Campaign Notes 6: Let's Get Ready To Grumble

Previous Entry

I made one post that wasn't related to BattleTech and broke out in a cold sweat. Shaking like a leaf, I've drifted through the intervening hours with sour resignation. Is this what I've been reduced to? Writing words about things that aren't two stories tall? Cobbling together thoughts that have nothing to do with the rippling staccato of competing autocannons? How do you people live? This is unmanageable.

"What's in here? Oh, it's every single topic that isn't BattleTech"

My partner tried to have a conversation about our relationship, but I couldn't hear him because he didn't mention 'heat sinks', 'LRMs', or hexes. Just some stuff about why my things were in boxes and how whatever passion we'd once shared was wilted beneath the scouring heat of my self-absorbed BattleTech hyperfixations. As if I'm supposed to know what that means, c'mon.

In any case, having not had another campaign session yet is actually an opportunity to subject my session-prep to the same scrutiny I've tried to leverage elsewhere. I tend to think of session-prep as distinctly different from things I might do, write, or prepare for the campaign at large. Coming up with the NPCs and the adventure-scenario's details, for example, doesn't feel like session-prep because those elements are likely to persist through multiple meetings of the group.

When I think about--and do--session prep what I'm focused on is the stuff I expect, or want, to literally happen in the literal time of the literal session.

I say this with some pride, but I've gotten compliments on my ability to pace an RPG session (standing in stark contrast to my sexual and intellectual stamina). Quite possibly, part of my successes are this session-prep.

Point To Point

The first part of my prep is to think about the limits of the session; what is the absolute least I'd like to accomplish, and what is the absolute most?

Last session ended with the PCs having just concluded a skirmish with some hovertanks. Both the PC Mechs were beat up, even in victory. Fictionally, the other two in the lance were untouched. Having concluded mid-patrol, this gave me the absolute least-- I wanted the PCs to return from their patrol with the information they'd gained; namely, that the Directorate Remnant was active near Grossman's Peak and apparently had some kind of logistics chain to sustain themselves.

That feels very doable. Their lance commander, the unimaginative and by-the-book Lieutenant Martin Merles, can serve as a lever if I need to prompt the players. But in truth, with their damage and low ammo, the PCs will almost certainly head back to base themselves.

So what about the absolute most? For me this is often more important than the lower boundary, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it winnows the corpus of shit I need to worry about into something something bite-sized.

"For fuck's sake, Sagan, just say you don't wanna bake an apple pie with me."

Secondly, this upper boundary is much more informed by my educated guess at the session's eventual course. The first step the PCs make is easy to anticipate. The more steps they take, the more fuzzy my guessing will be. So possibly this upper boundary is more about what I don't want to get to than what I do.

I've talked about the importance of framing before. Possibly what I'm discussing here is the guiding principles behind your framing; priorities. The way you frame something should be guided by your priorities. So figure those out or you'll find yourself writing about RPG prep while your partner packs your stuff up into boxes for some reason.

So what's my upper boundary this coming session? Well, I know that I don't want to get to the final confrontation with the Directorate Remnant, nor do I want them to discover the Castle Brian. Stepping backwards from that, do I want them to discover that there is a Castle Brian somewhere on planet? I think so. And while I don't want the final confrontation yet, getting some groundwork for that narrative beat could be useful. With that in mind, I'm going to set those as my upper boundary.

The In-Between

Now that I've framed the session, I can start populating it. If you read my previous post, you'll see exactly how I organize the in-between. I have the non-diagetic ambition ("Stretch Your Legs"), with some details. Here's what I have for the upcoming session:

• They've Always Been Here: One of my players couldn't make last session, so I'd like to devote some time to orienting her (both in and out of character). Helpfully, I think I can frame this with the debrief of the PCs when they return to base.
• Pound the Cobbles: The damage to the PC Mechs was extensive enough that they have a not-insignificant amount of time to kill before they can mount up again to go kill. Narratively, this  gives an opportunity for them to investigate some of their Big Questions; what's "Ensign" Young really up to? Why did Officer Swing meet with "The Works"? Where did the gunrunner get his special ammo?
• Knuckledustin': We had an opportunity to play with the Mech combat, I'd like to also try non-Mech combat. Especially since it uses a different system. And as a scene, this kind of thing is easy enough to drop in while the PCs are investigating.
• The Follow-Ups: Both PCs did some more domestic stuff last session; one attempted to ingratiate herself with her mechanic by buying him some pipe-tobacco. I'd like to dedicate some game time to having the fiction respond to their previous agency.

