Campaign Notes 2: Have Mech, Will Travel

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 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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