This is one of a series I aim to run describing the old, successful campaigns I have run in the past. I think this was the second campaign I ever ran with a determined plot, to fruition, over a year or so in about 1998. My players were all friends rather than devoted nerds, though two were ex-players enticed back to the fold by me. The campaign setting was determinedly high fantasy, and it was the first and only campaign I ever ran in high level Rolemaster, starting at about 9th and ending at about 15th level. None of my players had done RM before and I had a very definite plan for this campaign, so I gave them their characters. In many ways this was the most railroad-y campaign I have ever played, and probably the most railroad-y anyone will ever play.
The setting
The setting was the borderlands between two huge Empires, the Northern Empire being a roughly Western European-style mediaeval Empire, and the Southern being an Oriental combined Chinese/Japanese Empire. To the West was an African/Islamic-style desert kingdom, separated from the Northern lands by a Mountain range occupied by elves. In between the Northern and Southern kingdoms were a series of small independent city states and countries, with the two most relevant to this story being the Kingdom of the Lakes, a little feudal kingdom carved out of nothing by a retired adventurer (and his big-cat riding soldiers), and the key city of the campaign, Innsfelle, a massive city-state resting between the Northern Empire and the Kingdom of the Lakes, heavily fortified and buttressed to the South by the Mountain range separating the North from the Kingdom of the Lakes. Innsfelle, famously impregnable and never having been defeated in war, famously independent, and in possession of a few small outlier towns scattered through hills, forests and farmlands; a city-state that is essentially part of the Northern Empire culturally, but ferociously politically and militarily independent.
The characters
The characters I handed out for the players to take on were very carefully designed to work together, and partly based on some PCs I and my friends played in 1995 in a previous campaign:
- Kusumi, a Japanese-style Fighter, essentially a soldier, from common stock (not a Samurai) who is a crucial component of this campaign. He was a key part of the Southern Empire’s armies but joined a rebellion against the Empire, and rose up through the ranks of the rebellion; but at the last the leaders of the rebellion screwed him over (see below) so he took over a large chunk of the army and led it North. He has a single, historical adventuring experience with two of the other PCs. RM class: Fighter.
- Amber, an Elven enchantress, who adventured briefly with Kusumi, helping him to crush a smuggling ring when he was in charge of security for a Southern Lord. Amber is cast out from her own community, having rejected an arranged wedding and fled her homeland to take up a life of adventuring. RM Class: Enchantress (Companion 1 I think?)
- Cwael, a half-black (Western kingdom), half-elven assassin-hunter who has adventured for a very long time with Amber, and essentially thinks of himself as her bodyguard. RM Class: Nightblade (Companion 1: this is my favourite RM Class)
- Eldar 1: I forget the PC’s actual name now, but he was basically a dark elf Rogue, and Amber’s lover. In this campaign the dark elf are called Eldar and are not evil black-skinned elves from underground; they are elves who were cast out of the Elven kingdoms many millenia ago and live as nomadic mercenaries, selling their martial skills to the highest bidder. Eldar 1 is a rogue but also the leader of a small warband of about 50 eldar (half of whom are combatant). The group has this warband at its disposal. Eldar are reviled by all civilised races, like gypsies, and live in caravans like gypsies; they are also the most vicious mercenaries the world knows, and of course capable of all the non-wartime adventurer-style nastiness that you can imagine a warband of dark elf mercenaries getting up to. RM Class: Rogue.
- Asian 2: I can’t remember this PC’s name either, but he was a Southern Battle Mage, essentially a wizard trained in blowing shit up while soldiers run rampant around him. He and Kusumi fought extensively together in the Southern rebellion, and famously won the battle of the Oni Peaks before the rebellion (they had a magic bell). They rebelled together against the rebellion’s leaders and led their soldiers north. RM Class: Magician.
All the PCs started at 9th level. 9th level RM characters are a lot of fun.
