Session Reports:
This was the first game I've run in a while, and the first in a longer while that wasn't a oneshot or somesuch, that actually concluded instead of petering out.
I came up with the idea for this campaign after reading the manga Summertime Rendering, by the great Yasuki Tanaka. If you know, you know. Had I written it today, Tanaka-sensei would likely have made it into the honourable mentions of my best mangaka list.
Main takeaway: I love my boys! We had a good time.
Now for the critical part:
The scope of this game was bigger in its conception versus its execution. This is due to two factors: writing it all up - which I'll touch on again in a bit - and the difficulty in getting everyone in the group together at the same time consistently.
Originally, the scale of the campaign in terms of both timeline and number of mysteries to investigate was bigger. I intended to structure it like friend of the blog Ardent's Everlasting Summer campaign (or like the World of Horror videogame that Ardent based this campaign structure on) - a variety of seemingly-independent mysteries that culminate in a link to the overarching meta-mystery. The Branch of Mag Mell was conceived as warping physics across the island of St. Fiachra's, leading to things like a cave that contained a portal to the past (and there was to be a multi-generational household secretly composed of the same guy at different points in his subjective timeline who had an uneasy truce with the duplicate conspiracy).
I still think the time loop format would iron out a some of the potential weaknesses in a mystery game such as bad puzzles or clues - it would just need a more-robust timeline than the one I was working with.
We ended up not being able to put together weekly sessions regularly, ending up more bi-weekly. Combined with the writing issue, this made me scale things down so that we could actually finish the campaign with reasonable likelihood & in a reasonable length of time. The breakneck pacing of events in the town was a holdover from when discovering and utilizing the time-cave was intended to be a key part of solving all the mysteries, and remained convenient with the shrunken scale.
The writing issue - I dislike prep only slightly less than I dislike writing session reports. Several sessions were frantically and loosely plotted out an hour before they started. Ideally, I would go through life constantly both moderately drunk and in an adrenaline rush, but alas. This was the great weakness of myself and the campaign.
There were a few moments where having prepped visuals would have helped greatly with players visualizing the scene - such as the cavern beneath the church. An actual map of the town instead of listing points of interest would have helped with both travel times and giving the players more to work with in terms of plotting their investigation. Lack of a map also hampered the impact of the break-down of the town into anarchy - making it more of a glossed-over background event instead of requiring a change in mindset from leisurely driving around to fighting, running, or hiding between every block.
I have been watching the classic television show The X-Files, and that has given me thoughts about structuring investigation. If I were to do it again, I would compartmentalize the conspiracy more - divvying up knowledge of what exactly is going on between characters, so that there was less of a strict duplicate/non-duplicate knowledge divide, so that one interrogation, exposition, or murder wouldn't reveal the whole thing on one hand, and so that chasing a lead like the Blue Giant Crew wouldn't lead quite so nowhere.
Part of that issue with non-compartmentalization of the conspiracy is that I forgot about the character Finnigan O'Flannagan, who was meant to be the human hatchet-man of the duplicates - I will say he died as part of the mob in the house fire set by St. Fiachra's children.
I would also increase the materiality, the immediacy of the conspiracy - for example, the kidnappings were purely background events, and one could've been made into a random encounter that would have allowed the players to risk following the kidnappers to the entrance to the cave system and so on. "Who does what and where they do it at", in the immortal words of Charles Manson, to put it succinctly. Practical details. Adding more moving parts to the conspiracy, like weapon smuggling, money laundering, etc., as things happening in the world and as levers of it for the players to notice, investigate, and fuck with would also be good additions.
I would have liked to put more emphasis on the survival elements, but got the sense my players didn't really like that part. Personal difference rather than an objective flaw of the campaign I think.
A dhaoine uaisle, uaisle na hÉireann - go deo na ndeor! (D'fhéadfadh sé go bhfuil an neamhbhásmhaíocht á hithe ag planda i ndáiríre)
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