Elves of the World Unite
Happy Yule, everybody! I hope you got all your shopping done ahead of the elven labor disputes.
Anywho, what say we spend this holiday season talking about dooms? In particular, there’s this concept in Exalted 2e called “The Thousand Dooms.” The shtick is that there are a butt load of world-ending threats scattered around the setting, and any one of them might go off at any time. There’s a Death Lord working on The Anti-Life Equation! An evil version of Midsummer Night’s Dream plots to invade from all corners of the map! A planet-sized robot god is about to crash into Creation! Kung-fu secretaries are going to destroy fate! Etc.!
If you try to imagine a setting where all that crap is actually happening at the same time (much less play such a game) your head might well explode. That said, I do like that all those threats exist. Sure there are a Thousand Dooms hanging over the setting, but GMs only have to choose one. All those terrible threats are nothing more than narrative potential until you decide to shine the light of the group’s attention on them.
This is true of more plot elements than the world-ending threats. Any time you sideline Nancy the Noblewoman’s ongoing feud with her evil cousin to focus on investigating Pat the Paladin’s murdered mentor, you’re choosing to privilege one storyline over another. The important bit is to pick and choose with discretion. Make sure that everyone gets a moment to shine, and that each major plot arc weaves in with the next. My favorite explanation of the technique lives on page 77 over here (damn Chris Perkins knows what’s up).
How about the rest of you guys though? Do your plots ever get away from you? Do you ever feel like you’re trying to cram too much into your campaigns? How do you resolve it when half the party is into the arc and the other half wants to move on? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I run a sandbox-ish campaign that runs at a glacially slow pace (not my fault, the players are just busy). So I’m practically incapable of having those kinds of issues. I have plenty of time to think of things to make every individual shine in an even enough rotation (if not all in the same quest).
And in a sandbox game there’s really no cramming issue as long as you accept that a bunch of the ideas you come up with don’t need to be fleshed out too deeply before you’re sure the players aren’t going to completely ignore it.
Like the only things I think about in real detail are the quest they’re currently on and some minor fleshing out on the next stuff I’m more or less sure they’re going to do. And really my style is such that often I’m basically just improvising even the stuff they’re currently doing. Assuming you can call it improvising when you wait sometimes weeks for a particular player to post and coming up with a response you may or may not have had prepared (more or less) in a few minutes to a day. *shrug*
As for player differences of opinion…. in theory I don’t have that issue since I have three players. They can’t be tied. Not that’s really how it works out in practice. I just play it by ear since it’s not a big issue I deal with. (Really trying to get them to decide on any direction in particular as a group at all is a bigger struggle for me.)
That issue of picking a direction seems like it’s indemic to the thousand dooms problem. When Adventure lies in all directions, how do I know where I am supposed to go. I think the trick lies in realizing hat there is no “supposed to.” Pick any direction and it will be fun.
I just had to say, those tiny elves are extremely cute.
X-mas elves should be a playable race.
Absolutely. Though the gnomes fit them mechanically almost perfectly
I thought they were gnomes that were just mislabeled.
Still not sure what I think Harry Potter house elves are supposed to be. Creepy little buggers.
Elves are different in pretty much every mythology that has them
Hold my beer. I’m going in!
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurElvesAreBetter
One idea I have considered a few times while playing with worldbuilding is to have two or three races of elves which are actually completely different races, but all just got called elves because the people who first met them thought they looked similar. Something like American buffalo vs African buffalo vs water buffalo.
Could be an interesting colonial type game. My first thought hearing that idea was discovering “Indians” in friggin’ Cuba.
Merry Christmas, guys.
Right back atcha! I hope Santa brought you only the fattest of loot.