The Adventure: background and purpose
The story opens with the area around Innsfelle in a state of war. Kusumi and Asian 2 were in a rebellion of young Lords in the Southern Empire, which went horribly wrong. The young Lords, finding themselves losing and being trapped in an increasingly small area, had barricaded their army in a mountain fastness and determined to commit suicide and take their whole army with them. Kusumi and Asian 2, discovering this, slaughtered the Southern Lords and fled North with their army. Reaching Innsfelle, they decided this seemed a perfectly good city, and thought they’d take it over. Thus, they laid siege to it and started capturing the outlying towns. Nice guys all round. However, they have until the end of Autumn to complete the job; it is expected that by the end of Autumn the Northern Queen will have finished putting down a rebellion to the East, and her crack force of rebellion-putter-downerers, the “Queen’s Men” will come to Innsfelle to sort stuff out. But Innsfelle, Kusumi and Asian 2 have discovered upon arrival, is impregnable…
… At which point the campaign starts, with Kusumi and Asian 2 stumbling upon their old allies Cwael and Amber in a battlefield full of dead Innsfelle soldiers. The Eldar warband controlled by Eldar 1 have ambushed and destroyed the soldiers, and Kusumi and Asian 2 been invited to the aftermath. Here Cwael and Amber reveal that they have a letter from the Mayor of Innsfelle, sent to an important General, which makes it pretty clear that the Mayor is using the war to enrich himself. He has set up a nest of “bandits” – actually soldiers in the mountains and they raid supply trains of the Mayor’s own army, then sell the items they steal, and return the tax money they loot to the Mayor. The Mayor is so confident in Innsfelle’s impregnability – and the Autumn arrival of the Queen’s Men – that he is willing to undermine his own war effort for short term wealth.
The characters realise that, if they can get more concrete proof of the Mayor’s perfidy, and subsequently capture Innsfelle, then they may be able to convince the Queen to grant them suzerainty over the city, since the exisitng mayor is a Right Proper Bastard. In order to do this they need to:
- Prove the Mayor’s perfidy as extensively as possible
- Find a way into the city
- Make contact with the Queen
And thus the campaign unfolds, with the PCs having 3 months to capture a city.
Bsaic conditions of the campaign
The first thing to note about this little railroad is that none of the PCs can die. They are all essential to the plot (except maybe Eldar 1). Everyone knew this, but there were some famous moments in this campaign where everyone was in abject terror for their lives, despite the fact that they knew they had to be kept alive for the plot. It was through this process that I discovered that, with good storytelling, the proper choice of scenes and enemies, and the correct atmosphere, you can suspend or break every one of the supposed precepts of good adventure-setting, and particularly the notion of rewards and incentives is completely irrelevant if you’re running a fun campaign that everyone gets into in detail. There were no experience points in this campaign – I handed out levels at regular intervals – and no threat of death. Yet all my players acted on the assumption that all their actions were potentially deadly, and were the most cautious and inventive players you can imagine. I think this is because, more than any other campaign I have ever run, this campaign had a distinct and definite notion of “winning.” If Innsfelle fell into their possession at the end of the campaign, they had won – and beaten me – and if it didn’t, they had lost even though they lived.
Plus I set up a damn scary setting. During the campaign they discovered that actually the raids on the caravans by the mayor were cover for a search he was undertaking for a certain magic item, that would be used in a ritual on a hidden temple beneath Innsfelle. This ritual would free a Demon chained beneath the city millenia ago, and ultimately this campaign ended with the characters discovering the history and location of this demon, and banning it permanently. The quest for this demon and the truth behind it involved some exploration of frightening underground settings, interviews with dragons, and a variety of other scary encounters that kept the whole campaign in a continual atmosphere of creepy doom.
This is also the only campaign I’ve run where the PCs had extensive resources to call on from the start. They were mates with the leader of the Kingdom of the Lakes, and Amber was mates with a dragon, plus they had that Eldar warband, not to mention Kusumi’s entire army, at their disposal. Though all the adventures occurred on the level of the party, the campaign itself spanned a country-level war, with corresponding forces and resources in play. This gave the players a lot of flexibility in how to deal with particular problems.
The Eldar
During the campaign the PCs uncovered the mystery of why the Eldar were cast out from the Elven nation – essentially they refused to commit a terrible act as part of a war between elves and humans, and were exiled. This terrible act was related to the Demon locked under the city, and at one point the characters had to visit the ancient underground city in which the original Eldar were slaughtered by their elven compatriots for refusing to cooperate – the modern Eldar being the remnants of this slaughter. I can’t remember clearly now, but I think it was a type of Masada, in which the elves were surrounded and outnumbered, so decided to kill themselves and all the non-combatant elves in the city; but the Eldar objected and fled, fighting their way out of a secret entrance and sealing it behind themselves to avoid pursuit. Eldar 1 learnt all this history during the progress of the campaign.
