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 naĂŻve 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.
.JPG)