We play for 3-3.5 hours which is about all my tired bones can handle. More than that and I start to get cranky, turn into a pumpkin, and throw a glass slipper at someone.

"It's 9:47, eat shit I'm going to bed."

We also play at a bar so sobriety* isn't a non-factor...

The Bits & Bobs

Having at this point a pretty decent outline/skeleton of my session, informed by my priorities and comfortably bounded in scope, I can see to what I'll need in order to actualize it all.

To orient the new player, I'll want a succinct and accurate summary of what has happened already. More importantly, I'll need to make sure that summary enshrines the Big Questions that the PCs currently have. What I don't want is for this player to be trying to contribute to an investigation for which they have no context.

As for investigating, I need to devote some meatbrain to thinkthought where the PCs could expect to find answers.

The biggest question I need to answer--because its answer will inform so many others--is how the Castle Brian was discovered. And I think it comes back to "The Works"; this gunrunner got lucky, and has been trying to slowly sell off the ammo cache he got his hands on. He knows this cache implies the existence of a Castle Brian, but is not pursuing it-- it's only valuable if he can sell it, and he has neither the market to sell to nor the resources to sell a whole Castle Brian. And the information itself is dangerous. Anyone who could use a Castle Brian is likely to kill him to secure that information.

Here I'll make a note-- does "The Works" get offed? Not sure, but it's something handy to put in my back pocket. Plenty of narrative reasons, and a good dramatic moment I can use to pace the session.

I'm a serial pacer.

The Magistracy of Canopus got wind by discovering these sales of Star League era munitions. I need an operative from which they got this information, so I create a new NPC: Farad "Abby" Abdel, a "retired" Canopian adjutant. I'll put them in Brightlake Depot, where the PCs have a good chance of ending up.

That surely means they weren't the only ones to connect the dots. So I now have a good reason to litter clues among the Directorate as well; in fact, it serves as an apt reason for them to have come here in the first place. A Castle Brian could well renew their ambitions of overthrowing the Aurigan Coalition. I need some Directorate operatives, much like I needed Canopian ones: Sam Tremble, an ore prospector late of Grossman's Peak.

I'll need some stats if my ambition is to have some combat. Thankfully, I think I can get away with something pretty generic and just look for opportunities for violence; could be "The Works" protecting himself, the Directorate being the Directorate, local knuckledraggers who dislike off-worlders, etc. The MechWarrior: Destiny book has reams of 'em.

Finally, I need to decide where the Directorate Remnant is (but not the Castle Brian, not yet); near Grossman's Peak is a given. I choose a hex that puts them four hours north-east of Grossman's Peak. Somewhat isolated, amid terrain that mucks with magnetic-scans, but near to an outpost of civilization from which they can siphon logistics.

And that's about it! Tune in next post as I try to discover how I can make my partner love me again after having placed BattleTech before them in my home life. I suspect the answer is somewhere in my BattleTech rulebooks.

 *Alcoholism is a serious disease that makes you very good at stock trading and very bad at keeping your family. When companies say 'please drink responsibly', it's only because they haven't yet figured out how to monetize liver failure. Don't worry, they'll get there.

Design Thoughts: Know Your Place 1

Let me get this out of the way first, because like the oppressive noise I make while assaulting a plate of hot wings, there's no avoiding it. This post is going to at points be so far up its own ass that I'll qualify as a proctologist. I'm going to be so academic that all the sex I've ever had will un-happen, a process that promises to be just as confusing for my former partners as the initial act was. Probably, there will be less crying this time. Possibly more, though. I'm super emotionally fragile these days.

But these thoughts to follow have been rattling around in my noggin like the squirrel bones in my car's engine block and, like the squirrel bones, I really need to get them out.

Role With Me On This

I'm sure there are people far smarter and less having-had-sex than I am who have tackled how we parse the roles of player and facilitator in RPGs. You should go find them and read them. I won't link them here because reading is for nerds and as we've established I'm a prolific sex-haver.

"Yeah, I know where a cliborus is, duh."

In any case let's look at some examples of how some notable RPGs proffer the role of player and facilitator; what they do, should do, etc.

Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition, on "The Role of the Players":

Once completed, your character serves as your representative in the game.

On "The Role of the Dungeon Master": 

The DM is in charge of the adventure, which appears in the adventure book, while the characters navigate the adventure’s hazards and decide where to explore. [...] The DM determines the results of the adventurers’ actions and narrates what the characters experience.

