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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 9738301" data-attributes="member: 19675">In my oft-mentioned (by me) Champions 1900 game, the PCs were part of the interplanetary police force known as G.A.I.A.  They had jurisdiction on Earth, Mars, Venus & the Moon.It was my best ever campaign, and it worked because I had 100% buy in from the players in terms of setting conventions, PC designs, and really roleplaying their PCs.Other factors to its success:1) I ran it somewhat sandboxy.  It had an overall metaplot for the campaign, but also a bunch of missions that popped up unrelated to it.2) The metaplot and the side missions’ origins lay within stuff cribbed from the core Space:1889 campaign setting, my own ideas based on fiction from contemporaneous settings, plots I could file the serial numbers off of and place in 1900, stuff in the PC backgrounds (including Disadvantages) as well as the table talk of the players themselves.  Sometimes, the players’ ideas about what was “really going on” were better than my own, so I just stole them and did rewrites.  This meant that they occasionally thought they’d “read my mind”, which reinforced their enthusiasm.3) I made an internal broadsheet for G.A.I.A. that detailed rumors about what was going on in the setting, as well as recaps of the prior session’s action.  The players were largely free to pick which rumors they wanted to investigate.  Rumors that didn’t get picked disappeared after a couple of mentions- handled by other G.A.I.A. teams- unless they were part of the metaplot.4) the work I put into the villains paid off.  Mechanically, there wasn’t necessarily much new.  But dressing up the familiar archetypes in the aesthetics of the era was refreshing.  The one I think made the biggest impression was the guy in steam-powered super armor sporting twin arm-mounted flamethrowers, and he was just a minion of the BBEG & BBEGF.  Not only was his initial reveal a surprise, but his willingness to use his flamethrowers even if his allies were in the line of fire marked him as a seriously evil mofo, and a threat to be taken down ASAP.It was a lot of work on my end, but it didn’t feel like work.  I was so inspired, it really flowed.I suspect the players did a bit of their own homework, just based on how well their PCs fit the setting.</blockquote>

Verification