Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8167992" data-attributes="member: 42582">In contradiction of my use of "just" in my previous post, I'll say something about this too!The most recent "faction"-oriented campaign I've GMed is my current Classic Traveller one.At the start of the campaign there was a single faction - the bioweapon conspirators - whom the PCs were recruited by. (But at the start only one of them, the PC spy, worked out the nature of the conspiracy. The others just thought they were transporting some medical gear from one world to another.) In mechanical terms this was handled as a patron encounter, with me - as GM - introducing the details in a way that seemed to speak to established backstories and starting dispositions of the PCs.On the destination world the PCs met someone - another, later-introduced PC - who had herself been a victim of and test-subject for the conspirators. Around this point they turned against the conspirators and dobbed them in to the local authorities. They also learned about a break-away group of conspirators operating from an abandoned army base on this world and travelled there in their ATV and shot them up. The background here was established no-myth style.Around this point one of the players had his PC take the necessary steps to trigger another patron encounter. I built on this to have it be a civilian Imperial operative who retained the PCs to uncover details of what was happening on the conspirators' base world. This also helped solidify an emerging idea that the conspirators were a rogue group involving both civilian (Scout Service) and military (Naval and Marine personnel) elements of the Imperial government. (I wrote up a couple of pages outlining the workings/structures of these Imperial agencies at some early point during the campaign, drawing from and weaving together a mix of official and old White Dwarf material)The players had their PCs take on this mission, and ended up destroying the conspirators' base and stealing their ship (the laboratory vessel St Christopher). During these episodes of play (3 or 4 sessions) I also took the opportunity to introduce further elements into the shared fiction, responding to evinced player interests and riffing off things the players said and had their PCs do - these involved aliens and psionics, which is where the campaign has mostly headed for the past 10 sessions. In the course of that another faction has been introduced - the Imperial Navy trying to suppress psionic activity.The current state of the campaign - as I've said a bit about upthread - is bringing some of these things together: the PCs are exploring the psionically-inclined alien site on Zinion; they have an Imperial Naval Commander on their side, but she either doesn't know or is in denial about the PCs' psionic inclinations; the naval armada the PCs earlier escaped from is apparently on its way across the galactic rift; and also, last session, the players (and some of their PCs) learned that Leila Lo, the previous owner of the St Christopher who is still part of their "team" has not given up on bioweapons conspiracy.To elaborate on that last point: the noble PC Vincenzo von Hallucida won the St Christopher from Leila in a game of chance played amid the rubble of the bioweapons conspirators' base, and the relevant reaction roll and ensuing resolution established that there were no hard feelings on her part; so she stayed with the PCs, and has proved a valuable member of their group given she is both a surgeon and a starship pilot. Last session it was established (by me as GM narrating both the framing of a scene and some downstream wrap-u) that she had implanted spores taken from Vicenzo's lungs during surgery (after he breathed in "dust" on an alien starshi) into the body of an enemy NPC who was under her medical care; as a result the NPC had turned into an Alien which ran amuck on the St Christopher while it was in jump space.I tend to prefer this sort of "snowball" approach to trying to set it all up in advance. I've found - from experience, especially in running my first long RM campaign - that setting up in advance tends to produce wasted or redundant work, because you don't know at that stage what details will and won't be necessary. The "snowball" approach also makes it easier to make sure that whatever I'm doing as GM is also relevant to what the players are interested in.</blockquote>

Verification