It has come to my attention that people actually read these things!
Subsequently I have discovered that the last Retrospective I ever did started with the following ominous message...
How young we were. How foolish.
As I start to write this it is 29th August 2024. Thus begins the great work of dredging. I must once more delve into the past and remember what was, burdened with accursed foresight.
On Retrospectives in General
Something that keeps striking me on restarting the retrospectives is how insane and unique an experience this is. Most people don't have this.
Even if you're in that slim sliver of humanity who plays tabletop RPGs, most people don't have a decades-long ongoing campaign where I can read about what happened in the past and see how the effects of those decisions are still relevant in the imaginary game-world milieu of today.
There's a time in the next few years where I'll have been running this game for over half of my lifespan. Wild!
On the Novel Coronavirus
Looking back it's interesting to see these recaps coming out while there must have been that building sense of dread during the start of 2020, culminating in the first of many online D&D sessions in Session 260.
It's darkly funny that almost exactly a year after my campaign reached the post-apocalypse, the real world had an apocalypse of its own.
I know we've all undergone the Great Forgetting and now rarely talk about the pandemic, but it was a hell of a thing in those early days approaching the first Lockdown.
This is very evident in the 3 week gap between Session 258 and 259 - I'd gone to Venice for my Stag Do during the time when Italy was ground zero for the spread of Covid in the EU, and subsequently been forced to isolate!
Great time to go though. Next time there's a global disaster do consider hitting a tourist hotspot so you can see the sights with no queues.
(Do not do this).
I imagine there will be more to ruminate on regarding the lockdown experience in the next Retrospective, so for now I will leave it there!
On the Difficulties of Playing PCs as NPCs
There was a whole arc here where our heroes had to fight and destroy Styx (a former PC) who had taken over Fortress-City Fate in an earlier era.
The trouble is that I've never quite worked out how to do it when the former PC is important in the game world now, not to mention an adversary.
What if I get them wrong? What if the player thinks I'm mocking them personally by the way I'm playing their character? A character is a private thing in some ways, and my taking control of them must be crossing some sort of inchoate boundary.
In this case it was kind of fine. The character kind of got corrupted by their power and so their actions are kind of justifiably under my control. The same way reading a spooky book made it kind of fine for Wanda to discard all her character growth and become obsessed with her imaginary children in that one Dr Strange movie.
It still doesn't quite sit right, but that did lead to me making up the Mentor mechanic so that people's retired characters can be largely off-screen and played by them if necessary!
This may become an issue in the current (Aug-Sep 2024) era because there is now a new God made of PCs... but I foreshadow too much.
On Neo-Spacedin
Built around a crashed UFO whose replicator is stuck on the Undercooked Hawaiian Pizza setting, populated by Mod Cons (sentient modern home appliances) and Indomes (human minds from the Matrix sleeved into real bodies who use the world as a survival video game).
I also love the running joke that every newly formed town is some variation on Moondin.
Fun fact - it's called Moondin as a play on "Mundane" because the original joke was that the forest it's in is the only non-magical forest ever found in a fantasy setting.
On the Birth of the Dharga
Wow I didn't realise that this was the time period when the Dharga was formed!
Session 256 sees Dargo, a character whose entire vibe was getting bigger and more horrible as an Inheritor, ascending to a sort of Godhood as a giant flesh-tree.
Wait... how many PCs get retired as a result of some sort of apotheosis? I should look at the stats. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become God.
I remember this being one of those dramatic "rules don't matter, let's see how it lands" moments.
The great adversary was the Styxmind - the core Styx that controls Fortress-City Fate - a multifaceted being who wanted to impose his Law while being ontologically Neutral.
Opposing him was Sir Robyn, a lawyer wizard thereby containing the conceptuality of Law while being a wielder of Chaos.
Consuming both was Dargo, a being of Chaos invoking the world-consuming yet nonetheless Neutral Shub-Niggurath to become enormous and kaiju-formed, growing to encompass both in a horrific fleshy Yggdrassil. Chaos and Law united!
Russell, Dargo's player, has not returned since the pandemic. Kind of a perfect end to a player run honestly.
This was also eventually be the origin of JONATHON TOAST. An airship! Made of flesh!
I will talk more on Jonathon Toast as he becomes a gameplay concern, then a running joke, then a joke that's too existentially terrifying to be funny any more.
Wait a sec this was also the first session involving Jeremy Wizard! Charles' characters are famously all just Charles in a wig, so I think a lot of Jeremy's vibes get mixed up with the later iteration Celebus in the group's collective imaginary.
On the Best Death
After the horrors of the Dharga's emergence, the fleeing players in their wagon were assaulted by a dragon! How could I forget that Andromeda was riding a skeletal motorbike at the time??
During the dragon's assault Tom's character is thrown out of the wagon by a mis-thrown grenade, flies through the air, casts Dig Grave, thumps into said grave, and instantly dies.
Honestly it brings a tear to my eye.
Technically Rivière is still alive because this was a Necromancer Chaos Burst that caused temporary death, but since he never returned one must imagine that he died in that self-dug grave.
On Evicting Styx
18 August 2020 - 20 August 2024
On Evicting Styx
Ok for real this time.
Their last act as Lockdown drew in is, in retrospect, a real Scouring of the Shire capstone to this era.
They capture the Styxmind in a giant flesh tree. They claim a wagonful of Iron Rations to take back to New Moondin. They escape a dragon attack.
They return home... and find that an iteration of Styx has taken over the place in a Seraphim previously occupied by The Lady!
I remember expecting this to be a whole cool subterfuge-centred segment of the campaign.
Uniting factions, scraping together the remnants of the old order, feints and direct targeted strikes to restore New Moondin to its former glory.
Alas, the Lockdown came slamming in! The New Moondin plot was resolved via a concordance of allies and shenanigans (which to be fair is a very satisfactory way for a plot to be resolved), and we had to retreat behind our laptops for MONTHS!
