"What you know you can't explain, but you can feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind:
Driving you mad."
I'm not great at actually running campaigns, let me just come out and say that. I can't think on my feet very well and I'm not good with encounter design: Notice how you've never seen me do articles giving advice for those two things. While I'm not giving up trying to run games, it means I'll probably always have more ideas than I'll ever use.
I do get campaign ideas all the time, too. I've had three that I ultimately decided were just too damn spiteful or unkind to actually run. What do I mean by that? Each campaign below has its own reasons, but in general...some ideas are just not very nice. I once knew someone who claimed to be running a game of mortals in the Storyteller universe, only to brutally murder the PCs one by one in the first session.
Psyche, we're playing Wraith.
While nothing I came up with is quite that mean, I hope it illustrates what I'm talking about. Some tricks or twists are just too nasty to pull. Maybe I'll run these games some day, for someone. However, at this point I don't mind if the players figure it out early. In fact, that would probably soften the blow enough to make them palatable.
I do get campaign ideas all the time, too. I've had three that I ultimately decided were just too damn spiteful or unkind to actually run. What do I mean by that? Each campaign below has its own reasons, but in general...some ideas are just not very nice. I once knew someone who claimed to be running a game of mortals in the Storyteller universe, only to brutally murder the PCs one by one in the first session.
Psyche, we're playing Wraith.
While nothing I came up with is quite that mean, I hope it illustrates what I'm talking about. Some tricks or twists are just too nasty to pull. Maybe I'll run these games some day, for someone. However, at this point I don't mind if the players figure it out early. In fact, that would probably soften the blow enough to make them palatable.
Dead Pixels in the Sky
It starts with something distant, but worrying. A small group of people notice something far in the sky. Black marks, like the sky is dying. Few at first, and more every day. Nobody else seems to notice them, or even care. More things begin to unravel. Misshapen people in suits, with blurred faces and grainy, distorted voices start to stalk the group. Eventually... they try to kill them. Something is wrong, and these monsters seem to think killing anyone who can see the sky slowly unraveling will stop it.
The players must evade The Editors, piecing together the mystery through increasingly horrible and unraveled areas, dealing with corrupted people, monsters, and artifacts. Cryptic phone calls try to guide the players toward their eventual goal: The unraveling can't be stopped and escape is the only remaining goal. To where? It can't be explained. It can only be shown.
Because no one can be told what The Matrix is.
It starts with something distant, but worrying. A small group of people notice something far in the sky. Black marks, like the sky is dying. Few at first, and more every day. Nobody else seems to notice them, or even care. More things begin to unravel. Misshapen people in suits, with blurred faces and grainy, distorted voices start to stalk the group. Eventually... they try to kill them. Something is wrong, and these monsters seem to think killing anyone who can see the sky slowly unraveling will stop it.
The players must evade The Editors, piecing together the mystery through increasingly horrible and unraveled areas, dealing with corrupted people, monsters, and artifacts. Cryptic phone calls try to guide the players toward their eventual goal: The unraveling can't be stopped and escape is the only remaining goal. To where? It can't be explained. It can only be shown.
Because no one can be told what The Matrix is.
After the events of the movies, a splinter group in Zion was unsatisfied with the state of the truce with the Machines. Neo had broken the cycle, but it wasn't good enough: The Matrix must be torn down, whether or not the people inside it were given a subconscious choice to leave. An EMP bomb was placed at the heart of the Matrix's servers, crippling its functionality.
Any pod directly caught in the blast was corrupted permanently, the people inside fused to the matrix and their minds altered in permanent, horrible ways. Anyone on the edge of the blast had their connections permanently damaged, and were forced to watch their server corrupt and warp. A forced reboot was impossible while these damaged pods were still online...so Agents were sent to kill the inhabitants(the players) so the Machines could salvage the Matrix.
~-~-~
So yeah, I could never really justify an entire campaign being secretly a movie reference turned horror. When I had this idea, I honestly started to worry that I'd be physically assaulted at the point I said the line. I did have plans to quote the movie in the game's climax. The main thing that killed this idea was that I honestly dislike Call of Cthulhu's system intensely, but secondarily to that, it relied too much on the final act being a reveal of it being fanfiction. I didn't think anyone would appreciate the ending. I mean it's either a huge anticlimax or a cool "Go back and sift through the details" moment depending entirely on if you liked The Matrix or not.
