If Winter Ends: Current Broken Doll Campaign

[Christopher Ashe]

So I always said that one o' these days I would get around to updating all of you on what goes on with my crew gaming. I guess there are some people out there who might want to know how I as the designer run CoE. So here ya go. This is a synopsis of what's been going on in the campaign I'm currently running with a 3-person cast (we should be taking on a 4th this week). Felix and Church are otherwise occupied with work this time, so I've been running with a crew consisting of some members from back in the day and some new folks.

The base angle of this is called If Winter Ends as a working title. Yes, for those of you who are aware, it is the title of a Bright Eyes song. However the song has little relevance to the campaign angle itself, but I liked the title and I like making references to music, literature or film.

First the basics: This particular campaign angle was designed for 90-point ducks. I'm talking about average, New World folk with no real bearing on the Cycle and no knowledge of it. Characters could be of any age and were Human (and I mean human, not Lirie-Kana) race and possessed of no supernatural powers and no supernatural gifts or frailties. In short, all are ducks (a slang term we use for unimportant characters in BDS campaigns). All of these characters are from Philadelphia, PA from around the university area.

Currently the Campaign has hit 6 sessions, playing every other weekend for around 6 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. As such, whether the in-game time was particularly significant or not, I refer to each session as a separate episode. Soudtrack for this campaign has consisted largely of the works of James Newton Howard written for the films of M. Night Shayamalan (particularly the Village and Lady in the Water).

The Cast
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Matthew Madsen, 25 (Ella)
Matthew, or "Mattie" as his friends call him much to his dismay, is a grad student of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Multilingual and extremely well-read, his search for the truth about history and the nature of events borders on personal obsession. Matthew is one who must feel that he is in the center of the loop when it comes to information, always looks deeper to find the core of any event or significant factor and fears greatly that he may never understand the truth of existence.
Matthew is a close friend of Jake Eckert (NPC) and Danny Walker (PC) and is a nerd of the highest order, enjoying Dungeons & Dragons, Unreal Tournament and pretty much anything to do with computing and the internet in his spare time.

Eric "Joe" Johnson, 27 (Ella)
Joe Johnson is a Peace Officer in Philly who works at the University. Respected among his peers and carrying a certain amount of influence, he is an open-minded and fair man but not overly given to superstition or other such nonsense. Joe maintains a certain rapport with the students of the University that most officers do not and has good influence with the local PD. He hopes of one day becoming a federal field agent.

Danial "Danny" Walker, 24 (Ella)
Danny Walker, originally born in Texas, did his undergrad work at the University of North Texas and is currently studying graduate classes in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Matthew and Jake. He has a compulsive habit of muttering translations of ancient texts or even modern languages that he speaks and has poor vision for which he wears glasses. Despite all of his interest in what may be going on at any given moment, Danny has a habit of being left out of the main order of things by chance or otherwise. Danny is a very open-minded individual and throes himself fully into everything he chooses to pursue.

Recurring NPCs Thus Far
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Jacob "Jake" Eckert III, 25 (Ella)
Jake Eckert is a research librarian and a grad student in the Library Sciences program of the University. An extemely reclusive man, Jake is not unsocial but prefers rather the company of books to the company of most people aside from his close friends. A master of research in all fields, Jake speaks a wide variety of modern and ancient languages and knows a little bit about nearly anything. He is a collector of music of all sorts and has a personal interest in urban culture and ancient religions. Jake and Matthew first met in their undergraduate years at the University and have been close ever since.

Kenny "Twitch" Winchester, 24 (Ella)
Twitch is a prodigy in the medical field. Already a full doctor, he works with the Philadelphia Police Department in forensics and is known as a little too interested in his work. Highly quirky, neurotic and overly nervous, Kenny has a habit of speaking very rapidly and incoherently and is more than a bit jumpy about many things. The youngest of four sons, he spent much of his life being used as target practice for more athletic brothers, one of whom we come to find was a Golden Gloves boxer. As such, Kenny is actually somewhat skilled in stand-up fighting, but his primary shining ability comes in anatomy, physiology and medical care. While somewhat of the laughing stock of the forensics team in the city, Kenny's skill is unchallenged and his ability for understanding pathology and the human body unparalleled by many far beyond his years.

Lina Shael-Khannan, 15 (Luna)
First appearing in episode 3, Lina Shael-Khannan was liberated by the party while being smuggled away from a secret stronghold of the Dark. An anomaly among Shael-Khannan, Lina denied the appearance of Narsheakh during the rites and was never trained as a true SK, but rather remains largely damaged emotionally from the ordeal of the rites, which she still remembers vividly. Emotionally unsure, full of self-doubt and haunted by visions of what was done to her, Lina still protects the group at all costs and is particularly loyal to Joe, who she credits for saving her and for looking at her neutrally despite what she is.

