ZEITGEIST Worldres' Zeitgeist Campaign

Worldres

Explorer
Thank you so much for your answers, everyone!

About Book 4: Funnily enough, when I asked Mona's player (uh, my fiancee, whom I live with) which adventure she liked best, she immediately answered "not Always on Time!" I asked her why, and she told me she felt like she was under intense stress the whole adventure. Then, the next day, when I asked everyone during the session what their favourite was, Mona's player said it was "Always on Time!!!" I asked her why she changed her mind. She told me it had the highest highs and the best characters, even if she didn't enjoy what she perceived as the on-thin-ice feeling. She said one of her favourite moments of the campaign was seeing Lya hug Luc on the train platform, and welcome him into the Ob. Even though it was such a small moment, it tied together everything she needed to know about Lya in an instant. And every time Ashima Shimtu shows up, the players go nuts. I think Adventure 4 really is greater than the sum of its parts.

Personally, I loved the Escape Nem portion. Half of my players ended up in Nem and the other half were still on the train, so it felt a lot like that scene in Inception where Joseph Gordon Levitt's character has to try and put everyone into freefall without gravity. He is completely alone and scrambling to solve a puzzle involving dragging a bunch of unconscious people around and doing clever things with the environment. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew is fighting for their lives.

About Book 7: I didn't want to go into detail on my post because it was already long enough, so here is my non-flippant answer. I loved hearing the Obscurati justify itself. You had people like Ottavia (and Cula, on the face of it) who were genuinely trying to do good, and then on the other end of the spectrum, people like Catherine, who were obviously just trying to consolidate power for themselves but trying to maintain plausible deniability. (Even then, Catherine is the "worst person you know just made a great point" character, after Nic). Seeing both the very best and the very worst of the Obscurati in a sort of day-in-the-life way was great. And my favourite game moment ever was Amielle's speech, followed by Catherine's anti-Nic breakdown, and then the tense final vote where everything clicks into place. Good stuff.

About Book 8: It's probably my second favourite. I actually got misty-eyed when I read Dala's death for the first time. Kasavarina is an extremely compelling character, and I also enjoy her chemistry with each character. I think its quality kind of speaks for itself, honestly.

By the way: I saw the little "Zeitgeist Fiction" thread a little while ago, and thought to add that my players write little short stories from time to time, but I chickened out. They have over 60,000 words of stuff so far, though! Gatria's player decided to post all of hers in one volume. If you have time, I recommend checking out the most recent chapter, where Gatria and her familiar, Lucita, provide Kasavarina an outlet into which to pour her rage after they discover why Launga died. It is a perfect little microcosm of how the party fed into Kasavarina's pre-Obscurati traits, for better or for worse: I'll Be Okay - Chapter 12 - NotARedHerring - Zeitgeist: The Gears of Revolution [Archive of Our Own]. (Chapter 10, a very short story where Gatria remembers Pardo's abuse as she trains at the Martial Academy, is also great.)

And yeah, there are so, so many good adventures. I think I'm looking forward to 10 and 12 most, next.

Yes, they've got that achievement, but are they going to go for the New Game+ Ultra Hard 100% completion?

You joke, but my players ask me regularly if they'll ever get a chance to play Adventure 1 and 2, or "do it all again". I told them we could try 1 and 2 after everything was finished just for fun, and if they reasonably enjoyed experiencing a story they already knew the outcome of, I would be willing to do NG+ Hard Mode. But first things first.
 

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Worldres

Explorer
Hello again, everyone! It's almost been a year since my last post, oops. We're still going strong; partway through The Grinding Gears of Heaven, and I STILL haven't finished The Last Starry Sky write-up. Oof. In my defense, I got married, finished my PhD courses, and have been studying for my candidacy exam... but I still haven't missed a Zeitgeist Tuesday! Zeitgeist is consistently the bright spot in my week, and I'm having a crisis about it being over soon. I seriously won't know what to do with myself when it ends.

However, my players said they will go rogue and start coming into this thread if I don't post something to get myself back into the swing of updates, so, uh. What can I talk about that won't take me a super long time to write? Uh. Um. Hmmm...




INTERMISSION





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Bonds of Forced Faith 2 - Electric Boogaloo: Even the King Can't Figure Out How Risur Still in Business


So Gatria's player, GS, decided she wanted to DM The Bonds of Forced Faith as a Halloweenmas Special for her buddies. Now, the difference between my current game group "A", and GS's tabletop group "B", is that GS and I have been playing an ongoing game with "B" for ten years, whereas, while I have been friends with everyone in "A" for just as long, not all of them have actually played in a tabletop game before this.

So, GS and I finally got to see what happens when you put close friends who have practice roleplaying together for over a decade in one room and just let them loose on eachother, with no potential for hurt feelings. Gatria asked if I would play Tomas for every bit of the religious extremist he is. As you can probably tell, I love to stir the pot, so agreed.

It was an incredible time, far and away the best One Shot I have ever been in.

We had enough players for every character in BoFF. Gatria assigned King Lorcan to our friend Alex, who is saintly sweet, and Dame Melissa to his wife, who is delightfully mischievous. Opposites attract? Roland was assigned to someone who has THE most incredible poker face, and Harkover was given to our genre-savvy friend who took one look at his sheet and said "ah, he is a Dragon who made a secret Pact with the King." Amielle's player was given to one of the best RPers I have ever met, and as soon as she hit the stage, she came out swinging with this:

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Cowboy Amielle Latimer. Amielle Latimer with a full Southern accent, not one slip. GS and I were stunned into speechlessness. My players were privately spectating and asked me if I could retcon everyone in Danor into having a southern accent. I refused.

