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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Musings: Idiosyncratic Routine

I think I'll standardize these musings on Thursdays, so the blog will update MWThF. My greatest weapon is my predictability.

Anyway, this weeks musings is on personal campaigns. What's most idiosyncratic campaign you've ever been in? 

By that I don't necessarily mean 'weird', though it could be. I also don't mean how any campaign has to have come from a particular GM and a particular group of players. I mean a campaign whose premises you think could only have originated from that particular GM. Ideally the campaign would also reveal something about them to the players. 

For me this is pretty clearly David Twiddy's Pendragon campaign. You can read the whole thing here but the idea, in brief, was that in the time after Merlin's disappearance from Camelot Arthur became obsessed with finding reliable methods of divining the will of God. A learned rabbi entered the court with a plan to head to the lands beyond the horizon where he might secure the Urim & Thummim so that they might be returned to Camelot and serve that purpose. Our knights were tasked as his defenders in this, and we were being opposed by a group of Freemason Knights (commanded by the Knight of the Black and White Eagle). Our voyage west did not bring us to the Americas but to an island chain whose layout and the passages between them mirrored the kabbalah tree of life, so that as we traveled from island to island we were actually approaching the realms of the supernals and the very edge of creation. At the end of our quest, while we were denied the physical objects we sought, we had achieved Galahad-like purity and were able to literally dance on the rim of the world. 

It was a really fun campaign, but I just cannot conceive of anyone other than Dave developing the ideas behind it or being brave/mad enough to carry it off. I still remember his being vaguely disappointed when both Tom and I grasped immediately what the island chain was and what it symbolized based on dropping a single name, but I hope (at least) that was his only moment of disappointment in an outstanding, idiosyncratic performance.

That's mine. What was yours?

4 comments:

  1. It was a good time, although in the later sessions, the problem became that the players were witnessing these awesome, surreal events-but they weren't interacting with them. I just talked and the players listened. It was hard to get out of that.
    But apparently it wasn't too much of a problem. I'm glad you have such fond memories of it.
    -D*

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  2. My wife, Sam, is the GM I expect the most interesting and idiosyncratic games from. She came to gaming through Pendragon and doesn't really have the D&D baggage many gamers do, nor the rebellion against that baggage either. Her Blandings Castle game was very close to perfectly Wodehouse in tone and would be my pick for the most unusual game I've played.

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    1. I was willing to bet money that Sam's Blandings Castle game would be your choice for this. I have very fond memories of the write ups in A&E - in some ways it was an inspiration to me on keeping tone right for games like Mech & Matrimony.

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  3. OK, you asked. While your current Mech & Matrimony game is pretty idiosyncratic, the prize for *most* idiosyncratic game I've played goes to this completely homebrew adaptation of Gangbusters I was roped into back in grad school. It wasn't strictly a campaign -- we got through the whole multi-part adventure in a single weekend because the guy who wrote it and ran it was just visiting the guy who recruited us to play -- but it was definitely unusual.

    Here's how: near as I can figure, the system was developed by a guy who'd played RPGs in the 70's, then gotten a real job with lots of responsibilities that hadn't let him keep up with the hobby except for the homebrew system he was perfecting. So he missed all the changes that occurred in the RPG world during the '80s and early '90s: most notably, the development of more cooperative storytelling models, and the influx of women into the hobby.

    So we sit down, create characters, and learn the system -- which really *was* well-thought out -- then start playing the adventure. Two things became clear pretty quickly. First, the game was written to be played by the GM *against* the PCs. It was hands-down the most adversarial RPG I've ever played. At every turn, nasty and capricious things happened to us without any real warning, and we were supposed to figure out how to get out of it. Second, it was clear that the author/designer had never considered what to do if one of the characters was female. You see, the adventure hinged on a 'battle of the sexes round the world race', but was written with the assumption that all the characters would be on the 'guy' team. I was not. So a PC got put on the team that was supposed to be nothing but a bunch of NPCs for the guy team to rescue. Hilarity ensued, as I single-handedly used female stereotypes to subvert every one of the 'dangerous situations' my team was thrown into. My personal favorite (still) was when we were all being entertained by a bunch of thugs who wanted to 'buy the women.' One of the female NPCs was getting really upset and starting to make the scene that would (in the game's 'plan') degenerate into a gun battle for feminine honor...when I piped up and said I needed to visit the ladies, and would she like to join me? Since everyone knows women go to the bathroom in packs, she did. And she vented, and by the time we came out, the situation was defused.

    I've never seen anyone look so pole-axed as that GM, at that moment.

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