Headspace

I’ve started a few new campaigns, not entirely unusual in itself remembering that with wifey we start generally a new solo-campaign once in few months. This time it has however once again led to devising a new world.

I got my own horror(ish) worlds Mental and God Save the Queen and one of our new solo campaigns is set in the latter one. NG (pronounced Angie short of Angela) is set in the latter one. The world has developed on again, this campaign creating a new facet to the supernatural part of the world. Fun to play as unlike the previous character, NG has been keen to explore (and no this does not mean that the previous character wouldn’t have been fun to play).

The other new solo-campaign started as M asked if I ever have had ideas about devising a scifi-world of my own. As a matter of fact I had, but that was a long time ago. I decided to give it a try, turned off the self-critique and shame and used rip-offing as the main design-method. The end-result after the first week of gaming started to seem promising. Those who know the themes I like to explore in gaming are not likely surprised hearing that social structures especially in the context of power, meta-physics, historical tragedies and a protocol of fictive space empire are on the fore front. I’m especially happy with the functioning of the space travel (high ethers, mystic aspects of astral navigation, the term “high ethers”) in the setting. Other high points are the imperial ethics of power and protection that nicely ambiguate the white-black hats of the setting,
Birds (the Ancient Order of Peregrine Falcon, now divided into the order of migratory bird/Phoenix/gray bird and the Imperial Order of Crane Vigilant) and their philosophies, the messianic emperor…

…and finally there’s the FS group campaign. After long pondering I ended up with the core player group of three players, taking risk with a new player. In other words Anni and Jt joined me and M on this. Character preparation worked nice. Anni had a few solo games to prepare the character and ended up with a thoroughly in-game indoctrinated military chick. Unfortunately I didn’t have similar chances with other characters, but the players’ capabilities seem(ed) to smooth things over a lot M and Jt playing their characters (created on the spot) out beautifully.

The campaign in itself is something I’ve been thinking for a year or two and the idea has evolved over the time quite a lot. The basic idea at this point is to have a group that’s studying in the Jakovian agency’s “academy” to develop the essential capabilities of intelligence officers. Of course the characters come from most diversified backgrounds. One has a few years of officer candidate school in special services field branch (heavy indoctrination, military viewpoint), other an upbringing as administration oriented householder and the third a boyarina with a past and an amnesia.

There’s also an option of using guest-players in the campaign. Interested players are about, nice people too at that (rr¹, I of I&C, Spidey…). As time permits I’m playing a solo with rr² to develop him a character to play with and gaming style to fit the campaign. A first session of this is behind, took a full day, was pretty much fun and needs to be continued. The character was left in train in frozen wastes of Malignatius on his way towards a glorious future, although his travel companion seemed to lack faith towards the said future. If this act will pull together and the introductions with main troupe work well, the visits from this fella might be balancing to the group. Of others it might be too early to tell, but the logistics of fitting people and timetables might prove to be impossible obstacles, but maybe we’ll get there.

It was funny to note that I really do get stage-fright about new players. I “test drove/played” Jt in an impromptu game last con, but still the first session of the campaign was a bit nervous on my part. Hope it gets better while we get on, otherwise the game quality is going to be lacking from my part of it. Playing with new people is a bit like jumping to the lake, first one needs to gather the required courage and jump in, next there is a need to find the flow to go with so that no sinking occurs. If the flow is found, the game will glide along nicely pretty much making itself if not, well then…