 October 6, 2012 - 9:24am | I've been taking a little break in my campaign with my kids to get ready to come at it from a new angle. I've been heavily influenced as of late by this series of articles and am rethinking my approach to include different characters played by my kids to look at a larger story from a variety of perspectives. I talk about it at length in this thread but have had a recent thought inspired by my nine year old son: We were playing the Volturnus series, and drawing from the Volturnus Revisited project, I added an Eorna Lunar Defense installation and a KH battle sequence as a part of the overall battle for Volturnus. In reclaiming the installation, the kids' party discovered the installation was largely undamaged in the day of doom. Investigation uncovered a recording which showed a lone Eorna opening pressure bulkheads that caused his comrades to be blasted into space. This was all they knew of what happened. (Unknown to party, Sathar mind controlled him and had him act out to disable the facility before they wiped the planet out.) Fast forward to the Eleanor Moraes module, my 9yo son noticed that Comander Terry's actions were similar to those of the Eorna in the lunar installation. Now at this point, he was playing a different character, a scientist on the expedition, but now my son had discovered something about the Sathar as a PLAYER, that provides a little depth to the campaign setting. "Somehow they control people's minds". Now adding this to the concept of using a cast of characters to tell a larger story (as a sort of novel as Jedion put it) - I find myself wondering about what kind of baddies would it be cool to encounter - to make the kids awe and respect them as enemies. I would never arbitrarily kill off any of their favorite characters - I want them to feel rewarded for the investment. - but what if a part of the story is say the Klikks. The Klikks were originally the big boys on the block. They enslaved other races like the Heliopes and Sathar as a part of their empire. They wiped out a fledgeling empire in the center of the frontier - which is now the so called plague worlds. The Sathar end up turning on them and pushing them back. How cool would it be to introduce the Klikks in a module where the PCs discover them, begin to learn about them, but then they prove too much. Have pregen PC characters that are fun to play, maybe even more powerful than I would normally give them just to make it really fun, and at the end, put them in an impossible situation that wipes them out. You get the high power campaign, introduction of some major bad guys adding a sense of threat and impending doom, but the TPK scenario at the end keeps it from unbalancing the existing campaign. Thoughts? |
 October 6, 2012 - 4:41pm | Start out by having your kids PCs watching the news. Introduce a story about discovering the last records of this lost mission. Don't let them know it was a TPK, just that the fate of the famous expedition was unknown until now. Then stop mid-news report and tell your kids that they are going to play it out. This way it can be a TPK without hurting them and it will cement the event in their minds as a big news story. -iggy |
October 6, 2012 - 5:41pm | Start out by having your kids PCs watching the news. Introduce a story about discovering the last records of this lost mission. Don't let them know it was a TPK, just that the fate of the famous expedition was unknown until now. Then stop mid-news report and tell your kids that they are going to play it out. This way it can be a TPK without hurting them and it will cement the event in their minds as a big news story. I like it. Good idea! |
