ZEITGEIST General tips for running Zeitgeist?

[grankless]

I've read through the whole thing plenty of times, and read at least a couple campaign journals - but I still want to know if there's any good general advice for running the campaign beyond "make sure the party knows who everyone is" kind of stuff. Any recommendations or even things that need tweaked can be helped.

I'll be converting to Pathfinder 2e, but that doesn't really bear in on it.

 

[arkwright]

I wrote this advice up some time ago, never finished it, you might find it useful. Not sure how much of it I still stand by.

 

[Crispy120286]

I recommend you set up a shared Google Sheets for the entire party to use. Here is a copy of my parties as of a few sessions before the conclusion of Digging for Lies. Its primarily written by only one of my players but i go in and edit it regularly so they have the correct information. You'll notice some bad spelling occasionally. However the notes prove very valuable in an investigation. Everyone at my table has access and they can always reference back to it during game.

 

[Odysseus]

To get the most out of the campaign the party should be Constables. However being a cop isn't like being a normal PC. So try and get the players into Constable/investigators mode as soon as you can. Especially as there some great investigation adventures.
Take a lot of notes about what happens. Its a long campaign and you may need to refer to things that happens. For example the ghosts of bad guys/NPCs the party come back to fight them. So it helps to remember who actual killed them and how etc.

 

[grankless]

Yeah, great tips! I LOVE how your players' doc looks, Crispy, and Zeitvice rules.

Fortunately I've got some real note-takers and investigator fans in this party. Fortunately I'm sure they'll all have a pretty good time of it.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

If you can find ways to invest the characters backstories into the plot. I found that having a female eladrin vekeshi mystic fits into the plot very well and I think that having a skyseer would be a very good idea as there was a lot of stuff in the early part of the campaign that I had to feed to the players via an NPC and a skyseer would have eased imersion into the plot. If you can try to put people from their backstory into the plot so they get more of a personal connection, I did not do that as well as I should have done

 

[RoyalMoose]

What is proving very fun for my players is linking prominent NPCs from the module to their backstory. During their background creation I tried to steer important characters to be existing NPCs, so I knew they'd come up. I'm also switching out npcs in the module to NPCs the players themselves came up with in the module. My players' did not take a liking to Thames Grimsley at all, so now an in-game uncle became the defacto face of the dockers, who the party has a much stronger connection to.

Other examples are one of the players being the (disliked) son of Benedict Pemberton, who doesn't know his father is secretly dragon. One player has the lady of the forked tongue (Ashima something) as his patron, another used to work for the Obscurati facility in Cauldron-Hill in his past Deva life and used to be Tinker's teacher but doesn't remember it because it was his previous deva life, so that kinda stuff. One great example I read on this forum was to have a female Eladrin party member with amnesia actually being Kasvarina who had escaped Cauldron-Hill. These are just some examples.

These kind of links are making the world feel much more alive

Edit: spelling

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Yes this sort of linkage is good. One of my pc's is some sort of relation of El Extrano, another is the reincarnated daughter of Kasavarina , I could not come up with good linkages for the others but I wish I had.
Some sort of link to Kasavarina is good as it helps sell interest in book 8 which is essentially the story of Kasavarina and could be a problem if your group does not buy in to finding it interesting

 

[Crispy120286]

The closest connect one of my players has to a prominent NPC is Kieran Oddcog, Younger brother of Tinker Oddcog, Whom he believes dead after an accident 10 years ago in the City of Slate. The player knows his brother will eventually show up in the campaign, but has no idea how important he really is to the campaign as a whole.

 

[RoyalMoose]

It really depends on your DM style of course. I'm not very good at creating side quests that explore my players backstories, so I try to bring their backstory into the main story as much as possible so they still feel like their personal connections are explored, and so I don't have to make up too much content myself. But that's just one way to engage your players, not THE way.