Will the adventurers remember the marvelous sight of Landa Heri's Castle?2023-08-10
I have started to work on my Grenzland-Kampagne again (link in German).
Initially I was a bit hesitant to pick it up again, and actually start and continue this 7 year old OD&D campaign, but then again, so much has already happend, so much lore has been developed by playing. Why ignore this treasure of emergent story telling?
So I'm going through pages and pages of session reports on our Discord and on the wiki, and I wonder: to what avail have we written all this stuff? Have all those session reports really served their purpose?
Will the adventurers remember the marvelous sight of Landa Heri's Castle?
On the other hand, my game mastering notes about all those places and non-player characters are badly out of date. The players actions have had a lot of impact on the game world, but I feel these are not reflected in the game notes - not nearly enough.
Of what use is a note about a subterranean dwarven combat arena somewhere in a session report that hardly anyone ever read? Instead a rumour about it could be told by an interesting non-player character. This might be no more than a reminder for those players who discovered the place months and years ago, it might be no more than some colorful fluffy lore for new players, but it might just as well lead to a new adventure!
All those events, the lore that has developed, needs to be fed back into the campaign. After all, I want my players to enjoy, and have interest and investment in the campaign, not so much it's paraphernalia. I cannot and don't want to expect new players to study pages of campaign history in order to participate. Every aspect of the campaign should be accessible through play. If some prior campaign event is of historical import to the story it should be exposed through encounters, discoveries and NPC interactions.
So here's my plan:
go through all campaign notes and look for interesting bits
turn those into rumors, phrases for NPCs to say, maps (as game items to hand out to the players), and maybe short pieces of written history to be found in game.
develop a routine of adding any consquences from a session directly into the campaign notes.
The player characters barely escaped from the hydra? The patrons in the tavern will remember and tell about it.
The player characters were finally successful and slayed the dragon? Their names will always be remembered and the bards will sing their tale for decades to come.
Something along those lines ...
A hulking mercenary captain with a peculiar neckbeard sits at the bar, his poleaxe leaning to the counter:
"Oh boy, I remember the old days. About two weeks travel due northeast there used to be a rocky ravine with many cave entrances. People called it the Caves of Chaos, for their many chaotic humanoid inhabitants.
All the tribes have left, as far as I know. Who knows where they are now? If they even survived?
It was the time when Darpantor the mighty red dragon came and burned down the castle that was our outpost up in the Borderlands ..."
After emptying his beer mug he continues:
"The ravine is no more ... buried under snow and debris when the moon was shattered and the earthquakes came.
Sometimes I wish I could go back, and see my old friends ..."
The man tosses a coin to the bar tender, walks out into the cold rain, claps his dish sized hands and shouts:
"Come on everyone! We've got some work to do!"
Please send any comments or questions to wandererbill@betola.de or @wandererbill@tabletop.social
Copyright: ~lkh • Do. Aug. 10 14:52:58 CEST 2023 • License: CC BY-NC 4.0 • Hosted by: SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System - https://sdf-eu.org