The Plot That Got Away From Me

A tunnel of light carried Marigold away from her dying world... but where to?

When my friend Simon stumbled across his old copy of the Heroes & Other Worlds rulebook and posted online about how it brought back fond memories of the campaign I'd run for the Tuesday Knights back in 2014-2016, it got me thinking about that campaign again.

Rereading some of my old write-ups reminded me of the "great plan" I had hatched to tie the apocalyptic ending of that campaign into the next one I was kicking around at that time: a contemporary superhero campaign set in Knight City.

With that game faltering and my realisation that I'm not really a good "superhero" gamesmaster, I might as well share the "big idea" I had for linking our old fantasy game - The Chronicles of Cidri - to Knight City.

The HOW game ended... with the end of the world (the planet Cidri - an alternate Earth - was transformed into a Hellworld by the ancient god known as The Yellow King).

Only one member of Cobblethwaite's Companions (the player-character's party), Marigold Weaver (Clare's character), escaped Cidri's transformation, thanks to a mystical portal the heroes had opened during their final stand.

Marigold Weaver

But that was not the end of the character. I'd decided that she had materialised out the other side of the portal on the world of Knight City, and had taken a job as a fortune teller in the city.

In my write-ups of the HOW campaign, I had "cast" the various player-characters using pictures from TV shows, films etc and trainee sorceress Marigold was represented by Renée O'Connor aka Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess.

Posing as Madame Gold, in Knight City, she set up business in the middle-class to low upper-class residential borough of Fairlight.

Her write-up on the Knight City campaign guide/blog at the time was:

"Psychic to the stars - by appointment only. Generally considered a fraud by most people, Mary Gold is still treated with a great degree of respect by the residents of this borough. She is also one of the few people known to associate with Salem Saberhagen, the mysterious resident of the nearby Saberhagen Mansion."

Madame Gold

There was even a picture (left) to go with the entry, of Renée O'Connor put through a "fortune teller" filter on the Photofunia picture editor.

The "great plan" was then, at some point in the campaign, the new characters the Tuesday Knights would have been playing (ie. superheroes) would contact, or be contacted by, Madame Gold.

She would then warn them of the impending arrival of an apocalyptic Hellplanet (ie. the transformed Cidri, being 'piloted' by the Yellow King) in our solar system.

Part of her prophecy to avert disaster would involve tracking down a collection of "sleeping" heroes and "awakening" them.

These "sleeping heroes" would be the reincarnations of the Tuesday Knights' characters that had died at the end of The Chronicles of Cidri campaign (still with me?)

I had recast all the actors who had been used to represent the fantasy characters in the first campaign as random people in the world of Knight City, totally unaware of their "previous lives".

I'd thought it might have been quite cool if the player's superheroes had somehow come into - innocent, casual - contact with one or two of these people prior to their pivotal meeting with Madame Gold.

Anyway, that was about as far as I had gotten, as I'd planned to firm up details to fit the Knight City campaign as it developed... only it never did.

And my "great plan" never saw the light of day.

But I'm still rather pleased with it.

NB. Some of this multiversal mayhem did, eventually, manifest itself at our table, during Simon's epic 5e Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft campaign (2018 - 2021).

During Lockdown, Meredith, our occasional Antipodean player, returned for a spell (thanks to the magic of Zoom), playing her rogue, Imogen, from the HOW game, who'd stepped out of the legendary mists of Ravenloft to aid our party. 

I seem to recall there was mutterings that she might be a trans-dimensional agent of one of the facets of Baba Yaga, who also appeared (in some guise) in both the worlds of Cidri and Ravenloft.

CAMPAIGN AUTOPSIES: Will I Ever Learn?

Photo by Giancarlo Revolledo on Unsplash

When the Tuesday Knights came into being I was the de facto gamesmaster, running a deliciously vanilla fantasy campaign in my homebrew setting of Tekralh.

However, I don't feel my gamesmastering chops really began to take form until May 2014 when Pete handed me the reins of his nascent Chronicles of Cidri campaign.