Enlightenment man and Innsfelle
The PCs clearly constituted a group of outcasts, exiled from both their own lands and the city they aimed to capture, and in some case bound to a history of exile and revulsion. As the campaign developed this became an important theme, with all the PCs looking on their eventual capture of Innsfelle as an opportunity to establish a new kingdom of exiles in the gap between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, and to establish a new polity based on the laws and histories of these exiles. As the game developed this became a kind of multicultural dream, with the PCs increasingly in a type of Hamlet role, as misunderstood thinkers standing on the edge of the Enlightenment, returned to a more brutal feudal world and hoping to change it to a new and brighter outlook. The players became quite driven by this quest by the end and, being in charge of armies and strategic decisions, were willing to make some quite hard decisions to get there.
Role-playing weekends
We also pioneered the “role-playing weekend” during this campaign. Two of the players moved in together in the Blue Mountains, and we went to their house twice to do all-weekend-long extravaganzas. In fact, the final concluding session of this campaign occurred as part of a weekend-long session. We would cook, drink and do other things as part of these weekends, but the main part was the 8-10 hour sessions we would do each day of the weekend. This type of immersion really helped to maintain the intense and broody mood of this campaign.
Resolution
In the end all the threads of the story – the Eldar history, the site of their original exile, the bound Demon, the treacherous mayor, the negotiations with the distant Queen, and Amber’s dragon ally – all came together to a cracker of a conclusion. Unfortunately, however, the players screwed up (I can’t remember how, now) and although they captured the city and were granted it in perpetuum by the Queen, they also accidentally unleashed the bound demon. The plan was to have a sequel campaign – a high-level RM campaign! – in which the PCs hunted down the demon. Unfortunately, 3 players had to move away and the sequel never happened. But the first part was an awesome campaign with a dark, frightening mood, a complex story enacted on many levels, and a group of interesting and well-developed PCs who became only more interesting over the course of the game. I consider this campaign to be the one in which I realised that role-playing can be about soooo much more than killing things and stealing their stuff (even though that was, writ large, the exact topic of this whole campaign!) It really provided me with an opportunity to run an absorbing, fascinating and complex story that was so much more than just another anodyne fantasy arc.
September 27, 2010 at 8:36 pm
You tag this as being an example of railroading, and to a certain extent you did control a lot of initial elements, but these were balanced by more important ones, in my opinion.
A lot can be done with a group of players that knows and trusts each other. Your group at the time was comprised of close friends.
Having a group of characters that have clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and hooks to tie them together will void a lot of the conflicts or incompatible goals which can make a coherent story problematic. As you generated the characters for the players, and knew the players very well, you vastly increased the chances of a functional and interesting party that would quickly come to see itself as a strong social unit, and that the players would quickly be able to see as an excellent tool for achieving the goals of play.
The goals of play were not just killing and gaining experience points, they were a balanced mix of clear and implied goals, with the usual array of side quests, and slowly unravelling mysteries. The players knew from the outset what a major event in the world was, had hooks for their characters to want to solve it, had characters created with their predilections in mind – all of whom were useful, and were all going to get even more interesting if they could be developed.
Once in play, the events would happen regardless of player involvement, but were designed to be affected by player involvement. Moreover, you describe the players as having been both inventive and imaginitive in their roles which does not sound like they had to follow a trail of breadcrumbs to place x with item y. It sounds like they had to develop ways of dealing with the events of the world all on their own.
It sounds like it was a good game.
Would I run something like this with a group of new players, that I do not know very well…? Probably not. Do games like this work well, sometimes better than games with no plots, purposes, or pressure? Yes~
Interesting post!
September 27, 2010 at 10:47 pm
This campaign was more about playing the characters than making the world, and this I think is an interesting aspect of the railroad/story debate that hasn’t been discussed much: encouraging people to really get into their characters (i.e. to role-play) doesn’t necessarily have much to do with how you construct or unfold the plot. It’s about the atmosphere you set, the quality of the characters, and the degree of engagement of the players with your world. I note that a lot of OSR bloggers seem to think that it’s better to have your PC start with a blank slate, and then develop their characters with the story. But in this campaign it was the opposite – PCs were given a strong backstory and role-playing was about making this character work. I think a lot of people think this is not role-playing, but I can’t see it myself.
