Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Caerwent Closes

No photo description available.

A couple of weeks ago, I concluded my most recent RPG campaign, Caerwent Ascending. Of course, Caerwent Ascending was a sequal campaign to my group's previous campaign, Caerwent Down.

So, closing this campaign marks the end of about two years of adventure.

Caerwent Down

The origional campaign was played in the Numenera setting using the Cypher System basic rules and character types. It followed a group of adventurers searching for a legendary flying city that had fallen from the skies. 

Caerwent, the origional flying city, was inspired largely by Aurthian legends, and the group got to encounter the aged versions of several figures from these stories as they sought out the fallen city.

In the end, they found the city and rose it back, becoming the new leaders of this soaring city-state.

Caerwent Ascending

The more recent campaign utilized the Discovery & Destiny (Numenera 2) types and picked up a year after the previous campaign ended. The players took on the role of new leaders of caerwent (after the heroes from the past campaign had vanished) trying to make their city whole and leave an impact on the world.

They faced off against numerous threats, and learned a great deal about powerful datagods in the Ninth World that had created Caerwent and that would use the Iron Wind for their own ends.

In the end, they convinced the pawn of these datagods to join with them as they were joined by positive datagods in battle against the masters of the Iron Wind. The end of the day found them victorious.

Reflections-These were good campaigns

I enjoyed these campaigns a lot. It might not seem like it, with some of the things I'm going to follow this statement with, but I did. I want to highlight that right now. I am very happy to have gotten to run them, and I see them both as successes. It's just...harder for me to reflect on things that went well. I can't think of much to say about things that did go well, because they just...are... I think it's human not to be able to see the good as easily. I know I experienced the good, but it's harder to put my finger on it.

My Vision-Build a Better Ninth World

When I first started planning Caerwent, it was going to be one campaign. I wanted to have the players raise up the city and then become its champions, touring the world with the city in tow and making the Ninth World a better place. 

Then Monte Cook games announced Numenera 2, with a focus on building up cities and making the Ninth World better, and this seemed to be exactly exactly in line with my plan for the Caerwent game. But it wouldn't be out in time for when I wanted to start the game. So, I decided to split it into two games instead.

The first campaign, Caerwent Down, was fairly straightforward and went, more or less, according to plan. (I feel like I didn't think so at the time, but I cannot put my finger on what seemed out of place. Possibly just wanting to get to actually building up the Ninth World.)

I had...very high aspirations for Caerwent Ascending. I wanted to really get into the city rules. I wanted to really get into the crafting stuff. I wanted to really focus on Caerwent's connection to other cities and places in the Ninth World and for the players to work on building up these places. I had a plan that involved giving the players city-based issues in between sessions and having them vote on how they wanted to resolve them. Most of this didn't really end up happening.

Unmet Expectations

Notably, I don't really blame my players for things not going according to plan. The stuff that I thought was important and wanted to focus on? The city and crafting stuff and having players make decisions about how to rule the city? It all felt to me like stuff that was more technical than roleplay, and therefore stuff that I wanted to resolve outside of session. This really meant that even if that stuff was done, it wouldn't have been the focus of gameplay anyway, so I had set myself up for failure to begin with. 

But then, I found that players didn't really want to engage with these things outside of session. They didn't want to read long walls of text giving their advisors opinions on matters and then vote on them. They didn't want to spend time outside of session working on long technical crafting things. I don't blame them. 

So, most of these things, that had been my driving push to begin with sort of fell by the wayside. It also meant that we really didn't get to experience the full benefits of running Numenera 2 and might have been better off with the origional types/rules.

I'm not saying Numenera 2 doesn't work or that it wouldn't be fantastic for this sort of thing. It just wasn't as compatiable with the combination of how I was trying to run things and how my players were trying to play things. I probably could have taken time in session to work out the city-focused things, but for whatever reason I didn't want to and I ended up dropping these issues instead.

NPC Players

One thing that I did that I enjoyed a lot was that I ran NPC players. I may write a longer post about this in the future, but the basic idea is that I had people who weren't at the table that made characters/groups that were active in the world. Every couple weeks, I'd message the NPC Players about what was happening in the world as it affected their character/group, and we'd discuss what they wanted to do moving forward.

I think this made the world seem more real/dynamic for the players, and it allowed them to experience things that worked on other lines of thinking than the common patterns that I use.

One of the NPCs played a datagod who had an automaton infiltrate Caerwent under the guise of being one of its advisors. Another controlled the Jagged Dream, an organization trying to spark war in the Ninth World. Another played Caerwent's military advisor. Another played a replicating automaton, infecting any tech it found and turning it into instances of itself. Another played a mad noble whose wife had been transformed by the Iron Wind and who was set upon the path to revenge against the soaring city.

Overall

As I said earlier, I really enjoyed these campaigns, and that's the note I want to end on. I loved the characters that my players (both at the table and beyond) came up with, and I had a lot of fun interacting with them. The players explored a lot of interesting places across the Ninth World, and met a lot of interesting people. They overcame great villians and they did help cities and nations of the Ninth World. I had a lot of fun running these games, and I'm really looking forward to what we have to play next.

But that's a post for another day.

If you play RPGs, what are some campaigns that you look back on (either playing or running)? What do you remember fondly about them? Are there expectations you had that weren't quite met?

No comments:

Post a Comment