“The Thousand Dooms” basically sums up quite a lot of collaborative universes, especially superhero-type stuff (unintentionally negating any “the world would be better off without superheroes” plotlines), as well as stuff like the SCP or Lovecraft universes (either making them more terrifying because there’s so much stuff that could kill humanity, or less terrifying because clearly we’re doing something right since none of them have succeeded yet). Then again, D&D (especially Pathfinder), like superhero universes, is also the world of The Thousand Power Sources (arcane magic, divine magic, nature magic, music magic, angels/demons/devils, fey powers, witch patrons, shaman spirits, ki, psionics, alchemy, undeath, animated objects, summoning magic, robots, aliens, extraplanar aberrations, elemental magic/beings, gunpowder, and pure manly/womanly anger. And that’s just my Sorcerer’s ancestry! If you were Cthulhu and you finally manifested on a mortal world only to be immediately shot in the face with a laser gun, you’d consider backing off too.
I am reminded also of a game scenario I once created (video game, actually, but still an RPG) about a world that years ago defeated a great evil and lived in peace until just recently, when they discovered a portal that leads to 7 parallel timelines that either were conquered by the great evil, are still fighting the great evil (and becoming quite brutal in the process), or have gone through other strange circumstances (including different great evils, a total societal breakdown or the sudden and suspicious devotion to a religion that sounds like a parody of Ayn Rand). The protagonists, a team from the first timeline bolstered by recruits from other timelines, have to go to try and save each timeline, but are constantly having to make choices as to what threat is currently the highest priority – Timeline-Gamma’s population is enslaved by aliens while Timeline-Kappa needs humanitarian aid and Timeline-Beta is under attack from the Evil Overlord Army again and agents of Timeline-Delta have captured one of your teammates. And some members of the shaky inter-timeline alliance won’t like it if you’re always deciding their problems are the least important…
You ever hear of a novel called “Flight of the Silvers”? Really cool time travel / supers story. Lots of forking timelines. I bet you’d dig it.
3 things:
1. Wizard’s hat is great.
2. The fan-made Ruins of pathfinder setting comes to mind: http://ruins-of-pathfinder.wikidot.com/setting
3. This also reminds me of my plot to have an escaped villain from one game I’m running into another to attack the PCs.
Specifically, Master scourge from the Skull and shackles AP is now a slave of the aboleths in the Ruins of Azlant AP and is going to lead a skim raid on the PC’s colony.
Ha! I love this hobby. Here I write up an explanation of how you can get away with ignoring most of a setting’s dooms, and then here’s a counter example of what happens when you let all the dooms come true at once. There are so many cool ways to play this game, and none of them are absolutely correct. And that is awesome.
The “thousand Dooms” thingy, is why I am a Fan of Shadowrun, great World! (Terrible Complex system by the way.) You can always choose the backround for a Run. Magical Bug Spirits, eating People? No Problem! Crazy AI in the deep Host of the local Skyguide using empty Planes as one time Bombers against the Mega Corps? Whats this a Gang war going on? and and and. Call 111 Shadowrunner. We will solve it all.
I’m a fan of the conceit of “the run.” Dungeons work so well because they are a small geographic area where you can fit in a bunch of sequential obstacles. If you get rid of that format but want to keep a resource management adventure game as your paradigm, you have to find some kind of replacement. Having an A-Tram band of troubleshooters for hire is a rock solid substitute.
Oh Merry Christmas as well!
I am full of more spiced wine that a fantasy tavern. My merriness levels are quite satisfactory. 😀
Who’s the brunette behind Wizard?
It’s the Hermoine girl, isn’t it.
>_>
Eh… I usually keep one arc of apocalyptic proportions that is rarely ever under an actual time limit. Even after weeks of in-game mucking about on sidequests, the villain is always like “Curse you adventurers! How did you arrive in the nick of time?!” I guess liches and doom cults love their vacation days as much as the next person…
And here’s a thing I love doing in my games: since all my D&D games take place in the same homebrew universe, the actions of one group affect the others. Not only do events and characters from other games add the Dwarf Fortress level of minute details that make world feel alive, but if one party fails or ignores a quest it can simply segway into the other’s plot.
Oh, do you have simultaneous campaigns going in the same setting? I’ve always wanted to give that a whirl. Any difficulties with the two sets of characters trying to kill each other?
Reminds me of an ELFQUEST illustration where the two elven leads (Cutter and Skywise) were eyeing Santa Claus and Cutter is asking, “You want us to do WHAT…?”
As a lifelong ELFQUEST fan, Laurel is beside herself with glee at the comparison.