If you look at the Player's Handbook, you get (pg. 5) that a DM "describes the environment", "narrates the results". Players "describe what they want to do". I could do a whole post about the language of negotiation in D&D. 

If we look at Blades in the Dark, we get something a little different.

On "The Players" (pg. 2). Note that the bolding is not mine, that's in the book. John Harper wanted this to stand out.

This is the players’ core responsibility: they engage with the premise of the game, seeking out interesting opportunities for crime in the haunted city—taking big risks against powerful foes and sending their characters into danger.

On "The Gamemaster" (pg. 3)

The GM establish the dynamic world around the characters, [...] The GM plays all the non-player characters [...] The GM helps organize the conversation of the game so it's pointed toward the interesting elements of play.

I didn't choose those games arbitrarily. For better or worse, D&D is a mass large enough to have its own gravity within the RPG ecosystem; I don't think it's controversial to suggest many will enter the hobby here by mere virtue of its reach. And so, one might proffer that there are vast swathes of gamers who have internalized D&D's roles. The character are representative, advocating for their ambitions (mechanical, narrative, thematic, etc.) beneath the DM (who is "in charge", "determines the results").

"The enemy wizard casts Acid Orb, how do you plead?"

 And Blades in the Dark is a popular non-D&D RPG that is at least large/influential enough to have spawned its own ecosystem (and even a TV show). More importantly, its design came explicitly out of an interrogation of the power dynamics/narrative negotiations which are at D&D's bones. To quote Harper in February 2012 (five years before BitD was published):

"I wonder if it makes sense to look at the process you're currently using (your creative agenda, rulings, constitution, player/GM roles) as the game qua game. That is, there is no formal final state as a goal, but rather the functional implementation of this method and its evolution serves as "the game." I can certainly imagine a rules text that laid out the methodology as you're presenting it here, along with examples of rulings to form a baseline toolkit. That would be a complete game, IMO, and probably far more useful as a teaching text than the presentation of the final rules set when it's "finished."

There are plenty of ways to organize RPG design theory, and here I'm putting D&D at one end and Blades in the Dark on the other. One negotiates from a place of hierarchical authority (at its worst, 'mother-may-I'), while the other negotiates from a place more akin to Lev Vygotsky's pedagogical work (with the GM as a "more knowledgeable other" organizing the fiction-conversation, rather than strictly leading it).

To be honest, a child psychologist seems really apt to understanding RPG players.

I'm actually going to resist the urge to keep blathering; this is the third draft of this post and it feels only halfway done.

Keep on the lookout for part 2!

Campaign Notes 5: The Beginning Is The End Is The Smashing Pumpkins Song

Previous Entry

So I had a session and, against all odds, it went well. Then again, this is my blog. Maybe it went terribly, and I'm lying! I can lie! I can lie all I want! How would you know, you rube, you absolute weenus?! That's right. Don't forget who is boss around here.

It's this guy.

Anyway, it made me realize that I never dove much into my PCs. Part of it was a subconscious desire to spare very real people the terrifying ordeal of being on the internet in even the smallest way. This place is hell, except no one is forced to be here and we can leave at any time and we have unanimously decided we aren't going to.

The other part is that they represent very clear and unambiguous levers for me to pull. That lack of ambiguity makes them, to me, pretty uninteresting for a post like this. I write to find out what I'm doing, after I've done it. My defense counsel says I should stop, but what does he know he was stupid enough to take me on as a client. Lmao idiot.

But it probably does deserve some mention. All the players were given--and took--the option to randomly generate their characters. MechWarrior: Destiny doesn't natively have that as an option, even though it lightly adapts the infamous lifepaths of previous BattleTech RPGs. It was dead simple to just assign the possible options for a character's "Life Modules" to die results.

We ended up with:

1. Ramses Chrysomenthes: A former Solaris VII pilot who had conspicuously rejected the ambitions her parents had for her. Also has a mortgage on her Mech that might be held by the mob. From her background, I had a very clear connection to the Magistracy of Canopus which actually ended up becoming relevant immediately in the adventure scenario (as you'll see later).
2. Rhys Gladstone: A Capellan-orphan turned criminal, turned mechanic, turned pilot. This player wanted to play an old goat, and he's definitely one. From his background I have some deep hooks within the Capellan Confederation.
3. Firstname Lastname: This player wouldn't make it to the first session, and hasn't yet updated their character's name. But we did flesh them out. They also ended up being a Solaris VII pilot; unlike Ramses their background was in the internecine Free Worlds League civil wars. Interesting threads there, most especially that her cause lost. Good hook.

