ZEITGEIST Campaign completed

[reighndragon]

Wow, finishing the complete campaign in 4 years. I've started mine in june of 2021 with two introductory adventures, and started with the main campaign in october of 2021. We're now in adventure 4, so we expect to finish the whole campaign in 13 years instead of 4.

In this period our experience is exactly the same, best campaign we've ever run.

 

[RangerWickett]

In an odd coincidence, someone was posting on the EN World Discord channel about having just finished the campaign too. So that's two groups in the same week, 9 years after the adventures were published.

Any other art you might share?

And, what's the plan for the group? Dassi, are you taking a break from GMing?

 

[Dassi]

In an odd coincidence, someone was posting on the EN World Discord channel about having just finished the campaign too. So that's two groups in the same week, 9 years after the adventures were published.

Any other art you might share?

And, what's the plan for the group? Dassi, are you taking a break from GMing?

I'm not the GM! I was one of the players. @Nnesk was (and still is) the incredible GM.

Re: art, I will hand over to the superbly talented artist @Aviv to answer that question.

 

[Nnesk]

How can I take a break, when there's a mysterious murder to be investigated, in a strange manor not too far from Arrovia!

 

[Dassi]

How can I take a break, when there's a mysterious murder to be investigated, in a strange manor not too far from Arrovia!

We are the luckiest players in the world.

 

[RangerWickett]

What was the planar arrangement your group settled on?

It was necessary to pick one to be the default for ZEITGEIST going forward, and I tried to select ones that were popular among groups that had reported finishing the campaign. But if yours is different, and you do plan to run another adventure in the setting, I might be able to help reconcile any differences in the planar choices.

 

[Dassi]

What was the planar arrangement your group settled on?

It was necessary to pick one to be the default for ZEITGEIST going forward, and I tried to select ones that were popular among groups that had reported finishing the campaign. But if yours is different, and you do plan to run another adventure in the setting, I might be able to help reconcile any differences in the planar choices.

That would be great, thank you! Here's ours:

// Life - Av

// Fire - Jiese

// Water - Ostea

// Earth - Dunkleweiss

// Air - Caelon

// Death - Iratha Ket

// Time - Teyfka

// Space - Urim

 

[RangerWickett]

The short version is that you probably don't need to change anything in Death of the Author, other than a mention of apotropaic jade (which was a superstition before, but now actually has a mechanical effect to hurt malice beasts due to Amrou).

To be thorough, though, Adventures in ZEITGEIST went with (in order of closest to the sun):

• Jiese, the Fire of Industry. Close to the sun, this burnt rock is riven with seams of red. Jiese’s influence makes advanced technology possible. Outside this planar system, the innate fluctuations of magic in the rest of the multiverse makes most industry unreliable. Existing technology won’t stop working, but the engineering needed for mass production breaks down at scale. A tinkerer might craft their own personal devices, but on those distant worlds, society will never have industrial revolutions.
• Caeloon, the Paper Wind. Caeloon was a world nearly destroyed in fire, rescued and reborn in the Great Eclipse. A soothing green planet, its presence is ineffable, but lends people inner strength in times of despair. Suicide rates have declined since before the Eclipse.
• The Waking. The main world of the Zeitgeist setting is sustained and enriched by the energies of other worlds. It is orbited by Av, the Plane of Mirrors, a pale white moon that in rare conjunctions appears to be translucent like glass. Scholars believe its presence causes the Waking to be mirrored into the Dreaming and the Bleak Gate.
• Ostea, the Beating Heart. A planet the color of dark wine strengthens resistance to infections, and also enhances divinations fueled by blood. Deaths by infection are down from before the Eclipse.
• Urim, the Shattered Golden Chains. Flecks of gold glint along one stretch of the starry night, revealed by telescopes to be a stretch of asteroids. Urim’s presence causes gold to impede teleportation and extraplanar travel. One otherwise nondescript boulder amid the tumbling debris of Urim, Teykfa the Ticking Pendulum, produces a subtle regular chime, faintly audible across the vast gulf of space to those who watch the heavens. Awareness of it helps track the passage of moments, and instills a clearer sense of the grand scale of time.
• Mavisha, the Mysterious Deep. A watery blue orb, Mavisha causes divination about islands to be unreliable. A small green moon orbits it, Ascetia, the Hidden Jungle, and though little is known of the world, scholars tie its presence to how since the Eclipse interest in history has increased.
• Amrou, the Salt Waste. A pale orb that flickers on the darkest nights, Amrou empowers nonmagical defenses against the supernatural. Acts that were once mere superstitions – like pouring a line of salt to fend off fiends – now actually have some effect, albeit temporary. Knowledge of these apotropaic techniques are taught to everyone in Crisillyir, to help survive the various evils that escaped during the Eclipse.

(Plus Iratha Ket is tucked away into a pocket of the Bleak Gate. It's there to provide a sliver of hope in the otherwise, um, bleak realm.)

Now, some of that I think actually isn't canonically possible with the stuff we wrote in Adventure 12: The Grinding Gears of Heaven, but there was some precedent of 'sub-planes' with the Ob including Baden the Ghost Moon, and my co-authors on the book had some fun ideas for what a planet-hopping Jules Verne-esque element of the setting could be.

A lot of what we picked overlaps yours. The key changes are that we have Urim as Earth and Mavisha as Space. In Death of the Author, the action happens on an island, so Mavisha shielding the island from divinations done elsewhere doesn't really matter, so its absence won't change much.

(But thematically, I liked Mavisha being responsible for keeping spellcasters from just casting divination spells about the other planets; they're basically islands, and so you have to go there to learn about them. Alas, we never got around to writing an actual ZEITGEIST space opera.)