Pete had been running this, for a few months, using the old The Fantasy Trip rules, but I updated that to a retroclone of the system, Heroes & Other Worlds.

I have to confess that the mechanics were rather too "dice pooly" for my liking, but they really worked well in the context of our campaign.

I ran Cidri for the better part of three years, building up to a delightfully OTT apocalyptic climax.

This campaign remains my personal gold standard, a target I now wish to aim for again - and hopefully excel - when I'm finally allowed to return to the head of the table.

The Tuesday Knights' membership has changed a lot since those days, we've lost some people and gained more members, which means tastes have changed as well, but I still feel these "revelations" hold water and I really should adhere to them.

I wish I'd had the foresight to conduct an autopsy on our Cidri campaign when it wrapped, dissecting my thoughts on why it worked, but I think I was just basking in the adulation of my players... and so it never crossed my mind to attempt the kind of surprisingly perceptive analysis that I had with these earlier efforts that hadn't worked out.

As will be clear by now I've started work on my latest attempt to run an "open-ended" campaign for the Tuesday Knights, but this time with a new rules set (Twilight Sword) and a superficially-familiar fantasy setting.

This will actually be my fifth or sixth attempted campaign since the Tuesday Knights first started gaming back in August 2008.

So, what went wrong with my previous games?

TEKRALH I: The first game I ran for the Tuesday Knights started as heavily houseruled version of Castles & Crusades (with a large dose of Hackmaster and Arduin) and it worked really well to start with...

Until, for no readily apparent reason, I decided to switch horses mid-stream and changed the rules system to a by-the-book version of Labyrinth Lord. The characters were severely de-powered and the game turned into a meatgrinder of TPK after TPK.

Within a few sessions all the fun that we'd had at the start of the campaign was sucked from the campaign. Eventually, I had to pull the plug on the game as it wasn't getting anywhere.

When we started the players were giving me nice backstories for their characters, with plot hooks etc, but by the end I was lucky if they'd give their characters names as they knew their life expectancy had become so limited.

MORAL: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

KNIGHT CITY I: Next up was my Villains & Vigilantes campaign, set in Knight City. This was driven almost entirely by the naïve dream of trying to recapture the magic that Steve, Pete, Nick and I enjoyed with our original V&V games back in the '80s.

Almost from the start things went wrong with this campaign due to the simple fact that we weren't all singing from the same hymn sheet. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular, but when we were teenagers we were all (except for Nick) avid comic book readers and had reasonably similar tastes in comics and superheroes.

Thirty years later, tastes had changed and the sort of scenarios I wanted to run (e.g. dimension hopping, cosmic stuff) didn't sit comfortably with some of the players, who were expecting more straight-forward supervillain bashing.

There were also problems with the rules (from the clunky combat table at the game's heart to the peculiar diversity of character's random power sets), but ultimately these were just the straws that broke a very unhealthy camel's back. I think we could have overcome these if everyone had had contiguous ideas of where the game should be going.

MORAL: Make sure everyone is on the same page.

TEKRALH II: I thought I'd found a winner when I came across D101's Crypts & Things (a sword & sorcery variant of Swords & Wizardry) as I thought this kind of human-centric adventure game was the way to go.

The simple problem with this very short-lived campaign - and it had nothing to do with the rules - was I had just discovered A Song Of Ice & Fire!

I was in the grip of Westeros-fever and spent all my time thinking about developing the wider world, quickly losing sight of the intimate adventure I should have been running for the players. 

This would have been fine if the player-characters were all high-up members of House Stark or House Lannister, but they were actually 1st Level D&D proto-adventurers and tunnel grubbers.

Instead of developing scenarios or stocking dungeons I was researching medieval legal systems, clothing, cuisine, bartering etc My eyes were fixed on the horizon rather than the gamestable in front of me.

MORAL: Intimate, not epic.

SHADOWDARK: I only ran this for one session. The players told me afterwards that they loved it, but something about it just didn't click with me.

