Solace: Family
Hello friends, it is that time, a new mega-campaign begins!!
Firstly, thank you for your interest.
I've learned a lot from the the last mega-campaign and I'm hoping to address some of the challenges [1] we had through some interesting mechanics.
Secondly, I expect we will go through a bit of a learning curve together, assuming that doesn't scare you, here's the logistical setup:
- We play every other Thursday.
- Games will start at 8:05PM (Eastern)
- Games will end at no later than 10:15PM.[2]
- You can miss games.
- You can come to every game. [3]
- You are starting the game with no stats, and no class.
- You can be any humanoid race. [4] Races will not provide mechanical benefits, just flavor. Any mechanical benefits will be at your choosing. [5]
Okay, that's all for the logistics.
The actual game set up: You are a Viking. You will choose a viking role from one of the available options. This choice will have zero bearing on your stats, eventual class choice, or frankly anything except the flavor you come in with. Your role options are:
- Raider (Viking)[6]
Do you want to play a game?
Footnotes
- ↑ For example, giving priority quest choice to people who haven't played recently ended up with players who played often never being able to choose the quest. It incentivized people to not play if they wanted more narrative control, which is perverse. The people most invested are the least able to invest heavily. Because of how long of a gap people went between playing, the games ended up ALL being marathons, exhausting and draining instead of recharging your social batteries, you drained every other battery. Or at least I did. The long gaps between games also necessitated "story catchup" mechanics like using the wiki to share summaries, and then reading those summaries, and even to some extent studying. If it's fun for you, then great, but it ended up being less of a nice-to-have and more of a must-have if you wanted to engage with the greater narrative. Scheduling logistics were just genuinely complicated and required a lot of overhead and calendaring. I realize I didn't run a single campaign last go around, I ran three campaigns back to back. I could have allowed for some more meaningful resets and options to reconfigure or rework things for the players and the characters between campaigns instead of bulldozing through campaign to campaign in the three campaign mega-arc.
- ↑ Once 9:45 hits, we will end the game as soon as we hit a "paragraph ending," and regardless of what happens, we will end at 10:15 even if it feels a bit mid-sentence.
- ↑ I have an in-world mechanic that will allow your character to jump in and out without narrative complication, and as a player, you can also miss a game and/or several and rejoin without having to play catchup. We're all adults, life is complicated, we all do the best we can, and I'm trying to not just account for it, but lean into it. It's part of the game and I think it will make for a fun part.
- ↑ If you're not sure if what you want fits, ask
- ↑ and I have ways to make this happen if you don't want to pick for yourself
- ↑ yes this is kind of a joke. To quote Leonidas, "Spartans, what is your profession?"