Roleplaying games are fun. They are a superb social activity and idea furnaces. A clutch of like minded imagineers jointly build a story together and for each of us the epic will be remembered in our own way. As a GM, I only plant the seed of the idea, the story itself is the purview of the players. It's them that make it great.
Over the years, I've pretty much only run Icar. A long time ago, I dabbled with Paranoia and Cyberpunk but Icar has been the main staple of my gaming. Icar has changed with each campaign but the crunchiness of the rules does demand a certain style of play. You have a lot to keep track of. The aim was to run filler games while I finished off the next version of Icar.
I tried this with my previous group but lack of interest and persistant player drop-out meant I had to build a new group. I was going to run Cloudship Atlantis - a new game with a new group. How on earth might that turn out?
Designing the campaign
The campaign was going to be a mix of sandbox and adventure. The aim was to start with adventure and move gently into sandbox with a tie-up at the end. I didn't do the full Icar level of planning with events and timelines, instead I wrote ideas down in my notebook and formalised them into "Interesting things to do above Terra Firma" - two sides of A4 of cool stuff I wanted to cover. This is how I begin my Icar campaign planning normally but this time I didn't take the next step of building those into event timelines that occur even when the players aren't about. Instead, events would be triggered when players interacted with them.
This has two effects: 1. The game feels more like it's 'about' the players and 2. There is always something interesting happening.
With simple campaigns, where the end-goal is pretty obvious (find/sort out the pirate King) then that is ok. The players don't need much motivation to come to an interesting end. However, in more complex campaigns, you need to have more going on around the characters else suspension of disbelief is more difficult to sustain. Stuff has to happen to NPCs too.
I only ended up using 2/3 of the Cloudship Atlantis material I had and I think it was about the right length. There were a few other bits I could have stuffed in but I might run another game in the future, so I've moved the notes into Google Docs and saved them.
Giving up control
Cloudship Atlantis is different to my usual fayre of roleplaying game because there are rules that give narrative control over to the players. If a player rolls a critical success, they decide the lengths of success they achieve. If a player critically fails then the team thinks up the most horrid or fail-ridden way. This is giving up control because in the past it would be the GM that decides how bad things can be.
I like this style of play because critical successes are all the more delicious as suggestions from the floor make the character's actions more exciting.
More importantly, critical fails really are hardcore. As a GM, it feels bad to do truly horrid things to a player as the result of the dice, so critical failures tend not to be disasterous. Hand the outcome over to the player team with a remit of "funniest fail suggestion wins" and the critical roll can do extraordinarily bad things. Players are bastards. Hilarious bastards. The horror of the 1 in 10 being critically bad turns into 1 in 10 being critically bloody funny. As it comes from the team, the things that happen are far worse than if it came from the GM. FAR WORSE. As a GM, if I did the same things players did to themselves, I'd be a right git.
The other piece of control I quite like is choosing to fail. If a player cannot hit a target number then they can burn a dice from a pool that the whole team share. The player can choose to fail if by burning a dice, they still don't hit their target number. As the pool of dice dwindles at the end of a large actions sequence, players fail more often as there is a resistance to burning dice that other players might need later on. Failing is fun too.
Awesomeness
What made the game most excellent for me was the fact that the players truly threw themselves into each session. At the end of a tiring day at work, it can be really hard to get the enthusiasm up for playing and I can feel moments where people's energy runs dry.
The joy of my current group is that it takes very little push from me and they are self-propelling once more. By the time we hit 22:30, there is often so much momentum we could continue until dawn. That is truly special given it is a mid-week game. I quite often find I am beaming like a grinning idiot all the way home. I certainly was last night.
Completion
I read up all the usual blogs about completing campaigns and how to keep the tempo going without losing player control. You need to have a defined goal (Get a book of Davinci-like drawings and leave), an obvious protagonist (the pirate King), a twist (I had a group called Black Squadron who weren't obeying the rules of Swashbuckle) and a reveal (which the players used, reuniting the King with the Prince).
The big difference between this campaign and most others is that the fate of the PCs was more in the hands of the dice than ever before. Dice without bending. Half of the characters died because of outrageous ideas and the other half died of painting oneself into a corner and staggeringly poor dice. Losing the medic at ground zero was very, very unfortunate! Oddly, I didn't want the characters to die - I wanted them to win this one.
Next up - Commando 1940
I have a week left to prepare the next campaign, which is set in WW2. Here's the blurb:
July 1940: One month ago the allies fled at Dunkirk. A week ago France surrendered. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. The Special Operations Executive have just finished training a new platoon for No. 62 Commando. Their mission is to go deep behind enemy lines, into the black heart of the Third Reich to find and stop Morgensternwaffe: Morning Star Weapon, Hitler's occult research project.
Unlike the rest of No. 62 Commando, the platoon is made up from dual nationality soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk. They have been retrained for espionage and guerilla warfare and are ready to go.
It will be a mix of sneaky beaky, blatantly pretending to be German officers and blowing shit up.
The difficulty I am having is striking the right tone. The rules need to feel authentic-ish and the skills are all pretty stock. From that, it feels like a serious sort of game but I don't want it to be too serious. The Strengths/Weaknesses system might add a bit more joviality to it. The campaign after this one will be pretty hardcore, so I need to keep this light.
I will be ripping and mashing maps from Google Maps with my own style and that's my big job for this week: maps. I have a bunch of events (need more) and a clutch of locations (need more) but maps to tell players what they're doing and where they can go is really important. They won't be historically accurate but will draw on place names and geography from Southern Germany.
Equipment has been sorted (thanks to Wikipedia) and the system will be a modified version of Cloudship Atlantis's shared dice. I've read up about the Nazi war machine and know a bit about the campaign area. However, I don't feel nearly as ready as I was with Cloudship Atlantis!
Anyway, looking forward to it as the group is brilliant.