Tag Archives: Fantasy

FGLE Chp I:I, GM Debrief

Session Recap; Stream

Contents May Shift During Takeoff…

GM Confidence: 4/5. I felt pretty good about the overall results, though there was definitely room for improvement.

We got a pretty late start, having to deal with last-minute character updates, first-time-campaign technical problems…nothing unexpected. I started out in media res with a to-the-death PvP melée, a “simulation” intended to get everyone acclimated to their new characters’ abilities (sadly, not everyone realized it was a simulation, so there was some confusion). It served its purpose, I think, but…

The Slap-Fight

Nobody did anything technically wrong here, but two of the characters ended up spending quite a few rounds swinging ineffectively at each other, mostly out of reach of the rest, either not hitting or being successfully defended against—they were a situational match, and would inevitably keep going back and forth like that until someone made a mistake or flubbed a roll. Afterward, it occurred to me that in a situation like that, where no ground is being gained or lost and the scene is threatening to drag on in an un-fun manner, the GM really needs to be ready to step in and shake things up. In our case, I just called off the fight before it was officially over; this was fine for the narrative. In the future, though, I figure I need to give some forethought to how I can speed up such situations; changing the scenery a bit, maybe (adding obstacles, expanding or contracting the boundaries, putting superior weapons within reach, etc.). In a mass-battle, having nearby units get involved is probably sensible. Just a couple of notes about dynamic scenery elements is probably sufficient.

Out of Rhythm

The misunderstanding regarding the simulation already had me a little off-balance. Once the story-proper got moving, I started making little mistakes that compounded the issue.

  • I was reading off some bits of dialogue—which I did not want to be reading in the first place—and to make it worse, stumbling a bit due to some dental work a few days prior
  • The players apparently expected to be given horses (or the equivalent) for the trip, though that was not the case—not sure why I didn’t see that coming, and I wasn’t quite prepared to respond
  • When the Grandmaster of the Guild asked if anyone had any questions about the mission, nobody did…which was weird; I intentionally left out details so they would have questions to ask, and they didn’t. Still not sure what broke down there.
  • The pre-travel prep section kinda fell into a minor bit of disarray. I had planned to use an initiative sequence and tokens on the map to track general positions—not to turn into something “tactical,” just to provide a bit of helpful organization. For whatever reason, I didn’t stick to the plan, and I ended up getting things out of order, and even skipping over the “town crier” bits I wanted to use because I couldn’t quite direct the traffic to it in a sensible manner
  • As we started processing their travel speed and such, I discovered they were going to be much slower than I had anticipated—Encumbrance woes—and that made me panic a little

It just got all jumbled, and if there’s one do-over I would want out of this session, that would be it.

Under Way, Finally

Once they got properly under way, things started to smooth out, but I was still dealing with the much-lower travel speed, which caused further headaches for me. The travel map uses 30-mile hexes as “a typical day’s travel,” but that was no longer accurate, and I couldn’t quite sort out where they would end the day—I have the week to sort that out, but at the time, it added to the overall confusion. As a further consequence, I ended up blanking on some of the road events I had planned.

Lucky Break: Rayna’s player had just added a Quirk-level Nightmares, which fires off only on a Crit Fail—and when they camped for the night, it actually triggered. It was great timing, prompted some in-character development, and will probably be the last time it happens 😛

Overview

All the above issues were pretty minor, and I don’t think the players really picked up on my panic—or they aren’t saying so. All told, it went pretty well for a first session of a new campaign. Lessons were learned, though, and that’s always good:

  1. Stick to the plan
  2. Keep it organized
  3. Go over your notes and find out where you’re making “assumptions” and fix them—think of the worst-case and prepare for it

Introduction to Legends of Generica

Once upon a time, in the land of Clichéa, in the Kingdom of Generica, in the twelfth year of King Jon XVII, the land prospered. It was a period of uneasy peace, ten years since the Late Unpleasantness, and one year since the traitorous Luzar Drakeburne campaigned to usurp the Generic crown and was defeated. The king faced troubles from all sides; vassals plotting to take his throne, or gain their own; raiders terrorizing outlying farms; and neighboring kings awaiting opportunity to strike.

But far to the east, dark clouds gathered over Firemount: after a hundred years of silence, the Overlord of Nefaria recently sent his armies forth from the Black Tower and seized the neighboring Kingdom of Poorland. There is no doubt he next will march on Generica, his ancient enemy, and trod under foot any who stand in his path.

Meanwhile, a group of young, upstart adventurers of the Heroes’ Guild has formed a company of brothers-at-arms called The Company of the Bere (“bear,” not “beer”), and is about to be sent on their first mission…

History

In 2006, one of the Core Group GMs (Zorgon) decided to run a quasi-continuation of another GM’s D&D campaign, in a generic (that is, not our usual Greyhawk) setting, which was jokingly dubbed Forgotten GreyLance (Greyhawk + Forgotten Realms + DragonLance). I think the “Generica” concept was first referenced at that time. In 2011, he made another use of the setting for an entirely new campaign, this time adding “Eberron” to the name: Forgotten GreyLancErron.

In 2012/2013 the Core Group had different membership, half of which were relative noobs to gaming in general, and had not GMed before. We decided to run a “GM Club” including all current members, a GMing round-robin of three to four session apiece, each stint ending in a cliffhanger where the next GM would pick up. We used a setting based on the old FGLE plus some new concepts, called Forgotten GreyLancErron – Heroes of Generica, the building of which was shared amongst all the GMs. The round-robin was quite a success, and some of the GM-noobs went on to GM their own campaigns. It was this version that began the use of TV Tropes as a design feature.

In 2015, I started working on a new campaign for the Core Group based on FGLE which I was referring to as Legends of Generica. I took over the FGLE setting and started reworking it, intending to run the campaign in D&D 3.5 (would have been my first D&D campaign); the reworked setting was the first use of the Core Group Wiki. Along with TV Tropes, it would feature the heavy influence of the computer game, Crusader Kings 2, as a “realm management” concept. The campaign didn’t see production, but I kept working on it anyway, intending to get to it eventually, in one form or another.

Now in 2017, an opportunity has arisen to run Legends, instead, in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy for the Olympus Group, though there is talk of some Core Group overlap with a different D&D campaign that may use the same setting.

Campaign Overview

See Campaign Info.

(For the record, this campaign is not an official part of the Daniverse-proper.)

I’m setting the tone of the campaign on the “silly-side of average,” like The Princess Bride or Stardust. I’m keeping the setting quasi-realistic, to the degree that I can, but allowing the basic cinematic abilities, influenced to some degree by TV Tropes. The original D&D version would have started at 1st Level; this being GURPS, that means 150 points at the start—definitely still “green”—with their focus on eventual fame-&-fortune. The adventures themselves will be intentionally clichéd and simple, which should telegraph events for the properly genre-savvy—knowing it’s coming should be part of the fun. For the future, I’d like to get into some small-time realm-management, and of course, the campaign will undoubtedly end up featuring a long journey to take some McGuffin to Nefaria to destroy it before the Enemy can use it. As a side note: due to the current circumstances at the Olympus Group, this campaign will likely be my first to be live-streamed and recorded for YouTube, though I intend to keep the usual post-session records as well, probably on the Olympus blog.

Should be a fun ride…