Sunday, August 31, 2014

#RPGaDay 31st - Favorite RPG Of All Time

Unfair question. Also, how is this different from the Favorite Game System? I mean, there's probably a "we can use nostalgia to ignore faults in the system" filter or "I didn't like the system but the setting was really cool" filter.

So, like a politician, I will instead answer a question other than the one asked.

Favorite RPG Campaign Of All Time (That I Ran): The campaign where I feel like I was really firing on all cylinders, in terms of plot, pacing, NPCs, foreshadowing, etc, was a Shadowrun game I ran. I'd always loved the setting but didn't care for the system. In fact, when I started the game, I had tried to hack Masterbook rules for the Shadowrun setting. Around the same time I was realizing that the Masterbook magic system was broken, I went to GenCon and actually played a round of Shadowrun. It really helped me figure out the things I was confused with and so, after the third or fourth adventure, we converted the characters to Shadowrun, though I did keep some Masterbook stuff. I added the Action Deck to Shadowrun and I let them keep some advantages they'd bought in MB in Shadowrun.

Long rambling story after the cut....

So I didn't really care for the idea of Shadowrun being a bunch of freelance murderhobos, so I had them create semi-legitimate characters instead of total scumbag criminals. I also put it in Houston because I had some cool ideas for Future Houston. I may be forgetting a couple but the starting PCs were: A corporate wagemage fired from her cushy job, another mage who'd stolen a crapton of power foci from his old employer and was doing semi-legal magery, a freelance ambulance driver who was running a two-man DocWagon operation, a troll former Urban Brawl star turned bodyguard after he got blacklisted and a dwarf private detective that hated magic. (Later the mage on the run left because the other PCs had sort of sold him out. The player didn't mind, but the character was not thrilled. The player made an eco-terrorist coyote shaman. Another addition was a physical adept named "Bayou Steve.") One of the things I had imported from Masterbook was the idea of "Mystery" Merits and Flaws. So the Troll had a pretty serious mystery Flaw and the PI had equal levels of mystery merits and flaws. Later I asked the dwarf if I could bump the merit and flaw higher than the levels he'd purchased. This was fun to abuse later.

I was putting this campaign together around the same time that Babylon 5 was in its second season, where the arc really started taking off, and JMS was busily promoting the show on rec.arts.tv.babylon5.moderated (or something like that) and talked repeatedly about his five year plan. So I told myself, "hey, all the times you've run games before, it's been adventure to adventure, and while you called back to previous adventures, you never did any of that foreshadowing stuff to set up future adventures. Do the Babylon 5 thing. It'll be cool." So I came up with a five year (game years, that is) plan, and had each game year broken up into seven adventures. I did a detailed writeup of the first year, and had some placeholder notes for the rest of the game. Around Season One, Adventure 3 or so, I realized my Big Plot kind of stunk and re-wrote it, using more Shadowrun lore, as I'd been slowly accumulating more and more of the books as I went along.

I've got my archive of notes on the game on a CD somewhere in my closet, but here's the broad sketches of the plot.

The Shadowrunners (who I later dubbed the B-Team, since they weren't as good as the A-Team, and while they didn't like the name, they never came up with a better one) were a random group of folks hired by a fixer contact to protect a gas station way on the edges of the Houston Mega-Metroplex from a biker gang. I set it up for the PCs to fail, having the gang torch the gas station while the PCs were hunting the gang. The PCs had also found out that the gas station was a magic hot spot, and that as soon as the corps found out about it, they'd kill whoever owned it (making it look like an accident or just plain paying off Lone Star) and take the land. So the Fixer (who hadn't mentioned the grumpy old man who owned the gas station was his dad) said "fine, guess who's will just got retroactively updated so you drekheads inherit the gas station."

Now it turned out that Knight Errant simply bought all the land around the gas station and left the PCs alone.

But as time went on, the PCs got more involved with the Big Names of the game (Big D, Harlequin and Aina, Damien Knight, among others) and they learned the reason why the place was a magical hotspot, why Aztlan was willing to invade the CAS to take it and why the Insect Spirits wanted it.

Eventually, the PCs went on a journey into astral space and defeated the Insect Shaman that had been a problem for them since the very first adventure (though they didn't find out she was an immortal elf insect shaman until season 3 or so) and recovered a city's worth of Fourth World artifacts so that when the Horrors arrived hundreds of years later, they found an Earth that was armed and ready for them.

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