Planning the first adventure

The first adventure of the Land Clipper campaign is going to take place in New York City, which is a Trueborn stronghold at this point in the campaign's chronology. The city is not a steam-powered flying city, like the ones in London. Instead it is protected by a mechanical Statue of Liberty, who burns tresspasing Affected with her torch. In addition to shooting fire, the torch is equipped with "Judgment Bombs." Enormous explosives powered by the souls of dead Anglicans, which can only damage Affected.

The plot enabler, of course, is that rail tycoon Glendon Aldridge has died. The PCs are here to attend St. Paul's Church for the funeral, and more importantly, for the reading of the will.

The will leaves the PCs a substantial weekly wage, and an experimental train, which they can only have under the condition that they go adventuring in the name of upholding the American Way.

Traveling with the PCs will be a crew of less-capable NPCs who will operate the train for them. I'm going to have the players design these NPCs to draw them closer into the game world. This will presumably make it more personal if an NPC turns treacherous, or is placed in peril.

Additionally, each PC will have his own train car where he can stash his trophies, or even decorate as he likes. I'm hoping that this will give the players some interesting ways to express their characters, and will give the campaign a sense of home, even though it is a far-roaming campaign.

I don't want to give away too many spoilers here, but the PCs can't get the rewards promised them in the will until all the paperwork goes through. But they're still contractually obligated to start adventuring right away, so their first task is to investigate the "Uncle Sam Wants YOU!" posters that have been mysteriously appearing around town, along with the rumors of Affected Yankee Doodle (Uncle Sam's right-hand goon!) being in town.

The thing I am most excited about for this adventure is that I'm doing everything I can to ensure that all of the encounters have some sort of interesting twist to them.

For instance, One of the first encounters takes place inside a fairly public structure. The location is a front for an Affected gang, and about half of the patrons present are members of the gang. The other half is made up of helpless schmucks. If the Affected know that the players have caught onto them, they're going to try to kill everyone in the place who isn't a part of their gang, since a single witness could blow their cover.

In a later encounter, the players meet a group of gunfighters who want to kill them. The gunfighters fill the room up with poison gas, and take pills that create bubbles of breathable air around themselves. This means that the only way for the players to escape the gas is to stay as close to the gunfighters as possible!

And then during a boss fight, a certain tentacled boss will reveal that his tentacles are supporting a layer of a gooey acidic substance which will fall if he is killed. The PCs will need to figure out a way to beat him without getting splashed with deadly ooze!

These obstacles will all be surmountable. Fairly easily so. It's a level one adventure after all. But they should all add at least enough of an interesting twist to keep the players paying attention. I'll make sure to post about how it all goes down.

There is a lot more in store here, and I'm dying to talk about it, but I'll have to save it for later, as anything more would have to be a huge spoiler.

Goals for the next campaign.

I am planning out my next Apocalyptus campaign now, with the goal of fixing some of the problems that I had last time.

The new campaign is entitled "The Land Clipper," and follows the adventures of a group of PCs who travel the American countryside in a fantastic train looking for adventure during the darkest days of the Civil War.

As with London before, the Apocalyptus version of America doesn't exactly adhere to history. The Civil War is being fought by two factions of Affected who have been turned against each other through the masterful strategy of the Trueborn president Lincoln. Deadly Affected Folk Heroes like Paul Bunyan and John Henry walk the earth, looking for adventurers to fight. The empire of California is its own nation, ruled over by Emperor Norton.

Glendon Aldridge, tycoon of Aldridge Rail has recently died. He has left a substantial wage, and a remarkable prototype for an experimental train called The Land Clipper to the PCs, on the condition that they live out his lifelong dream of traveling America looking for people to help with their skills in adventuring.

There are dual "Big Bad" villains. Affected Uncle Sam, who rules the Affected of the North, and Affected Jefferson Davis (who I might replace with someone more interesting), who rules the Affected of the south. The Affected Wright Brothers fly all over the continent causing trouble in their massive experimental flying machine. Affected Northern giants such as Paul Bunyan remain neutral, killing everything they see.

I plan to include every possible event from American history in this campaign, even if it isn't historically accurate. The Great Chicago Fire? In the campaign. Custer's last stand? Definitely. The California Gold Rush? You know it. It's a Uranium rush this time, though.

Anyway, I think that this setting will be really fun to play in, and I think that it will be really educational for me to research all the stuff I'm going to need to know for this.

I'm hoping not to get bogged down by the same problems that I had last campaign. Here are some things that I'm going to make myself do to avoid making the same mistakes.

• Do character creation as a group to ensure that every character fills a unique role, and there are player-generated plot hooks to build off from.
• Keep a hard-and-fast limit on the number of players per session. Probably eight. Some players are of the type that mostly sit back and watch the other players. They don't need to have characters in order to do this. Some players don't attend reliably. They don't need to play, or perhaps they can play another character's cohort when they are in attendance.
• Appoint a well-liked fair-minded player as a permanent party leader who can curtail problem players in-game.
• Do not allow characters to take oddball feats from splatbooks, or at least limit the practice.
• Look over character sheets every week to make sure that I know how characters are coming along.
• Do multi-session adventures rather than one-shot sessions every week. Even if players can't commit to coming to every session, they should be able to handle three weeks in a row now and then.
• Use smaller numbers of stronger monsters, so that combats will go faster.
• Designate one player as the chronicler, to help keep track of story.
• Designate one player the damage-tracker. I'm bad at keeping track of which enemies have how much damage, and which ones are under special conditions. I don't want to bog things down further by writing it all down myself.
• Give every planned combat encounter an interesting hook, such as an environmental hazard, a special weapon carried by one of the monsters, or a goal other than just killing everything.
• Use my laptop less. A lot less.