Altogether, they answered what I wanted answered: Why are you a MechWarrior pilot for the Ninth Wave? That's all I needed, especially this early in the campaign. Their details are things I keep track of so I can opportunistically snipe them; some facilitators suggest gearing narrative/play more centrally around PC backgrounds. I'm sure that works for them, but I've always had better success using PC background as mortar rather than brick.

Idoú, éna paichnídi!

With only two of my three players present, my ambitions for the session got scaled back slightly. I anticipated hitting the following notes:

• Meet The Family: I wanted to get some scenes in where the PCs had opportunities to meet and form opinions about various NPCs who would recur through the adventure scenario.
• Stretch Your Legs: I wanted to give the players an idea of what future modes of play would entail; what it meant, for example, for their lance to be assigned to go on patrol.
• Slice of Life: I wanted to emphasize that there would be plenty of opportunities for player-directed engagement with the banal and the domestic. Characters were more than pilots, they were people. What does this person do?
• Fisticuffs: I wanted to try out some combat. I've previously mentioned I'm using a bit of a Frankenstein* of different systems (MechWarrior: Destiny for non-combat, BattleTech: Destiny for combat, Classic BattleTech for company management, and more). This session was a good chance to kick the tires.

How successful was I? Well afterwards one of the players dislocated my kneecap with a savage roundhouse kick and, while I was mewling on the ground, spit in my open mouth. Before you start making judgments, that's just how he expresses himself. His grandmother does the same thing, but in her old age it sometimes takes a couple kicks to get it right.

In truth, I think I hit all except "Stretch Your Legs". The players immediately glommed onto the main NPCs I'd been hoping they would (refer to Campaign Notes 3). During play, I ended up adding two more.

Major Bentley Nelson was the Magistracy of Canopus officer assigned to direct the Ninth Wave, per the contract. He was a foppish, pleasant man who was undoubtedly a "social officer". Their interactions revealed his lack of qualifications but, at least, some cognizance of that. He was perfectly willing to step aside and let others pull their weight. This allowed me to introduce Lt. Young as his "Ensign" adjutant. Gladstone immediately scoped that the Ensign was not, in fact, an Ensign, and Ramses' specific background let her identify that the Magistracy often sent soon-to-be-promoted officers back through the ranks. This was meant to reinforce the entire chain-of-command which would underpin the officer's new commission and worked very well as Young's cover story.

"The Works" was a local arms dealer they made contact with (via Gladstone's gutter-running instincts). They allowed me to introduce more details about Gangtok's local cultures; how those of Simon's Valley were insular, how Grossman's Peak was a good place to get lost etc. The players almost immediately started leaning on these characterizations to help winnow in where they thought the Directorate might be operating. Unqualified success, as far as I'm concerned. I even had the chance to seed the implication that, for reasons unknown to them, Officer Swing had already spoken with "The Works".

"Fisticuffs" was probably the sloppiest, but it was nonetheless very helpful. Insofar I got to kick the tires, I had a lot of help. The whole table joined in the kicking. I got a lot of usable data and feedback on my attempt to run BattleTech: Destiny in a theatre-of-the-mind style.

More succinctly, I'm a broken man but the bits of me which remain can still be ground into yet finer dust.

I may try to type up my "theatre of the mind" hack of BattleTech: Destiny, next time if I hate myself**.

Next Entry

*Some people will say that Dr. Frankenstein was the real monster in that book, while others will say it's his creation. They're all wrong, the real monster is Lord Byron.

**I do.

Campaign Notes 4: Private Props Are Inherently Theft

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There are some game systems which directly address the physical space of RPGing; that space matters, because it girds everything else. We can play Dungeons: The Dragoning online via Zoom, or in a Turkish bathhouse where a swarthy man named Yağmur watches with interest and his penis out. Same game, wildly different vibes.

The indie space is where I often see it. 10 Candles by Stephen Dewey makes ten literal candles the centerpiece for its horror-mood, for example. Other games like Monte Cook Games' Invisible Sun embrace the idea that props can uplift the vibe of a session to a staggeringly expensive degree*.

You're a gamer now, get in.

All of the above to say that I, personally, love what props can bring to an atmosphere. But like choosing which gas station you're going to atomize with a burrito-bowel movement, you have to be discerning. Not any prop will do. You need props with room for you to pitch forward and grab your ankles while you pray to whatever god is listening. You need props with solid doors to stifle what will, to anyone outside, sound like an opera singer being messily murdered mid-Nesusn dorma. You need props that will let you unload your gutful of hellfire, then waddle over to the counter and say "one burrito, please".

