Unfinished Sympathies

I started this treatise as a means of dumping my exorbitant prep on the web. My gambit would be to finish a campaign and then package the lot so I could wax lyrical on its lessons. Perhaps if the DM's Guild had existed when I'd started I would have made more professional efforts.

However, the great enemy of all tabletop roleplaying defeated many of my campaigns: Scheduling. Keeping one day free a week takes it's toll. Lives change and suddenly Thursday is not so good for Korok the Barbarian anymore.

I'm currently producing more piecemeal prep as Dungeon World requires. I run sandbox campaigns and take it one episode at a time. I'm also twiddling with tools for use at the table - this is what happens when you watch people struggle to play D&D from the hardback tomes. So it seems I will never return and complete those ivory towers I created, but I may as well show you folks around the corpses that Lord Schedule slew. The files are all in Markdown format, you can use something like Dillinger, Mou or MarkdownPad to edit and print their contents. I'd convert them to PDF but it's a hassle to sort out the page breaks. I also apologise for the lack of maps, I drew them on the fly and still do.

Nex - D&D

Basically Rifts. I'd had fun with portals in one campaign and concocted this odd bounty hunter outfit that was in need of murder hobos to go on missions. A fist full of one-shots. The idea was that it would be inclusive, anyone could join in and we could also visit their world. We never did visit anyone's world. These missions are quite railroady.

Faerun - D&D

Sort of sandbox. I dropped the players off at Fireshear at the top of the map, then gave them a mission to escort someone to the bottom of the map. I chose to prep all the stuff that could occur in the area and tried to wing the rest of it. Which I was ill prepared to do at the time. I hadn't the random tables to hand that I rely on now and I didn't ask enough questions. Yet these little treks across classic D&D territory were quite fun and it was interesting using the Sword Coast as a bible - if exhausting to research.

Moles - Mouse Guard

Discovering mole society, terrorist plots, epic battles, and flight! I like epic campaigns. I especially enjoyed researching flora and fauna to have an impact on missions. I think the terrorist plot got away from me a bit, I wanted something to slow the story down but I kept using the same beat instead of spending time with local politics. A lot of this campaign's drama could be scaled down to simpler motives of individuals and feel a lot more like Mouse Guard instead of D&D.

Were I to have the fortune to run Mouse Guard again, I would run it more in a sandbox style. My lists of bullet points were valuable, but often I let my prep get the better of me instead of letting the players tell the story.

So it goes.

Wasted potential? Not quite. My agenda with prep has changed but throughout I still believed in the name of this blog. Bullets, ammunition. All these shots were fired, my aim has improved.