That's the basics so far. At present I don't have time to do episode synopses. Hopefully those will be up this weekend, assuming I dont get too caught up in the World of Warcraft expansion (which I haven't picked up yet).

until next time

- Ashe

[Christopher Ashe]

well I've got a bit of catching up to do on this one so I better get cracking.

Notes from the GM
With this angle I wanted to take a bit different of a route from the campaigns I normally run. Like any writer of role-playing games, I suppose my own campaigns have had a great deal of bearing on how CoE actually shaped up. Most of my campaigns in the past have been fairly epic - the characters are generally pretty extraordinary folks who rise to the challenge of a greater war. I involve a lot of human elements in the story and try as much to get the characters to display their own vulnerabilities, but in the end we as the audience are very aware of who the heroes are. They act and behave generally like we can expect the heroes of film and fiction to. Also I have rules as the GM, such as the NPCs never out-playing the characters in combat and whatnot. I apologized to my crew ahead of time on this one, as this is not that type of story.
I challenged my players to create characters that were unremarkable people: everyday folks you or I might actually meet. Definitely not the old world type, but rather individuals with little concern with anything but their own personal goals in life if they even knew what those were. There were no initial supernatural aspects for characters in this campaign and no supernatural related extended aspects. Race was human only and we got started from there.
As I go through my synopses of the various in-game occurrences I will follow up with some notes as the GM. I'm not sure what anyone might gain from my own campaign-running insight, but I've been running games for around 16 years now for crews of all types so I might have something you'll fin useful. I'll also try to update the cast list as we move on.

References, Nods and Influences
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I'll be very straightforward about the fact that I love to show my influences and make references. There are probably a lot of people out there still who are very adamant on"original" material in gaming campaign above all else, and I am not one of those people. I love my influences and I'm perfectly secure in my own creativity, so I feel perfectly fine in bringing classic angles, cliches and occasionally the obvious rip-off into the campaign. For me it's always about what helps everyone in my game have the most fun. I have plenty of original material when I write my books, but in game it's all about what works for the scene. So see if you can spot my references and rip-offs ;)

How I prepare for a Campaign
Now, this is a tricky one. Every GM I'm sure has a process they go through when preparing for a game. I think any good GM has several angles at any time kicking around in their head, waiting to be employed, but you never really know which one to use. When starting a campaign I generally try to get an idea of my angle and where it might be going, but I always try to focus primarily on the events that I want to happen that session, the key scenes that I want to influence. Now, the foremost thing that I have learned in all my years of running game is that none of this will occur the way I think it will, so there is a lot of improvisation that goes into this. My primary focus as the GM is to play off the PCs as much as possible and roll with their angles. Therefore it has become my habit instead of writing plot lines to write what is within my power to control: what goes on in the rest of the world. At the point in game where we are now, the PCs have little real idea of what is going on in the world around them and I like it that way. At any given moment as the GM, I am considering the effect, if any, that their actions are having on the overall progression of events on the whole of the world being affected. I suppose I've said enough on this bit, so I'll move on.

Suspension of Disbelief
I write fiction and my campaigns are no exception. There are likely some of you out there who will read this and find a hell of a lot of holes in my angles as far as realism goes, especially in this campaign, which deals with far more political and world factors than I generally employ as well as settings that I myself am unfamiliar with altogether. This is perfectly intentional. I'll be the first to admit that I do not put an extreme amount of research into the realism of certain aspects of my campaign, and prefer to lean on the cinematic over simulation. In my honest opinion, most of the themes, characters and elements of the story are highly fantastical, so I see little point in creating great contrast between the real and unreal.
That having been said, if you are of some authority on matters within this story that I grossly exaggerated or skewed, I would love to hear from you. I'm always interested to know how some of these events might really have transpired given the circumstances. I take a lot of creative license on just about anything that fits the story, often with full knowledge of the realistic aspects, but I'm always willing to learn new things.

Mature Themes
Just because I should probably put this forward, the events of this campaign involve mature subject manner, graphic violence, sexual themes and other adult-oriented material. The players in this campaign are all adults and therefore we deal with a certain level of fiction that could be considered by the MPAA as the Unrated or NC-17 caliber of material for you kids out there. I'm not your Dad, but I'm just putting that forward. The events in this campaign are fiction in every sense and should be treated as such. We are telling a story here, one of adventure, intrigue and danger, but also one of horror and the harshness of war and loss.

- Ashe

[Deviantpersonality]

What actually happened to this thread?
Id love to hear more!