At the time I was working on my overcomplicated Frankengame monstrosity of assorted houserules all stapled together with my own ideas from decades of gaming.

As it happened, "my" system and Shadowdark shared some similar ideas. It's just Shadowdark did them more elegantly, more streamlined. So I should have been happy!

To this day, I have no idea why I bounced off of Shadowdark so hard, when - upon initially reading the rules - it felt like such a perfect fit for my style of gamesmastering. 

However, I'm glad I didn't drag this game out and euthanised it before people got too invested in the campaign.

MORAL: If you're going to kill off a game, kill it quickly.

KNIGHT CITY II: Last year - before the osteoarthritis in my back knocked me off my feet for more than six months - I started a new V&V campaign (this time with some houserules to avoid some of the issues we'd encountered mechanically last time).

I provided the players with pamphlets before hand introducing the setting and - hopefully - suggesting the style of game I was hoping for.

But, once again, it didn't take long to realise that we had four players all pulling in different directions. This meant, for instance, that the opening scenario - which should have taken one or two sessions to wrap up - was heading into its fourth month when I had to retire from the field.

At its core, the problems with this iteration of Knight City were exactly the same as before, even though the make-up of the group at the table was different.

Superheroes are such a broad genre that they can mean diametrically different things to different players, no matter how well you think you've spelled out your personal vision.

And a central element of that clash of ideologies lies at my own feet. Over the decades (I've been reading comics since I was a wee nipper, and a collector since I was a teenager), my personal beliefs about what makes a good costumed crimefighter have become so embedded in my psyche that I'm not only unable to clearly explain my "vision" (surely everyone else sees superheroes the same way, right?) but I get frustrated when my players don't automatically share the same "vision"!

Just because it's a beloved reading and viewing genre for me doesn't mean I can run it as an open-ended, forever campaign. In fact, I'm probably too emotionally invested in the genre for me to brook any deviation from my perceived "one true way".

To top that off - again ignoring my mistakes from previous failed campaigns - I'd gone full "Game of Thrones" on Knight City and obsessively detailed every borough, with hundreds and hundreds of locations. Most of which, the players bypassed when creating their character backstories. 

It's almost as if I'd totally ignored every single misstep I'd made previously as a gamesmaster and was trying to crash on regardless.

MORAL: Learn from your past mistakes. Pick a game genre that everyone understands.

Deadlands Resurrected!

Reminiscing about Deadlands earlier this year reignited my love for this game-changing setting. While I still have a number of my original books (from the pre-Savage Worlds era), I had none of the later Savage Worlds material... until today!

Although April is supposed to be my month of "no impulse purchases" (just a few pre-orders, like yesterday's Al Swearingen book), I couldn't resist this box set when it popped up in one of my eBay saved searches.

Although I've looked at Savage Worlds bits and bobs over the years, I've never really had a handle on the system or even considered presenting it to the Tuesday Knights as an option.

Rather "fortuitously" one of my last 'impulse' purchases, on the final day of March, had been the hardbacked core rule book for the latest iteration of Savage Worlds.

As my superhero campaign with the Tuesday Knights is just taking off, I have no immediate plans to switch horses midstream (let's see how the gang get on fighting villains on the streets of Knight City for a few more 'issues' first), but I'm glad to know I have this hefty Deadlands box set in my collection now.

Fit to bursting with cards, bennies (poker chips that act as "fate tokens"), a new set of dice, a map of the Weird West, ammo counter dials, a hardback setting supplement, and a solid gamesmaster's screen (with an adventure booklet), the Bay trader I purchased this off of hadn't opened any of the contents, so everything was still sealed in plastic.

I love games that go that extra mile and Savage Worlds has always seemed to thrive on its useful, additional widgets (cards, tokens, counters etc) to help gamesmasters and players (gotta love an "ammo counter dial"!).

Honestly, I'm not so into the steampunk of it all at the moment, but Deadlands remains one of the most influential creations in my roleplaying development - even if I've never actually played in the setting or run it - that I'm sure, if nothing else, it can help inform my Dead Man's Hand skirmish gaming plans.

