Endings
I have been awfully busy with Story Games and my own work the last few weeks and so I have been absent for some time. It is a very pleasing rhythm--out into the community and hopefully back to the blog to develop some of the ideas fostered by the forum. But that is for another post.
I am drawing to a close a campaign that has lasted more than 4 years--that has passed through several DM's hands, which began with a humble band of performers and concludes with deities. The scope, in retrospect, is truly epic. While I will miss the campaign, I can't help but feel proud of the fact that I will draw it to a natural conclusion rather than let it slowly wither from lack of inspiration and drive.
At this point in the campaign, the players are literally the deities of a remote cosmology. While not full-fledged gods in the Deities & Demigods sense, they possess the salient abilities and many immunites of godhood. So, for a change, I let them visit the old D&D cosmology (the city of Union) as regular epic characters. They got the chance to bum around in epic taverns, take epic commissions to strange places. It was a fun little aside before drawing it all to a close. In the midst of that, though, I caught a glimmer of a possible story arc that won't be but could have been.
In the midst of their travels through the D&D cosmology, they caught a glimpse of Demagorgon's tower. They had run into him before, glancingly, and so had plenty of reason to be interested in this. I, as DM, saw in the tower a rich puzzle box of traps, puzzles, and bizarre social encounters--sort of a Planescape Gormenghast meets Cube. That intertwining double-helix rising from the muck has become an image of untapped possibility.
And it's a good thing that it remains untapped. It means that my players and I leave the world with a halo of imagination still remaining to it. It passes into our collective gaming pasts as a not-yet-finished dream--something that can fuel our future games. We can go out and remember the things that weren't completed and try to express their completion in a other ways, without thereby exhausting it.
Am I being a little too melancholy and romantic? Perhaps--but I want to remember that tower and the strange world that calls to me through it.
I am drawing to a close a campaign that has lasted more than 4 years--that has passed through several DM's hands, which began with a humble band of performers and concludes with deities. The scope, in retrospect, is truly epic. While I will miss the campaign, I can't help but feel proud of the fact that I will draw it to a natural conclusion rather than let it slowly wither from lack of inspiration and drive.
At this point in the campaign, the players are literally the deities of a remote cosmology. While not full-fledged gods in the Deities & Demigods sense, they possess the salient abilities and many immunites of godhood. So, for a change, I let them visit the old D&D cosmology (the city of Union) as regular epic characters. They got the chance to bum around in epic taverns, take epic commissions to strange places. It was a fun little aside before drawing it all to a close. In the midst of that, though, I caught a glimmer of a possible story arc that won't be but could have been.
In the midst of their travels through the D&D cosmology, they caught a glimpse of Demagorgon's tower. They had run into him before, glancingly, and so had plenty of reason to be interested in this. I, as DM, saw in the tower a rich puzzle box of traps, puzzles, and bizarre social encounters--sort of a Planescape Gormenghast meets Cube. That intertwining double-helix rising from the muck has become an image of untapped possibility.
And it's a good thing that it remains untapped. It means that my players and I leave the world with a halo of imagination still remaining to it. It passes into our collective gaming pasts as a not-yet-finished dream--something that can fuel our future games. We can go out and remember the things that weren't completed and try to express their completion in a other ways, without thereby exhausting it.
Am I being a little too melancholy and romantic? Perhaps--but I want to remember that tower and the strange world that calls to me through it.
posted by Ian | 1:30 PM
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