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Game Stories
This is where I'll dump my various game stories that reflect good, bad, and strange stories that come from my gaming history. This won't necesarily be the latest up-to-date stuff, but could include things I remember from when I started playing in grade school.
Guild of Temporal Adventures: A Plot Derailed
I was running my Guild of Temporal Adventures campaign, and I had an arc planned out that was based on some Michael Moorcock books, Macross, the GrimJack comics, Those Annoying Post Brothers, and the assorted special interests of the play group. The problem was every character had to die before the campaign got underway. It was cool it was very exciting. It was avant guard. Nobody knew exactly what the heck was going on but everyone was excited.
To get total fatality for the PCs I started started the campaign with one shot mini scenarios (less than an hour) with each player. Characters were dropping like flies, then getting their super powers while the other players were in the other room playing board games. One character even managed to avoid death, but also avoided gaining his own super power. It was a hoot.
In one encounter with an NPC, that was supposed to be a no account underling, the player (Jerry) asked his name. This was supposed to be a brush-off encounter, so the NPC shrugged off his inquiry with "you don't need to know that". Jerry pushed the point, having his character reach onto the NPC's paper filled desk to take up the character's name plate. I scrambled for a name and gave him "Joshua Baxter."
Names have power. It was at that point the entire arc of the campaign changed, Joshua Baxter became the key villain of a range of scenarios that jumped time and space. Jerry drove the players into obsessing over this self-created arch-nemesis, their actions giving him power, drive, and opportunity to rise above the mid-level functionary status. A five-minute throw away scene triggered a campaign that trumped what I had thought a well crafted story about multiple earths and preventing their destruction.
We never made it to the campaign I had originally planed.
Call of Cthulhu: A Plot Derailed
In had scripted a modern Call of Cthulhu campaign focused on Dagon, Deep Ones, and the associated mythos. Yet another Global Campaign to Save Mankind. It started in San Francisco and then down to South America, over to China, with stops in about a dozen exotic locations, then back to the gulf coast and eventually ending up in Innsmouth. I started prep my freshman year of college and then that summer ran the opening scenario for a small group of friends.
After the first scenario another enthusiast of the Lovecraftian Mythos, (Erech) wanted to join. We had a night when he and two of the original players were over at my place, and I decided to run together a mini scenario that would bring his character into the story. I didn't want to advance the main story line, the next episode would have wiped out a group of only three players so I quickly threw together a scenario with Serpent men. After that run Erech was all set to join the main campaign.
Come next play night we were doing player recap and then the introduction of Erech's character. During the recap of the first session I hand out the ominous (yet terribly uninformative) clues gained from insane rambling PCs had taken from the minions in that session.
Towards the end of the mini scenario recap, Jerry gets back in to character and and starts on a rant about how "Sure, deep ones are scary, but they live in the water and are really not that much of a threat to mankind. But really the serpent men are the big threat. Serpent men can look like people. Serpent men sacrifice humans on their dark altars and here is proof on film. Let us quit looking at this deep one stuff, it is not important, let's go find deep ones, let's take vengeance on them for the crimes they have committed against us.
They bought it. And at that point I had to discard the campaign prep I did and move on with the campaign they now wanted to play in. In all though, The Coils of Yig turned out to be a cool campaign.
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