Honestly, it's easy to ignore the effects of most of the planes. Like, Caeloon has a mechanical effect:

A character with Intelligence 8+ can spend a bonus action to buoy its spirits. It can make a new Wisdom or Charisma saving throw against one effect it failed a save against in the past round. If one of its allies in the encounter is dead, unconscious, or helpless, the character also can ignore charmed and frightened conditions until the end of its next turn. After it does this, it cannot do it again until it completes a long rest.

Ostea has one too:

If a character with Constitution 13+ and Intelligence 8+ has access to at least a few drops of another creature’s blood, they can spend an hour preparing a potion or face paint with that blood. Doing so requires expending one Hit Die through bloodletting, which is mixed with the quarry’s blood. Consuming the potion or applying the paint takes an action, and for the next hour they can generally sense the direction to that creature within one mile, and unerringly sense its location if it is within thirty feet, ignoring concealment. However, the quarry likewise has the same awareness of the tracker’s location.

But if the PCs don't use those abilities, it's not like that interferes with setting canon. The only big thing is that Urim still blocks teleportation through gold, which you'll all already know.

Honestly, Dunkelweiss is the biggest change. We actually have a section in Adventures in ZEITGEIST advising what abilities a few alternative planes could have, and Dunkelweiss's is:

Hangovers can be cured with ten minutes of brisk exercise. Drinking of any amount has no negative long-term health consequences. Indeed, a night of intense carousing function as the spell lesser restoration.

We went with a combo of Teykfa and Ascetia for Time, and neither really impacts day-to-day narratives.

Amrou makes mundane superstitions have a bit of protective power, like holy symbols to repel the dead and jade to harm aberrations. You could just nix that part of the plot, or maybe make it a side effect of Iratha Ket.

I . . . um, personally wouldn't include an upbeat musical number in the adventure, because it would go a bit against the themes, but hey, your call.

 

[efreund]

Alas, we never got around to writing an actual ZEITGEIST space opera.

This comment demands elaboration.

 

[RangerWickett]

This comment demands elaboration.

Well, the space opera isn't really planned at all.

I started work on Adventures in ZEITGEIST in November 2019, but then in the summer of 2020 Russ decided to gather a diverse stable of writers to create Level Up, and that idea got a lot more interest than ZEITGEIST ever did. So we finished AiZ, but EN Publishing has ultimately decided to focus more on content that is easier for people to use in their own homebrew settings.

Still, I did make a pitch for some new ZEITGEIST adventures. I knew a second adventure path was a non-starter because later adventures never sell as much as earlier ones, so budgeting them is rough. My idea was one adventure per nation, increasing in levels, with an option to use the same characters in each, but intentionally designed to be stand-alone plots.

---

1. The first one we already published, Death of the Author, a mansion murder mystery on the border of Drakr and the Malice Lands.

2. The second is written, but I think won't be published unless I get Russ's permission to release it on my own, Steel Wind, a Casablanca-esque adventure with spycraft, demons, and flying machines in a Crisillyiri city at risk of military occupation.

(When I playtested this with my friends, everyone picked a subclass from Adventures in ZEITGEIST, and it was the titanist ranger of the Hollow Widow who solved most of the mysteries by talking to spiders. They're everywhere, and so are great witnesses of secret meetings.)

3. Three Keys, a treasure hunt in the ruins of an old Elfaivaran city that was overrun and abandoned centuries ago, and where now three groups vie to recover relics that could create three very different futures for their nation. It digs into a dark chapter of the nation's history, but offers a hope for a better future by finding a way to heal from trauma.

(I ran a short campaign with my friends that let me brainstorm ideas for what this would look like, but nothing's written down. It was sort of a city-as-open-air-dungeon premise, with different factions you could get help from. Probably the most 'gamist' idea of the set.)

4. Aviso, a Beran naval picaresque inspired by Teddy Roosevelt sending America's 'Great White Fleet' to circumnavigate the world and show off, with a heavy dash of Gulliver's Travels-style satire. The party are along as sailors, press, spies, or bodyguards for a dignitary on the navy’s dispatch boat, sent ahead to scout and relay messages.

(I've done zero planning for this.)

5. Brief Remarks on the Occasion of the Launch of an Aerial Warship, where the PCs help an aged Stover Delft deal with various small crises around Flint so he can focus on writing a speech for the launch of the flying dreadnought RAS Burning Sky. The PCs thwart potential threats of sabotage, espionage, and fey politics, assist Delft in settling a petty vendetta, and then help him decide what speech to deliver, which shapes public sentiment.

(A couple weeks ago I ran a heist for a group of EN5ider writers, and if I ever do write this adventure, the heist would be one chapter of it. We only were doing a one-shot, though, and so the PCs, um, declined to be heroic. Ha. But the broad idea was to have a series of vignettes, each of which would link two of the districts of Flint to showcase the tensions in the city.)

6. Remembrance. This is my Inception/Christopher-Nolan-style-mindf-ck. Telling much about it would be a spoiler, other than that character creation would require each PC to choose from a list of memories that they have to integrate into their character's past.

(I ran this to help Steampunkette enjoy one of the classes she designed for her Paranormal Power book. DriveThruRPG And I realized my plans for psychic combat were probably too high-concept. First drafts of mindf-cks, though, always require a lot of work to really land well, I think.)

7. Concert of the Spheres, the one where the PCs travel between the planets. I went back and forth between whether it should be a Star Wars action adventure, or more of a high-concept Star Trek movie, using the worlds as microcosms to analyze a social question in our own world. But also with a steampunk spaceship battle.

And when I'm feeling less complicated, I want to write a megadungeon that involves remnants of the Demonocracy and one of the Ancient ziggurats that leads to Amrou.