I hope showcasing my own (props, not bowel movements), you'll get a look into the rationale for each; what it brings to the atmosphere, what it offers in utility, etc.

Prose & Contracts

Probably one of the more important props I wanted to bring to the game came from one of its central themes; the ways in which material circumstance impede, support, or otherwise impact ideologies. What good is a rebellion with no ammo? A freedom fighter without the literal things needed to fight? So I very much want the players to be invested in the Jungian shadow that is their mercenary company's financials.

What I didn't want was to make it boring, opaque, or ancillary. If I was going to make them do math, it had better be worthwhile. In any case, here's what I made:

You've seen this already, but I'm proud of it so you're seeing it twice.

Behold! In my previous entry I talked about one of the recurring "Starting Contexts" being the rote aspect of their employment as mercenaries. Get contract, do mission. This handout is meant to enshrine that in a tactile way; if no player makes a single note, remembers nothing of the previous session, they can still look at the current contract and see who is employing them, who they're fighting, and for how long.

I've also encoded useful information that will come up-- how much will their employer reimburse them for damage/expenses, and how much of the battlefield loot will they keep? Hopefully, having those terms explicit will help the players think in terms of 'is this fight worthwhile?' which is where I want their heads to be (or at least end up).

It's a single piece of paper, and lemme tell you I worked very hard to make sure it stayed exactly that. I want to give them the feel of complex litigious language; I don't want to burden them with the reality of it.

Just as important is the information I've purposeful omitted. I decided against putting in anything regarding the relative strengths of enemies and allies. Why? That's a big blank space for player agency-- if they want to get involved in deciding what contracts the Ninth Wave Free Company takes, the easiest way to contribute is to research who they're fighting. Maybe that juicy payout on paper is because they're going up against The Hellripper Regiments instead of the Softsad Children's Militia.

Information informs player action, and well-positioned absence can prompt it.

Here Be DRG-1Ns

The other prop I plan to use with relativity is a very simple "you are here" map, showing the planet they're currently on and the region it is in. This isn't something I'd attempt if there were already a truly intense preexisting support for maps of the setting.

Here is the first map for their first adventure scenario/contract.

It's cribbed almost wholesale from Sarna.net because that website is to my BattleTech hyperfixation what spraypaint is to someone who wants to huff spraypaint. But I chose (and modified slightly) for two reasons.

1. The map has two circles; the first is the distance of a single JumpShip, the second the distance of a single hyper-pulse. Together, they respectively indicate how well-connected the planet is physically and informationally to the rest of the region.
2. The map doesn't show the entire Inner Sphere, but implies their current region's position relative to it. Hopefully that emphasizes that this is a big galaxy; to show its totality would be to make it small again. Like in the story about blind men and an elephant, I want them to feel a part so they can wonder about the whole.

It's framing, again. It's always framing. Find the edge, draw a line in the sand, place the chicken wire. It's not a forest until you find the treeline; up until then it's just the wilderness.

Nerd's Eye View

Finally, I've got the planetary regional map of Gangtok. A lot of what I mention above still applies-- I wanted the map to only show a part, to keep the whole a blank space their imaginations can fill. Unlike the stellar cartography, this handout is going to have some more definable utility and implications.

Bless St. Azgaar and their mighty generator

I mucked around quite a bit with stuff like pallets, aesthetics of mountains and coastlines and rivers. But they're aesthetics. I tried to make them look good because looking good is nice. It's why I spend so much time in front of a mirror. I'm incredibly handsome. I'm just so goddamn handsome**.

But that aside, there's some rationale behind exactly how and where I placed stuff.

The main spaceport for the planet Gangtok is "Highbreak". You'll note, however, that it is not centered in the map; instead the city of Brightlake Depot is. The Depot is the cultural center of the planet, where people of Grossman's Peak and Simon's Valley mingle, and I wanted to emphasize that. Highbreak is a place of control and safety for the PCs, it's where the Ninth Wave is bivouacked, and it's where the Directorate Remnant is absolutely not going to be.

The map, then, is meant to show a lot of places they could be. Lots of wilderness which the PCs will have to scout and patrol in order to hound their adversary for a confrontation.

Relatedly, I chose ~20 mile hexes to try and balance between isolation and access. At ~60 miles per hour (reasonable for these Mechs), it's roughly 4-5 hours from Highbreak to Brightlake Depot. That's easy on a kind of strategic level, but tricky on the tactical level. It means that a lance-on-patrol can't expect reinforcements to save them from a tight spot.