PROJECT 60: PIVOT!!!

My parents' copy of A Pictorial History of The Wild West, which I treasure to this day

Honestly, it should come as no great surprise to anyone that in the last few weeks I've dramatically pivoted on my choices for my PROJECT 60 (geeky things I want to have up and running by the time I turn 60 in late 2026).

If you've been paying attention you'll already be aware that my much-talked fantasy heartbreaker/Frankengame is dead and my RPG focus is wholly upon my recently launched Villains & Vigilantes campaign for the Tuesday Knights: Knight City.

While superhero RPGs - primarily V&V - weren't the first I played as a youngling, they were the first where I felt we had the makings of a long-running campaign, thanks to the sterling work of my old chum, Steve (elder brother of fellow Tuesday Knight founding member, Pete).

I've ensured that there are traces of those original games evident in our current setting, Knight City, and some of the rules tweaks I've employed are based upon changes that Steve created four decades ago.

However, it's not just the roleplaying side of PROJECT 60 that has been flipped. While I'm still intrigued by the 16th Century Border Reivers of Scotland and am very happy with the painted figures I have, and large library of reference material, there was always something niggling at the back of my mind.

One of things that had drawn me to gaming the lawless shenanigans of the Border Reivers had been my perception that this was the closest we had gotten to the American Wild West on our island.

But then, if I was so inspired by the Wild West... why wasn't I gaming the Wild West?

One of my techniques for corralling my spiralling thoughts has always been the principle of returning to square one, remembering what first caught my attention.

And this reminded me that, when I was about six or seven, armed with a bag of plastic cowboy and Indian 'army men' figures, and some cool, clip-together Old West buildings and fences, the very first "wargame" I wrote for myself centred on lawless, Frontier gunfighters.

Years before I even heard of roleplaying games, this was a skirmish game where each figure represented a single gunfighter, and they all had access to certain skills, with "tests" being resolved with a combination of normal six-sided dice and "average" dice (my first exposure to 'non-standard' dice... I was hooked from an early age, thanks to the vintage wargames shop on The Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells). 

My interest in the Old West can be traced to my parents' copy of The Pictorial History of the Wild West, a battered, well-read, hypnotically-illustrated, "true account of the bad men, desperadoes, rustlers and outlaws of the Old West - and the men who fought them to establish law and order."

Young me could frequently be found pawing through this tome, marvelling at the period photographs and losing myself in the stories of Billy The Kid, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday et al. 

Since then, I've always had a penchant for Westerns, and - at the climax of my three-year Scriptwriting for Film and TV course at Bournemouth University - I even wrote a Western film script, inspired by true events, for my final assignment.

During my great roleplaying interregnum - the extensive period of reading, but never playing, RPGs between the end of our old superhero play-by-post game and then the launch of the Tuesday Knights - one of the games that I was really hooked on was Shane Hensley's first stab at Deadlands, the pre-Savage Worlds iteration of his Weird West setting.

I didn't fully grok the overly-complex rules system but I absolutely loved the backstory and the writing of the atmospheric 'fluff' of the setting. 

While, I guess, these might appear quite 'old school' to modern sensibilities, the rules books, supplements and box sets of that original Deadlands remain, in my eyes, some of the greatest RPG material ever produced.

What all this reminiscing has led to - after doing my due diligence and watching a lot of YouTube reviews and 'actual play' videos - is my investment in Great Escape Games' highly lauded Dead Man's Hand Redux.

This is a well-supported game, from a popular company, that most definitely has legs and scratches my itch for a skirmish game even better than the Border Reivers.

Like I said, the Border Reivers project remains ongoing, but it's on the backburner for the moment, while I dig into Dead Man's Hand Redux, turn my hand to painting the plastic buildings (boy, this takes me back to my childhood), and get the miniatures professionally painted.

With the plastic miniatures you get in the starter box, you're able to design your own gang and I already have ideas to base mine on Timmy The Flea and The Hole-In-The-Head gang, if my primitive modelling skills are up the task!