Another aspect of this campaign that interests me is that there was no “penalty” of death. Death was not a realistic option for most PCs in this game, and there was only one measure of failure – failing to capture the city of Innsfelle. The players all took this on as their main measure of success, and yet somehow death remained constantly on their minds. A lot of bloggers seem to think that death needs to be an omni-present reality (and its reality enforced by regular actual PC deaths) to make the game challenging, but this campaign taught me that that’s not true. A GM can set many goals for his players, and staying alive need not be one of them. I think I may have got hints of this from Ars Magica, where your character is part of a coven and therefore death is not a failure (you have others to play). It’s the success or failure of the coven that constitutes a warning to the player that they’re not doing something right.
Anyway, I think “railroad” and “story” games offer a different set of challenges to the players and GM, and they don’t at all represent a diminution of role-playing skill or style, and I hope this post gives some ideas about why.
September 28, 2010 at 3:21 am
Sounds like a neat, very tight little campaign. I’ll certainly agree with you on the whole issue of death; I run a game that’s rather light on death but high on tension. Death, after all, is really just a form of failure (except when it isn’t) and there are much more interesting things you can do to PCs than just kill them.
I’m curious about a few details in how you ran your game:
How much leeway did you give the players in playing the characters you gave them? How often did you have to tell them that their character would not believe certain things or take certain actions because of who they were or their background?
What was the primary activity in the campaign? Dungeon-delving? Politicking? Investigation? Guerrilla warfare?
You mention “the PCs had extensive resources to call on from the start… This gave the players a lot of flexibility in how to deal with particular problems.” How did the players exercise this flexibility? Did it significantly alter the campaign dynamic and IC situation much? Or were these basically extra tools to overcome simple, short-term obstacles?
September 28, 2010 at 8:38 am
I just wrote a long reply but my stupid kitten stood on the mouse and somehow deleted it. grr.
I didn’t set up PC characters, just back-story, and left the players to develop their characters. I think I might have given a few racial and cultural hints, and I certainly outlined their relationships to each other (e.g. Eldar 1 didn’t know the Southerners at all). PC character was developed consultatively over the adventure, with the players checking with each other and me when they thought that PC actions might be bad for the fun of the group (of players). The Hamlet-esque enlightenment-man angle on the PCs’ actions developed late, for example, and through their evolving vision of how Innsfelle would be after they captured it.
The game was largely a mixture of negotiation/politicking, and encounters in buildings and open spaces. I don’t do much dungeon-delving (I consider dungeons to be contrived and silly locations outside of cave lairs and dungeons specific to carefully-constructed plots). I suggested running some battles as wargames but my players were astoundingly uninterested, and made it clear they wanted battles to be run as a setting, with me determining the outcome. Fair enough.
The resources were used mostly as threats/extra tools, but Amber’s friendly dragon was used for dramatic effect to back up a negotiation, and near the end of the campaign Eldar 1 convinced everyone to turn Innsfelle into a permanent home for the Eldar, so used his own clan to gather together the other Eldar tribes, significantly boosting their resources and also giving them a key negotiating chip in dealing with the Northern Queen. So I think they ended up using that resource quite well. I did, however, construct things so that they couldn’t solve every problem by throwing a furious band of much-feared elven mercenaries at it.
Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out.
September 28, 2010 at 10:09 am
I think the post does what you intended, although the comments do add some important clarifications.
In-character play is something about which I feel pretty strongly, and have been trying to get properly into words since I started my blog. I have quite a few meandering posts on the topic now.
I think in your comment to Brian you indicated a very important point that will lead to greater success: putting limits on or guiding the choice of background, and then letting the players build personalities from there.
While the idea of developing a character out of experiences in play and reactions to their stats and favorite moments from the a blank slate with an alignment attached has merit, can be a lot of fun, and leads to roleplaying it certainly isn’t the ‘one true way.’ There is a lot to be said for learning to play a character with comprehensive and communicable character aspects as well as you play the strategic, social, and mechanical aspects of their occupation, class, or role in the game.
September 28, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Thanks Runeslinger.
I’ve done both types of character development when I play and I seem to naturally incline towards background development before play. That said though, I’m a much better GM than I am a player, so …
September 28, 2010 at 5:04 pm
[…] by Runeslinger on September 28, 2010 · Leave a Comment While reading a post on Compromise and Conceit about acting in-character, a question of the nature of risk in roleplaying games was raised, namely […]