Any pod directly caught in the blast was corrupted permanently, the people inside fused to the matrix and their minds altered in permanent, horrible ways. Anyone on the edge of the blast had their connections permanently damaged, and were forced to watch their server corrupt and warp. A forced reboot was impossible while these damaged pods were still online...so Agents were sent to kill the inhabitants(the players) so the Machines could salvage the Matrix.
~-~-~
So yeah, I could never really justify an entire campaign being secretly a movie reference turned horror. When I had this idea, I honestly started to worry that I'd be physically assaulted at the point I said the line. I did have plans to quote the movie in the game's climax. The main thing that killed this idea was that I honestly dislike Call of Cthulhu's system intensely, but secondarily to that, it relied too much on the final act being a reveal of it being fanfiction. I didn't think anyone would appreciate the ending. I mean it's either a huge anticlimax or a cool "Go back and sift through the details" moment depending entirely on if you liked The Matrix or not.
Gallows Creek Revival
The Weird West is harsh and New Mexico doubly so, but few people down on their luck could resist the offer painted on flyers spread far and wide across the United States: Move to Gallows Creek and get your own parcel of land and fifty dollars to help you settle in. The players aren't the only ones who jumped at the offer: Gallows Creek is growing swiftly.
The people here are distant, though. Some are even guarded. Slowly, problems start to rise. The undertaker has been robbing graves, trying to stitch together the perfect wife. The blacksmith is desperate to keep anyone from knowing she's died years ago. Former slaves hiding their identity live next to former confederate soldiers desperately trying to do the same. Hucksters, hexers, scientists, engineers and otherwise live here. A mystery starts to grow: Why's the mayor so jovial? Where'd he get so much money, and what's down beneath the town?
And does everyone here have a damn secret?
~-~-~
Everyone in the town had a damn secret. Literally every single person. I started to put this together, back when we were young and playership was volatile. I took everyone aside individually and told them I wanted their character to have a secret to keep and gave them some bonus XP or somesuch to achieve it. I probably wasn't subtle about it.
The mayor was a prospector who found an ancient Aztec temple to a god of secrets. He built a fortune off raiding the temple and selling the gold artifacts inside...but spent too long and delved too deep. He caught the attention of the slumbering god, who forced the mayor to bring him sacrifices. Flyers hexed to attract the eye of the guilty were plastered over the Weird West to draw people full of the power it craved to the temple. The players would have had to protect their own secrets or come to terms with them while dealing with the strange, suspicious townsfolk of Gallows Creek. Eventually, they'd have to stop a God from being awoken by collapsing the temple, and the entire town with it.
Aaah, you can probably see why I decided this one was too mean, right? I had the idea back when I thought manipulating the players was okay if you had a noble goal in mind and weren't just an asshole trying to get your rocks off to causing misfortune. I thought I was being very clever and...well, these days I hate "clever".
Hand of the Broken King
The Weird West is harsh and New Mexico doubly so, but few people down on their luck could resist the offer painted on flyers spread far and wide across the United States: Move to Gallows Creek and get your own parcel of land and fifty dollars to help you settle in. The players aren't the only ones who jumped at the offer: Gallows Creek is growing swiftly.
The people here are distant, though. Some are even guarded. Slowly, problems start to rise. The undertaker has been robbing graves, trying to stitch together the perfect wife. The blacksmith is desperate to keep anyone from knowing she's died years ago. Former slaves hiding their identity live next to former confederate soldiers desperately trying to do the same. Hucksters, hexers, scientists, engineers and otherwise live here. A mystery starts to grow: Why's the mayor so jovial? Where'd he get so much money, and what's down beneath the town?
And does everyone here have a damn secret?
~-~-~
Everyone in the town had a damn secret. Literally every single person. I started to put this together, back when we were young and playership was volatile. I took everyone aside individually and told them I wanted their character to have a secret to keep and gave them some bonus XP or somesuch to achieve it. I probably wasn't subtle about it.
