MountZionEditor said:
Thanks for the great post and some slick ideas. I especially like the playing backstory idea.
Sure thing - I like having a place to ask GM questions or post your adventure ideas for thoughts.
Unfortunately (honestly) I haven't had much help in this forum when asking for help... so I like to think karma will help me out for the future.
The playing of the backstory was tricky - since it have a few things I'd need to consider...
- hopefully the fateful fistfight with their former leader would go well
- they'd need to have a reason to split off from the group (their history was as part of one of the Aquilonian Companies) so it could be managable with a short 1 session adventure.
- I wanted to hint at some of the stuff that had already happened (game-time continuity) Example: they got to "meet" the other Nordhemier that they ONLY "saw" dead from the opening story, as it happened our Barbarian used his sword after to pay respect to the dead, and NOW they actually got to talk to him... cool stuff.
- the leader had to come off stern but confident and cool... roleplaying military leaders (or any NPC) can be touchy on how the players "take them", one poorly chosen word turns their perception of the NPC.
- and they hopefully would survive the past adventure...
IF they had not survived I'd have figured out what to do... The stand-by is that it's a "Lotus-Dream" and they wake up having never done it - but I hate that one, it's sort of a cop out to me...
Other ideas we based on sorcery, dopplegangers, and necromancy.
THEN, when we would go back to the other "future" games they'd have to make a new character because their "dead" character would be revealed for the traitor or whatever they were....
Arkobla Conn said:
My group has been very linear, but I'm enjoying this reading and would consider working in a non-linear fashion. I wonder, now that they are 10th level and I have the 'end' planned ... (grin) ... if I could convince them to go back and do some fill in adventures with the same characters....
Talk to them about it and see if it would be cool.
Then spring it on them.
I'm still new to my campaign (only 7 game sessions in) but here's some thoughts on what I did...
I've found I like MIXING the continuity... I wouldn't have fun doing linear-linear-linear adventure then go back in time and doing more linear-linear-linear adventures...
I perfer to build it like a timeline of their lives and the FIRST adventure the group had was the "BASE" time. The ZERO date.
From then I skipped some time (a few months) and they were on their next adventure mostly linear from the previous adventure... They were in the 2nd session of that story and a player couldn't make the session so I planned to jump to...
Back a year prior to that timeline, the PC's first meeting each other. Their adventures coming down from the north lands toward where they'd end up for the "great battle" that ended up sending them on their adventuring path. (ie. the backstory)
Now it's back to the last session of the previous story to finish with the other player could make it...
DURING that adventure I had interlude/cut scenes, that WILL be actual scenes in the "canon" of our story that will be the opening (or maybe the ending?!!) of the next story I run.
Then again I've just recently had the idea to do a story about one of the PC's childhood (an idea from the recent Conan comic issue), which would be surprising to the players since I hyped that the Shadizar story would be next...
A short 1-2 game story could be really cool. Wherein one PC plays a Level 0 commener version of himself as an 8 year old and the other PCs play friends, cousins or townfolk that are in the story with him.
what do you guys think?
-kev-