Anyway, Amielle's player, Megan, was super into her. Like, go big or go home invested, just as much as GS was when she played her in my campaign. Megan was so invested that she wrote a 90,000 word novel about Amielle after the game (though it crossed over with our homebrew campaign, so it wasn't canon compliant. Still!). Amielle Latimer has the freaking secret sauce! Everyone who plays her seems to love her. If I ever do Zeitgeist NG+, I'm inviting Megan to play Ameille and turning her loose, like I did in my first game.

So, things went fairly normal until the Gang killed the Red Contessa - and then everything went straight to hell.

The Contessa messed the King up with a vicious curse, and Amielle made a desperate attempt to save him by IVing her own freaking blood into him to try and neutralize it. Once the Contessa was dead and the hurricane started up, I decided to have Tomas make a break for her scroll, and basically do the whole "Gollum with the One Ring" thing once he got it - he broke into a wide grin and laughed joyously, knowing he was about to be elevated to Cardinal. In my mind, this was just a little celebration before he went and healed the King, but...

Melissa and Roland thought that this was so incredibly suspicious that they cornered him and demanded he hand it over to them. Tomas refused, and said that the only person he answered to was Triegenes.

Roland got real close, grabbed Tomas by the collar, looked him in the eye, and shouted: "I don't believe in your ****ing God."

Then Melissa stole the scroll. Tomas grabbed it and tried to throw Melissa off the mountain. Roland straight-up started wounding to kill Tomas, and told Melissa to help kill him.

I will now post some screenshots from "Spectators of Forced Faith," a private chat with my Zeitgeist Group.

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The King, this entire time, is on death's door. Amielle, literally feeding her own blood into the King through the most desperate emergency medicine you've ever seen, yelled at everyone to keep it together, which got ignored. Hurricane raging this entire time. Harkover, blown across the map, too far away to intervene in either conflict. This left Lorcan no one to give the Crown to except Amielle... who vehemently refused it. The King replied that if she didn't want to be Queen, she better make sure he survives long enough to find someone else.

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Don't worry, Megan never found out that Amielle is a Ghost in the full game.

Amielle immediately screamed to everyone that Tomas was under her protection, that Roland and Melissa were going to Stop attacking him, and that Tomas was going to come over here and save the King with his Divine magic RIGHT NOW. Tomas answered that he would, indeed, save the King - but only if Amielle could guarantee that he would make it down the mountain with his scroll. Amielle promised him that if he saved the King's life, she'd accompany him down the mountain herself, and would shoot anyone who tried to stop him.

Melissa almost turned and took out Amielle right then and there, but kept her rage together.

Tomas turned curse upon himself, but unfortunately, on the last possible turn, I reached 0 HP and died.

Amielle responded by silently walking over to Tomas, lifting his body into her arms, and princess-carrying his corpse down the Hill. When Melissa asked what she was doing, Amielle responded: "I made him a promise. He and his scroll get to the bottom the mountain. And I'll shoot anyone who gets in my way." And then she walked off into the sunrise...

The King survived for a short while, but because Amielle's attempt at emergency medicine went poorly, he died of complications within one week - long enough to desperately try to coach Melissa into a better Queen. It Did Not Go Well, but that's a story for another day...


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Meanwhile, Gatria, the DM, is literally just sitting there. Laughing at us. She hasn't said a single thing in over an hour. She just sat back and let it all go.


It was awesome.

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Even though I had just gotten married months prior, my wife didn't seem to be offended by this statement.


MORE TREATS

So my wife has just straight up decided to do an entire painting series for this game, featuring each of the player characters and an NPC. Here's the first three she's completed:

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Hoya and Duplicant!Xambria



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Cleone and Nathan. When a Deva and a Tiefling have children, we decided that the cursed bloodline and the Devan divinity neutralize eachother, and they come out as a normal human... Surprise!



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Gatria and her not-so-secret affair with Morgan Cipiano's daughter, Antonia.

--

Finally, one of my players, Steph, who plays Cleone, made a wiki for the game that you can find by clicking here! Hopefully other players haven't been creeping on it and getting spoiled. I would say not to read this if you are a player and haven't finished a campaign, but if you are, what are you even doing in here?

She's put a lot of love and care into it, and is extremely consistent about posting articles, summaries, and notes as they happen, which is way more than I can say about my write-ups, hah. That said, there's so many microchanges I have made to the narrative that our notes might be impenetrable to outsiders (like, Kvarti is, just, straight up someone else in my game.)... Still, I wanted to highlight her effort!
Especially this excerpt from my favourite article:

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I'll try to post The Last Starry Sky by the end of May! See you all again, real soon!

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Hoya and the Adamantium Giant :p
 


Yeah, daaaamn, this had me laughing and smiling. Making me snicker at my big bad; how dare you!

I think when I ran BoFF at a con, King Lorcan's player had the Contessa's curse on him, so he tossed the crown to Melissa, said good luck, then yeeted himself off the mountaintop so the rest of the team could kill the witch without qualms.

Please tell your players I love the art. I had, I hope you'll understand, sorta forgotten the details of the PCs, so when I saw Gatria had a tail I had to refresh my memory. But hey, since you first started posting in 2021, we actually published the setting guide, and while we don't technically have catfolk for Gatria, we do have canon tiger elves. That's kinda close.
 


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