The mayor was a prospector who found an ancient Aztec temple to a god of secrets. He built a fortune off raiding the temple and selling the gold artifacts inside...but spent too long and delved too deep. He caught the attention of the slumbering god, who forced the mayor to bring him sacrifices. Flyers hexed to attract the eye of the guilty were plastered over the Weird West to draw people full of the power it craved to the temple. The players would have had to protect their own secrets or come to terms with them while dealing with the strange, suspicious townsfolk of Gallows Creek. Eventually, they'd have to stop a God from being awoken by collapsing the temple, and the entire town with it.
Aaah, you can probably see why I decided this one was too mean, right? I had the idea back when I thought manipulating the players was okay if you had a noble goal in mind and weren't just an asshole trying to get your rocks off to causing misfortune. I thought I was being very clever and...well, these days I hate "clever".
Hand of the Broken King
What begins as a game of high adventure in a land of sword and sorcery soon takes a strange turn. Invaders from another world arrive in force, in massive steel ships that soar through the sky. Men in pure white armor and skull helmets begin to take control of entire cities. They begin to kidnap magic users and send their strange golems to raid magical troves. Their leader wants something that only exists in this realm, a secret he and his kind do not possess: the secret of Magic.
~-~-~
Hey did you notice that Star Wars D20 is almost, kind of, sort of compatible with Pathfinder? I did. This is another one that's probably too cheesy for me to really run, but I liked the idea of the Empire showing up in the middle of a typical campaign because Darth Vader heard tales of a wholly different way to control The Force.
The logistics of the game aren't hairy at all, honestly. The players could take feats to become proficient in technological weapons or spend points in Star Wars skills. Eventually I'd open up Star Wars feats as well. Tech weapons would obviously be overpowered, but they can't be enchanted easily: I was tossing around the idea of not letting the players enchant them at all, or at a heavier cost. So, it's a tradeoff. The players de-facto can't use the Force or else the entire plot doesn't work, so I don't have to worry about force sensitive or Jedi characters I'm not in direct control of.
The problem here was primarily that I felt like a heel for not letting people do Star Wars concepts with the game, but it's contrary to the entire point of the game so I still don't think I'd be able to justify it. I dislike "GM's special toys" a lot and I think they should be used sparingly to keep a sense of fairness. However, people are gonna be naturally upset that they could have played a Jedi or something and I said no. The second the reveal happens and they realize what's going on, half the group would want to make a new character. Let's be real, though: I don't even like letting them play Jedi in the game that's supposed to have Jedi.
~-~-~
Hey did you notice that Star Wars D20 is almost, kind of, sort of compatible with Pathfinder? I did. This is another one that's probably too cheesy for me to really run, but I liked the idea of the Empire showing up in the middle of a typical campaign because Darth Vader heard tales of a wholly different way to control The Force.
The logistics of the game aren't hairy at all, honestly. The players could take feats to become proficient in technological weapons or spend points in Star Wars skills. Eventually I'd open up Star Wars feats as well. Tech weapons would obviously be overpowered, but they can't be enchanted easily: I was tossing around the idea of not letting the players enchant them at all, or at a heavier cost. So, it's a tradeoff. The players de-facto can't use the Force or else the entire plot doesn't work, so I don't have to worry about force sensitive or Jedi characters I'm not in direct control of.
The problem here was primarily that I felt like a heel for not letting people do Star Wars concepts with the game, but it's contrary to the entire point of the game so I still don't think I'd be able to justify it. I dislike "GM's special toys" a lot and I think they should be used sparingly to keep a sense of fairness. However, people are gonna be naturally upset that they could have played a Jedi or something and I said no. The second the reveal happens and they realize what's going on, half the group would want to make a new character. Let's be real, though: I don't even like letting them play Jedi in the game that's supposed to have Jedi.
It's also one of those things where I'd try to spend as much time as possible doing cutesy confusing descriptions because the players would obviously have no idea what they're looking at, and as I get older I hate sort of thing a little more each year. Forsooth, you hear a phantom voice exclaiming your position! Surely they are using clairvoyance spells and illusions to mystically shout information to their troops! Completely fuck off with that.
@}-,-'--
Honestly, feel free to steal any of these ideas, if you want. Never say never, but I'm probably not going to use them. If nothing else, all three require me to be a tricksy little bitch and I just don't like doing that, whether or not these ideas really are too mean. Two out of three are also tied to pre-existing intellectual properties. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but I think you need to really knock something out of the park if you're going to do a reference and I'm not confident in my ability to do that.