Finally, I tried to make sure there was a reasonable diversity of terrain implied by the map. Highbreak sits in rolling hills, Brightlake on the edge of a large lake/quarry, Grossman's Peak is snuggled in the rough terrain leading to the mountains, and Simon's Valley is in a fertile river valley. Confrontations at any location should feel different, and hopefully that's something I can play with when I'm encounter building.

I anticipate next Campaign Notes to talk about actual sessions as they happen, but schedules are the bane of all RPGs so we'll see. Actually, that's not true. The true bane of all RPGs is Goreslaker the Imagimonster, who feeds on dreams and vivisects the unworthy. He dreams of teeth, and nothing else. Those He culls will find no mercy in the eternity which follows.

His maw is an abattoir of all human hope. Also He plays Pathfinder.

*This is the most money I've ever spent on a single RPG item, and frankly my car was probably going to be repossessed anyway.

**My mother is very clear on this.

Campaign Notes 3: PrattleTech

Previous Entry

Last post we talked about framing. Narrative framing! Not, like, the framing of a picture of your first dog Chelsea when she was a puppy which sits next to a picture of your current dog Samwise not only because she was a good dog and you have fond memories of her but because youth is wasted on the youthful and in retrospect you suspect you could've been a better owner so you try to be that better owner with your current dog but mental health being what it is you still sometimes stay awake at night trying not to think of what Samwise will look like when he's old and whether he would forgive you and whether he's happy because you sure as shit aren't.

Not that kind of framing, the other kind.

"Ha ha yeah things are going great, ma, lots of people like my blog I'm doing really great"

Anyway, this post is going to winnow in on some nuts-and-bolts. I've established the framework I want, and found a region which supports that framing; now I need to craft the adventure scenario and all that entails.

Something I landed on pretty immediately was that a pure sandbox ( in the sense of "player-prompted, emergent narratives with a primarily reactive facilitator"*) was not desirable because BattleTech as a setting is big. Decades of history, real and fictional, piled into wargames, boardgames, RPGs, video games, and (memorably) a cartoon. I'm not asking them to grok it all; but sandbox play by and large requires some familiarity with the landscape. It otherwise, in my experience, degenerates into mother-may-I madlibs.

On top of this, the massive body of supporting fiction--the very thing that I think would work against a newbie faceplanting against 38 years of grognardia--could do some of the heavy lifting of my adventure scenarios. I had NPCs, timelines, a truly staggering stellar cartography; I had the turgid magnificence of Sarna dot fucking net. I am a lazy person. I once threw out a plate, knife, and fork because the trashcan was closer than the dishwasher. I only read five of the seven deadly sins.

No idea what number six is.

For my scenario, I'm going to organize my thoughts into four categories:

1. Starting Context: What the PCs know they have to do; additionally, the resources they know they have
2. Developing Context: What PCs don't know--but may learn--they have to do; resources they may come to discover
3. Antagonist Forces: Who is trying to stop them, inhibit them, be a nuisance
4. Relevance: Why it matters, why the players or characters are engaged to Do Stuff

This certainly isn't the only way to organize writing an adventure scenario, but it works for me in this instance. If it doesn't work for you, that's fine! You're just a shitty facilitator, a shitty person, and your bloodline will disappear from the world unloved and unmourned.

Starting Context

For this campaign, I'm keeping the starting context simple (which doesn't mean easy). Relatively uncomplicated, explicit, and anticipatable. I can't believe I nailed the spelling for that on the first try**. Very simply, the PCs will be members of a mercenary company of BattleMechs; that company, the Ninth Wave Free Company will take on contracts. Initially, they'll be secured and negotiated by NPCs but my ambition is that the more players feel comfortable in the setting the more active they'll be in these contracts.

For the first scenario, the Ninth Wave has been hired by the Magistracy of Canopus to run down remnants of the Aurigan Directorate. Helpfully--and in keeping with the theme of this region of space--this former regime was backed by the Taurian Concordat. The PCs will be in the Aurigan Coalition's turf, fighting their enemy, but employed by someone else. Delightful. And this is simple enough, especially as a starting point to the campaign-- players know they'll be scouting, finding the enemy, paddling their saucy hams, etc.

And to that end, they'll have the resources of a mercenary company behind them. Twelve BattleMechs, their pilots, their mechanics, the administrative staff. I have some names jotted down for many of these, but I only decided to flesh out three.

