Campaign Writeup: The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion

This weekend, my summer campaign ended. The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion was an urban-based, semi-dark campaign set in a typical D&D setting time-advanced to the Victorian era, with a bit more (magical) technology and a lot more egalitarianism. While performing local odd jobs, the players uncovered a plot to invade their city from the Plane of Shadow, in order to disrupt the creation of a Plane of Light. Further investigation led them to the leader of the plot, who informed them that a Plane of Light would eventually collapse the entire cosmology, and when the players tried to stop the ritual, they found themselves on the wrong end of an angel and her light-based creations and allies.

Here’s what I learned from running this campaign:

• I have a hard time remembering that I’m running campaigns for grown-ups now. When I started DMing, I worried a lot about how to motivate the players to participate in the plot of the campaign, whatever it ended up being. I used to solve this with interesting, “love-to-hate” villains and problems that left no room for a party to opt out of them, but in this campaign I was surprised at the gusto with which the characters approached the plot. I think what’s getting me is that I expect players to need to be motivated, lest they spend weeks faffing about and trying to cause trouble. But I tend to have far fewer players these days that want to play the chaotic neutral rogue who hassles the NPCs and the world because its funny. Rather, players want a good plot. They’re willing to accept small in-character sacrifices (the party leader decides to deal with the problem himself rather than alert the authorities and leave it to them) for long-term story benefits (chasing an airship, unpaid, is more fun than sitting in the office waiting for another gainful job).
• Players like guns. This was a Pathfinder campaign, but I think the first session predated the playtest firearms rules, so I designed my own. Rather than dealing with actual gun rules, I made them not unlike reskinned crossbows, and I expected that nobody would complain. I was right, but what I didn’t expect was for every character to have at least one gun. I’ve never had a campaign before where every player had a ranged weapon, even if it was a really good idea, but this time even the party healer had two. Though right now, I don’t know if it’s the reskinning, or if players just feel more comfortable with a loaded gun than a loaded crossbow, or what.
• Speaking of Pathfinder, it’s great. I still feel more comfortable with 3rd Edition than 4th Edition, so running this campaign felt a bit like coming home. I was worried about how it would run with so little published material, but it never got in the way, and rarely did a player complain about not having an option that fit their character. We did do a little bit of messing with spells and items, but I think we’re learning what Paizo already knew, that you can get all the mileage you need out of little changes to existing material.
• 3rd Edition can be reskinned startlingly well, at least on my end. We tend to feel locally that one of 4th Edition’s greatest strengths is its openness to not being played as written, because every power can have the serial numbers filed off and described however the player wants. Conversely, there are only so many ways to reskin a full attack action. But I tried to approach designing monsters with the 4th Edition mindset of “creatures can do whatever, but try to stick to certain power guidelines”, and not only did I get great monsters out of it, the players really didn’t seem to mind when an opponent had DR 10/light.

Given the option, here’s what I would change:

• I would have memorized Pathfinder’s skill system more. For the whole campaign, I ran Pathfinder on Saturday afternoons, played 3.5 on Saturday evenings, and played 4th Edition on Sunday afternoons. For the second half of the campaign, I also played Fate on Thursday. Depending on the system and edition, a player can try to accomplish the same thing by making a Gather Information, Streetwise, Knowledge (local), or Contacts check, and I never got it entirely straight. Experienced players weren’t fazed, but players not well-versed in all of the systems were awfully confused when I asked them to make a check that wasn’t on their sheet, and I should have been able to prevent that.
• I probably would have introduced more fantastic elements. One of the points of the setting was that this was a time-advanced world, but with all of the normal trappings of high fantasy. I could have included an NPC giant working and living in the warehouse district, or let the players use a magical communication system, or mentioned a country with a dragon republic, but I ended up running it like only the players had overt magical powers, which wasn’t accurate or terribly immersive.
• Similarly, I should’ve gotten more pictures to show the players. I wrote a program to track combat and display information to the players, but I tend to have it sitting on one or two pictures for most of the session. This was even more pronounced in this campaign, where most of the action happened in one city with one picture. If I’m going to have a screen facing the party at all times, I need to use it more.

In general, I’m really happy about the campaign. I fully intend to come back to this world, and in fact these characters and their company, for later campaigns of similar length. All worlds have unexplored depth, but I don’t think I’ve run one that I want to explore as much as this, and the players seemed really keen on their characters and willing to come back. Rather than one long campaign, I think the series of mini-campaigns fits the pulp-style setting and allows characters to jump in and out with the interest of the players. Also, I want to get more mileage out of the map I made of the main city.

I would love to do campaign write-ups like this for the other campaigns I’ve run, but I don’t know that they’ll be this thorough. This one’s a bit more fresh in my mind than the things I ran in 2004.