It's been back to Moondin for the last little while, except this is a very different Moondin to the one the players once knew. It's a changed Moondin. An apocalyptic Moondin.
This last run of sessions have been mostly defined by a complex mess of clashing agendas and surprisingly compelling character stakes.
The various clashing agendas got so complex that I had to do a big ol' summary at the start of the latest recap. For players who've been there the whole time they've been able to follow along, but for poor old Andy who'd returned after a fairly long hiatus it was just crazy.
The talk of the town in Moondin is the Boat Race. A bunch of demons have shown up in town and begun running a dangerous race on the lava moat. Who are they? Why are they doing this? How? Big mysteries!
Under, around, and clashing with this mystery are a bunch of people with other agendas, all of whom clash against the players' plans and have consequences that ricochet out to mess up the plans of others.
Emergent complexity, yea!
The character stakes thing surprised me. Turns out love triangles are pretty fun!
The wildest thing is how much extra weight characters get in a long-running campaign, and how little individual weirdnesses stack up over time, until you realise how insane everything is when you step back and look at events as a whole.
So like -
POWERLAD's beloved wife Bertha came off the Carousing table this time last year. Last year! During that time she's grown from being an amusing drunken consequence to a character in her own right, occasional PC, and genuinely caring wife who acts as a home base wherever she sets up shop.
The love rival, Andromeda, is a copy of another player's character from another timeline. The original Andromeda died in POWERLAD's arms in a genuinely heartbreaking campaign moment. This "new" Andromeda fell for POWERLAD when he widowed her by killing her husband, an alternate timeline copy of himself.
Add to this a whole other situation where this alt-Andromeda got possessed by a spider demon queen who is (was) engaged to another character and...
Shit is so fucking wild, man. I love it.
I'm only just realising this now, but Arach-Nacha the lust demon spider queen had a whole story arc. From being stuffed in a bag and taken far away from her creepy dungeon lair, to taking over the body of a hot dragon lady, to getting married to a creepy alien Elf, to assisting a scientist who wanted to create the venom that would end the world, to dying in that scientist's creepy lair.
She had a wild ride.
And now she's dead because a crystal dragon ate her.
No wonder it's hard for Andy to catch up!
Another natural plot arc has been Sir Robyn. The spider queen implanted POWERLAD with eggs, later those eggs hatched into spiders, then Sir Robyn decided to take care of them.
Now he's the adoptive father of some shitty spider kids whose parents are around but don't care about them, assisted by his two raccoon familiars like some sort of gonzo fantasy sitcom.
I legitimately couldn't make this stuff up, it's all just grown up from a combo of random rolls, character decisions, and intra-group memes.
It's all emergent complexity. All wheels in wheels, plans clashing with plans, goals clashing with goals, and the situation is so precarious that it's dead easy for the PCs to knock the whole thing over!
It's perfect is what it is.
And that's not to mention the continued advancement of the Apocalypse with the blowing of the Second Trumpet, new player Carter turning up and being obsessed with runes, and all the zany gameplay centred around business merger between two players' businesses.
Man.
This also was a time of mild change for my house rules, most significantly in changing Sneak Attacks to Backstabs. I've gone into that elsewhere though.
And that's not to mention the continued advancement of the Apocalypse with the blowing of the Second Trumpet, new player Carter turning up and being obsessed with runes, and all the zany gameplay centred around business merger between two players' businesses.
Man.
This also was a time of mild change for my house rules, most significantly in changing Sneak Attacks to Backstabs. I've gone into that elsewhere though.
And on a sombre note, Tom ragequit again and this time it might be permanent. He always wanted to go off and do his own thing, touch dangerous stuff with his bare hand, and be a hero who wasn't part of the team... so he died a lot. Alas.
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Mini-Reviews
The Magma Lake of Ninhursag
I may have mentioned this before, but it's a big lava lake with crystal trees connected by vine bridges with a massive dragon on an island in the middle of it.
Intended to be a difficult heist situation, but nobody's ever been daring enough to try. Also now POWERLAD is the leader of one of the five drakencults here, so it's all diplomacy!
A zany module which... woah holy shit this thing got withdrawn from sale?! I guess I'll link Bryce's review. I've got a collector's item apparently!
Man, anyway. This was originally a squishy oozey fungusey module, so I took the bones and made it a part of the city of Moondin where all the tentacles had grown up from the ground.
It's good, I injected a lot of my own game's lore in here. Mostly players go straight through to the dungeon, and then the dungeon below that, but they could conceivably really hunt around this place more if they wanted.
Anyway I like it and I'm sad it's been withdrawn from sale but HAPPY because YOU will never experience this GOODNESS.
This module has gone through so many changes man.
Originally it was a complex filled with the Mould Men and their Cleric leader who believed the Mould was a gift from God.
Then the players eliminated the Mould forever, and those who didn't leave remained in this complex getting high and wishing they could go back to the soft warm togetherness of Mould.
So it was a druggy complex for a while. This is what the players knew it as for a while.
Then they managed to get a crystal dragon to come in here, and so the place is now (unbenownst to, but probably suspected by, the players) full of sharp crystal minions and the scared remnants of the junkies.
How's the module itself? Real cool.
Kabuki Kaiser sent this to me aaaaages ago to review and ffiiiiiinnally the time has come for it to be triggered.
I put it on my Apocalypse Timeline sheet a few months in the future, assuming it'd come around soon, but it took a while!
Anyway, this is a wuxia oriental-themed module centred around a dragonboat racing festival, run by undead liches, with a mysterious conspiracy at the heart of it.
I changed it to a mysteriously oriental module centred around a dragonboat race of crystal boats on boiling magma, run by powerful demons who call themselves Flower Liches, with a mysterious conspiracy at the heart of it.
Basically I changed as little as I could get away with!
This has necessitated various alterations across the board, mostly minor, which I'll detail when the thing's over and I do an actual review.
Early takeaway - the Lich's houses are all self-contained dungeons which are individually cool, but the room descriptions are really hard to parse chunks of text where the room descriptions are embedded in the text and not even in order.
That's my only complaint so far!
Oh and the art is cool as fuck.
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