My Ideas: Writing For a Teeny Audience

Earlier in this blog (somewhere around the Revolutionary War, I believe,) I last mentioned my earlier experience as a player of Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. Of course, I never just wanted to play these games. I wanted to run them. This shouldn't be too surprising to any who reads this blog (and other mythological figures.) I not only love the act of creation, I love showing it to the public. I love it when my work is evaluated and, well, recognized. Narcisistic? A little, but that's just a part of being an artist. Besides, if nobody responds to your stuff, you can't improve on it.

Not that it didn't take me a while. I'll focus on the first of my not immediately catastrophic attempt at running a D&D game. There were at least three failures before this point. The first was when I browbeated my friends into the game. Things were already looking bad when one of my friends tore up his character sheet and quit midway through the first adventure. To be fair, he's been known to be a bit overdramatic. It nonetheless lasted for about five or six adventures before the rest of my barely interested friends gave up. Round two was even worse; I got some of my friends (including the guy who quit last time) and the barely interested friends of my brother. It lasted about three or four adventures and ended with the whole party being captured, but at least I got some interesting characters out of that one. Finally, I tried running a game, which eventually became my first 3rd edition game, with the D&D group in college. It went okay for a few adventures one year, but over the summer, two players broke up, one friend quit the group out of the fallout of that, and a fourth left the school, leaving me with about 1.5 players. So it goes.

Finally, after graduating from college, I gave up on the attempt to convince my friends and just posted for ads online. That eventually got me three or four players, and so the game began! This game started with and idea I got a couple of years ago prior. The first adventure used pre-generated characters of a fairly high level and absolutely no relation or alliance. All the characters hunted the Quill of Destiny, an artifact of incredible power that let its user write the future, but only for a limited time. The characters alternated between working together to pass challenges and earn orbs that extend the time they can use the Quill, and happily stealing from each other or fighting to claim the right of the Quill. It didn't help that half the selected starting characters are evil.

And so, at the end of the adventure, three characters made it to the end with the Quill, with one character dead after the others abandoned him to a dragon and another character repeatedly shot by another character. Of those three, two were evil, and they wrote of conquered dragon armies, evil empires built out of the undead, and in one particularly clever idea, day itself would only last a quarter as long as normal. The last guy was neutral and fortunately created some vestige of civilization, albeit underground, which is actually pretty helpful what with the only three hours a day of sun and the almost lifeless surface.

Now that the players could make their own characters, they became special forces for the main underground city. This time, I went creative/weird, and I made them all partially amnesiac. They knew their history, but none of the names of their friends, family, hometowns, etc. It was only after meeting these people that they remembered these names; as if hearing it the first time triggered their memory. Oh, and they all met a strange shadowy figure the day they got the amnesia, saying that they were her children and it was their job to destroy the "usurpers."

The campaign sort of blipped over that last bit for a while, though. It initially is about the characters running a literal underground resistance against the evil orc/dragon and undead empires, but soon they discover a much worse threat. In addition to all the other changes to the standard D&D setting, I included another one; the standard gods were gone, to be replaced by own pantheon. That pantheon consisted of twelve goddesses known as the Sisters. That's right, I got them from the Valley game I mentioned ages ago. But the characters only knew about 11 goddesses. In this world like the original, Bas, the only evil goddess, fell and was forgotten. However, somebody discovered her, and she is slowly rising to power. When she does so physically, she will be a goddess manifest on the material plane, with all the unpleasantness that suggests.

The plot soon revolved on fighting Bas and her forces while simultaneously learning more about the strange world's history. The Quill, it turned out, has been around for millions of years and was created deliberately by a power higher than the gods. Ideally, it appears every time the world was building to an unstoppable climax, leading to a final victory of good or evil. The Quill let some mid-level forces take over and change the story completely, and it would be centuries or millennia before another climax would develop. As a result, there were the ruins of countless civilizations buried in the world, often with advanced technology or other forces unknown to a typical fantasy game.

This time, however, things went wrong. When Bas fell, she made a crater that penetrated many of those ruins, and as she started to recover, she gained access to powers that should have been left alone. And as the players continued their adventures, they discovered more of these ancient land, including an entire hi-tech city (with a nuclear weapon) currently inhabited by the surviving good and neutral dragons.

But all things must end, and this campaign didn't end well, though it came close, right on to the edge. My biggest problem with my longer-lasting games is consistent players. That's what comes from recruiting via online and otherwise using former strangers. Often it's just a matter of time, of course. People get busy, life happens. Occasionally it's the person, of course. In one case, which led to me taking a month off and switching to a game every two weeks instead of every week, a player cussed me out and quit the game after learning I was talking online about weakening his vastly overpowered magical armor. Other times, there were fights between players, and I am not good at conflict resolution, at least not after people are already angry.

But this game died to more traditional reasons. All of a sudden, two players, including the last one to still be there from Day 1, were moving out of state. One of said players was hosting the game for a good year by then, so we lost our regular game site. And that means losing another player who came from the other direction. Half the party gone, we had to end the regular sessions. We tried to at least finish the game by playing online, and for an adventure or two, that worked or came close to it. But in the end, people just drifted away. Everyone was epic level, half the people had barely functioning internet connections or just couldn't show up often, and combat already takes ludicrously long at that stage even before you factor in the delays from online gaming. The campaign's story ended with a few final entries into my enworld-based story hour, using a few comments from the players to modify things. At the most, we were three adventures away from ending the campaign.

That ending has haunted me ever since. What could I have done better? The easy answer, of course, would be to cut out some of the less important adventures, but how would I know when the game would suddenly end? Or I should have accepted that the online game was a half-assed fix at best and sped to the campaign's conclusion, which started with an epic war against Bas and her forces. That led to an actual final battle between Bas herself and the party, of course. But it concluded with the party getting access to the Quill of Destiny just as the two former users and current emperors attempt to use its power a second time. Both sides would attack Bas' own surviving generals, letting the future of the world be rewritten. Now, this last bit I was able to at least do with input from the players, though it resulted in the very climax the Quill was supposed to avoid. So the world of the Quill came to an end, its survivors in a state of eternal "Happily ever after."

As for the amnesia and “destroy the usurpers” thing, it came up much, much later and was promptly ignored by the players. Basically, they were all (or most, at that point) former servants of Lolth, who was pissed that the non-evil underground empire largely consisted of drow who reformed and no longer worshipped her. So Lolth revived her servants in new bodies and altered the memories of everyone on the plane to think the characters, who mostly replaced people that actually died in the real history, were there all along. They never figured that much out, so it never factored into their writings in the Quill, but I thought it was a clever idea nonetheless.

But I wasn't entirely satisfied with that ending, and I assumed neither were some of the characters who didn't write about such things. In the end, it provided me for the initial inspiration of Mesion, the campaign setting I'm currently running. How will it end? I can't say. The characters are 19th level, the world is within months of possibly ending, and in real life, I lost my job and may have to move by the end of August. This could be another heartbreak, or it could be the end I always wanted in my stories. But I'll be sure to say either way, and give a bit more detail about my storytelling method in general, when the time comes!