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.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: And So It Began (Again)

The first meeting of the Tuesday Knights (our gaming group) took place on August 19, 2008, when I ran the debut session of a new Castles & Crusades campaign for Nick, Pete, and Clare.

This was the first role-playing game I'd actually run for over a decade. I'd bottled out of running games several times since I'd come out of hospital in 2005 and was still very anxious about whether my health (both physically and mentally) would be up to the challenge.

In retrospect, one of the biggest mistakes I made in those early days was getting distracted by the "new shiny", switching systems to Labyrinth Lord and then grinding the game into the ground, so someone else had to run something instead.

If I could travel back to 2008, I'd tell my younger self to have faith and stick with Castles & Crusades. Who knows, if that had been the case, we could still be playing that campaign now? How incredible would that be?

In the 17 years since that fateful day in the dining room of our old house, our pool of potential players has blossomed, while Pete, Clare and I remain the consistent core. We were joined by Kevin, who has become another constant around the table, Steve, Simon, Meredith, Erica, Mark and, most recently, Mark's daughter, Rebecca.

While other demands on their time have seen Nick, Steve, Simon, Meredith, and Erica step away from the group, we still manage to corral a solid four or five people for our monthly sessions.

Despite the collapse of that original campaign, I did manage to run a three year fantasy campaign using Heroes and Other Worlds (a modern reworking of the classic GURPS-adjacent Fantasy Trip system), which ended with the destruction of the world.

Pete ran a number of Top Secret espionage games, Meredith presented us with a wholly homemade World of Warcraft adventure, Simon saw us right up to the gates of Castle Ravenloft in his 5e D&D Curse of Strahd campaign (which went 'online' during the COVID pandemic), Clare's run some memorable indie one-shots, and the other year Mark scared the bejeebers out of us with his self-penned Call of Cthulhu rural horror adventure.

In between these I've tried to run some other games, but they've invariably crashed-and-burned because of my insecurities, self-doubt, and limited attention span.

I'm hoping that, after my two recent debacles (with Shadowdark and Villains & Vigilantes) I've finally learned enough that when I'm next allowed to sit behind the gamesmaster's screen I'll be able to keep the train on the tracks.

However, our most enduring game has been Pete's "weird science" pulp adventure campaign that started as a 1950's "Atomic Horror" campaign using GURPS, then time-slipped to the 1930s for an epic Hollow Earth Expedition run, before, at the end of last year, switching systems again to Outgunned Adventures for more Indiana Jones-style shenanigans.

And through all this, my rock and number one cheerleader has been my wonderful non-geeky wife, Rachel, who may not get the delights of roleplaying games, but understands how important they are to me.

Every month she cooks our group pizza, serves up drinks, and joins in the pre-game banter as we all catch-up on whatever is going on in our lives.

Last year's gaming plans were largely scuppered by my back problems (osteoarthritis), but hopefully that's behind me now (see what I did there?) and 2026 will be a return to regular gaming for the foreseeable future.