Captain Roland Calus, commanding officer and owner of the Ninth Wave Free Company. He's a jovial veteran, but has notably started to lose a step in the cockpit. He'll be there to mentor, be a reasonable-but-firm authority figure. Like all good mentors, he'll be someone who can eventually step out of the way for the PCs (either by death or retirement).

Dr. A.E. Antony, the doctor. He's a brilliant surgeon with excellent bona fides and a drinking problem. I'll use him to help flesh out the more civilian side of things; I don't want the campaign to be one-note, war and violence. This is the guy who will try and get the PCs to go to the opera with him.

Officer Gerard Swing, intelligence officer. In the Napoleonic War, Wellington had "riding officers" and that's the archetype I'm looking to hit. I'm also cranking the spymaster knob up to eleven-- he's aloof, eccentric, extremely off-putting. But ultimately he's an incredibly savvy diviner of intelligence; if the PCs get dossiers, he made them. If they need information, he's got it. I'm also earmarking him for the Developing Context.

Developing Context

As I mentioned earlier, this is the category of material that participates in, precipitates, or is consequence of some change in the fictional circumstances. As players Do Stuff, they will learn things, acquire things, meet people, reevaluate relationships, etc.

For this adventure scenario, I already had an idea that I wanted to have a little bit of a wheels-within-wheels thing going on. For the start of a campaign, I wasn't going to pull any rugs-- friends would not become enemies, enemies would not become friends. My emphasis was going to be "look closer" more than "doubt everything". To that end;

The Mission Is Only Part Of The Mission - I decided that the Magistracy of Canopus wasn't only trying to prop up their buffer-state with the Taurians. They wanted something and that something was one of the Castles Brian. These are great MacGuffins*** in BattleTech, as there is not a single entity which could not benefit from finding one of these funboxes of death-technologies.

It's like one of these, except it vomits lasers and micro-missiles.

And here I can re-introduce Gerard Swing. He is the only one in the company who knows what the Magistracy knows, which means he's a resource they can lean on when it becomes clear Something More Is Going On. Plus it fits. This creepy skeletonman is useful, not nice or pleasant. He is absolutely on their side, whether the PCs like it or not. I put him here because I very much want there to be a Before and After for who Swing is. I want them to see him one way, initially, and another way later. Look closer, see the far the rabbit hole goes.

So that's where the scenario is going to develop; that the Magistracy isn't just interested in taking out the Directorate remnant, but also nipping up an undiscovered trove of lost war material from under the Aurigan Coalition's nose.

Antagonist Forces

So what is stopping the PCs, both in their starting and developing contexts? The first and obvious one is the Directorate remnant. To scale the scenario, I created a nice roster of Mechs, tanks, etc. that is on-planet. When the time comes, I can draw from this pool for fights. By pre-generating with some particularity, I also have a sense of how backed in a corner the Directorate is-- how close the Ninth Wave is from winning. I've also decided to earmark two NPCs.

Lieutenant Jurgen Oberfelt is a bastard. A real bastard. A sticky, tenacious piece of shit who commands some of the Directorate forces. I made this NPC to be a kind of moral floor; this is the worst this universe will create, and an emblematic hate-sink for why the players should want to change it. I'm hoping to keep this guy alive--and, given his cowardice and self-interest, that won't be too hard--so he can crop up again like a herpes flare.

Lieutenant Naomi Young is, by contrast, a perfectly pleasant person. She's professional, prompt, unflappable. She is also a member of the Magistracy's intelligence arm and deeply invested in making sure the Magistracy gets the MacGuffin over anyone else (including the grubby mercenary company).  If Swing is the unfriendly ally, Young is the friendly enemy. Pointedly, I want to introduce her as a non-violent antagonist. This should, I hope, emphasize that the point of a gun isn't the only way to do business. Diversify your leverage portfolio, you'll go far kid.

Relevance

There are campaign motifs which definitely fall here. I'm emphasizing the material fact of BattleMechs (their cost to arm, maintain, repair, move around) specifically as a function of who has power (e.g., those with the ability to arm, maintain, repair, move around these war machines); a Castle Brian is pure windfall, there.

Additionally, though, I'm hoping to dangle "scale" as a wriggly worm in front of my table of gulpers. More Mechs means a bigger Ninth Wave, a bigger Ninth Wave means larger contracts. It means moving--or being moved--towards the centers of power and influence.

This campaign is starting on the Periphery, the literal fringe. But that's not where it has to go.

We'll see how the players respond to all this, going forward.

*There are other senses of the word "sandbox". That assumes the word has a stable, coherent and widely accepted meaning. It often doesn't.

**I did not.

***Technically I'm using the term 'MacGuffin' wrong, as they are traditionally incidental rather than useful; items to be fought over because they must be fought over. Since a Castle Brian is incredibly useful specifically because of what it does, strictly speaking it's not a really a MacGuffin.

Campaign Notes 2: Have Mech, Will Travel

Previous Entry

 As promised, I'm continuing my campaign notes/log. Is it helpful for organizing my brainmeat? Will it bear succulent fruit at the table? Will the narrative juice run down my chin in gorgeous Epicurean luxury? We'll see. This has already proven to be something of a retrospective for me, which is weird considering the campaign hasn't really started yet.

So let's get into some nitty and/or gritty about this campaign I'm running.

Not that gritty

Where To Start

It all comes down to framing. In RPGs, there is a back-and-forth between facilitator (DM, GM, Storyteller, etc.) and player-characters; the call-and-response in which the facilitator establishes and the player-characters react (or vice versa). If one is intentional in how one frames these calls, you can help establish a framework for the responses.

In the practice of law, you have "leading the witness". The question 'do you kick your puppy, Mr. Anderson?' is framed very differently than 'for how long have you been kicking puppies, Mr. Anderson?'. This is a nuance that Powered by the Apocalypse games have traditionally brought to the forefront; in those systems the GM has "hard moves" and "soft moves" which can reductively be characterized as 'something happened, what do you do?' and 'something is about to happen, what do you do?'.

It's how you frame it. That's the primary responsibility, as I see it, for most facilitators in most RPG systems and campaigns. Intentional, conscientious framing that clarifies the edges of the sandbox you're playing in.

The importance of framing also comes up at the start of a campaign, where nothing has emerged from play (which hasn't happened), and expectations are often made with a lot of unsubstantiated underlying assumptions. I had to decide where I wanted the campaign to start-- geographically, literally, as well as thematically.

I managed to organize what I wanted out of this framing:

1. The Fringe: I wanted it fairly removed from the high halls of influence, the shining center of galactic politics in the Inner Sphere; not just to thematically connect the PCs with the small guys (rather than the big 'uns), but to keep the players from feeling pressured to grok the turgid throatsac of lore which is BattleTech.
2. Trampled Grass: I wanted it in a place where political interests where high but the direct influence of those interests was low; a proxy conflict, bushwar, someplace caught in the middle. The players would interact with these political interests through their intermediaries-- as well as act as intermediaries themselves. Thematically, I wanted to emphasize the multiplicity of agenda which gird the conflict. Sometimes you support a faction because you agree, sometimes because their methods align with your goals (even if your goals don't align with their goals), sometimes because you were given a lot of money.
3. Fish/Pond Ratio: I wanted it in a place where the players were, paradoxically, not bit-players. Because the centers of power/influence were so remote, their operant arms would have a lot more agency/leeway than otherwise. A small fish in the big pond becomes a big fish if stuffed in a small pond, after all; and here I figure it's best to start with a sense of empowerment for the players. There will undoubtedly be later opportunities for disempowerment.

With all the above in mind, I winnowed in on a sector of the Inner Sphere called The Periphery. In this setting, the smaller political players are quite literally forced to the edges of the galaxy (#1); by that virtue they are similarly denuded of BattleMechs.

I chose the Aurigan Coalition (setting for Harebrained Schemes' video game), specifically, because it's situated between two Periphery powers that have a history of slapfighting each other for the scraps on the fringe. That ticks #2. Happily, Catalyst Game Labs also released a supplement fleshing it out.

That the Aurigan Coalition has just, in the year 3026, finished resolving a civil war means that they aren't exactly apt to projecting political power via three-story mechanical murdermachines.

Behold, the political process at work!

Having the PCs be members of a private mercenary company hired by the Aurigan Coalition--or even better yet, one of its neighbors with a vested interest in propping up a buffer state--ticks #3 nicely.

There it is, the wordy thought process by which I arrive on the first landscape for this RPG Campaign; the PCs are MechWarriors in the Ninth Wave Free Company, contracted by the Magistracy of Canopus to help clean up remnant hardliners from a fascist regime within the Aurigan Coalition.

Next post, I'm going to delve into the opening game scenario/adventure.

If you were disappointed by the relative sterility of this post, the conspicuous lack of my normal rhetorical flair, all I can tell you is that you should suck my weenus. It's exhausting trying to please you-- you don't even look in my eyes anymore when we make love.

Maybe if we have a kid together it'll fix things

Until next time!

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