I’ve run a couple of MotW one shots in the past, but am ramping up to start a full campaign.
What sort of story arcs have you people used for longer campaigns? I have some ideas, but I find it hard to think about longer term issues slotting into short term mysteries.
Post ’em if you got ’em
I ran a campaign where the players were all members of a band. They fought with their instruments, and would change genres to sneak into places:
Classical troupe for a southern vampire fancy wedding
heavy metal for a ghost-drug party
Techno for a moonlight rave
And so on. Since there were hired by the bad guys, they had a bunch of opportunities to poke around and learn clues.
The way I think about story arcs and short term mysteries is this: each step of your story arc’s countdown should have the potential to spin off into an associated mystery.
If your story arc is (to use something like one I’ve used, as a rough example) is something like:
>Echidna’s werewolf agents secure a foothold in the city
>Echidna buys the cooperation of the city’s mediums
>Echidna finds a pocket universe of lost lore
>Echidna discovers the secret to opening the gates of Death
>Echidna begins the ritual to resurrect Typhon
>Echidna and Typhon’s monstrous children flood the city
Then for each of those, as my campaign goes on, I would brainstorm how a mystery could connect to it. The most fun way (in my experience) is to think about how they’re doing what they’re doing and brainstorm what completely unrelated problems this could cause.
So, her werewolf agents are brawling with the competition to give her a hideout and the resources she needs? Cool, let’s run a mystery where the party encounters a newly-turned werewolf who doesn’t understand what’s going on, and the party has to protect them and their family from the city’s native (and vengeful) werewolf population. Somewhere along the way, they find out about the NEW monsters in town.
Echidna buys out the city’s psychics? Cool, maybe I decide that one of them didn’t want to go and they kidnapped him — and now his powers are lashing out and creating instances of telekinetic chaos in the places he’s frequented. It looks like poltergeists, but careful clue gathering will lead them (just in the nick of time) to the river where Echidna’s foreign werewolves (tying into the dangling threads from last time!!) are disposing of the troublesome psychic. Maybe, if they’re fast, they can stop the other psychics from finding what Echidna wants.
If they don’t make it in time to stop her, maybe they make it in time to learn about the pocket dimension that looks like the library from Last Airbender. Then, you can have them make it to the spirit-haunted labyrinth of knowledge — and have them go up against all of its weird haunted house shenanigans while trying to find their way out. Maybe they team up with Echidna’s agents? Maybe they just worry about saving themselves and the mortals inevitably also trapped inside.
And so on. Let your arc paint your big picture, and use your mysteries to expand on and paint a picture of the rippling effects of your Big Bad’s evil plan. Don’t plan too much in advance, just have an idea (maybe) of what the plan looks like, and what monster would help for any given step of the plan. Depending on the player’s rolls, you might have to completely rewrite the next step or two of the Arc… or you might even get to skip an entire step as the Big Bad’s plan launches into high gear.
Hmm, that’s a good way to go about it.
I guess I worry that, knowing my players a bit, they’re going to latch onto the behind-the-scenes plot on the first whiff and forget all the fore-front monster hunting. Which is totally fine. I’m just not sure I understand how to interlace “vampire episodes” and “monster episodes” together once that happens.
If you look at shows like X-Files and such, you’ll notice the heroes never go directly for the big bad. The reason is because they don’t know enough to actually do that. That’s your secret for interlacing Mythos episodes with MotW episodes. The Big Bad compartmentalizes, and whatever story arc clues the PCs can get are limited in any given episode.
Besides that, if the PCs do go after the first whiff of Big Bad, that’s not necessarily bad. Then, you just frame all of your mysteries as resulting from their investigating. “You guys followed that tip from last episode, and it brought you here to meet an informant… who has been dismembered all across the alleyway. What do you do?”
Alternatively, latching onto the behind-the-scenes monsters doesn’t stop the ancillary mysteries if they really are part of the story. The PCs might find themselves in a tough spot when they start hunting the Big Bads actively, and letting the collateral damage pile up in the meantime.
SETTING: WWII, European Theatre of Operations (See also: Real-world timeline, and a detailed one)
CONCEPT: Each week we follow the exploits of a newly constituted multi-cultural Allied supernatural task force as they go behind the lines to defeat the preternatural threats of the Third Reich and the Axis powers.
TYPICAL SESSION: The protagonists receive or have received an assignment, and are flown in to foil the plot, recover the artifact, defeat the monster, or otherwise resolve something uncanny and dangerous. In following their duty to their countries, the main characters find they must also deal with their own issues.
Doyce Testerman Awesome. We are actually doing Prohibition Era US, which interlaces a BIT with WWI. I was considering trying to get them to bump it up to a WWII thing, but outside the theater of war
I would recommend watching Burn Notice season 3 for masterful interweaving of immediate concerns and season long metaplot. I eschew the mystery ladder used in the book, it creates a timeline but maps organizations poorly. Pyramids work better, displaying sharply delineated tiers of authority and the ties between various agents.
Incorporate some of the things from your one shots so they’re involved retroactively. Also makes you look smart via pseudo foreshadowing.
In our game, the gods that had been protecting North America from supernatural badness have gone away, due to the expiration of an ancient contract. Now a bunch of other powers, mostly malevolent, are trying to claim little bits of American for themselves. The PCs are trying to defend the innocent during the interregnum, and are preparing to take down any Big Bads that try to become the new gods of America.
Aaron B I’d love to see an example of your pyramid structure
I like to build the arcs from the consequences and unresolved threads of early mysteries.
My longest running game had an arc that grew from our Professional’s dealings with her Agency. The Agency turned out to be being used to capture torture, and weaponise monsters and magic, ultimately for the personal benefit of the director. That all grew from some red tape failures combined with the consequences of the mysteries they occurred in.
I think the best advice is don’t decide on an arc yet; jut find a good opening adventure and let your player’s interest indicate where you would like to go. Maybe provide some cryptic clues about an evil group or artifact and let their actions fill in the arc to start like “Armitage Files” for Trail of Cthulhu. In that supplement players find bizarre messages from the future describing a future end of the world that the players must discover the details for and prevent. The key is the GM decides on the “world ending event” after play illustrates the player’s interests. Or to put it another way: What Michael Sands said.
Recently played in a great six-session campaign GM’d by Michael Kennedy .
He set the campaign during WWI, and each session was in a different place that something meaningful was happening, on the fringes of the main war.
An egyptologist was attacking conscientious objectors in London, after losing her lover to the war. She was using a ritual from the book of the dead to summon a crocodilian god (forgot its name) to eat them.
In northern Africa we discovered a Rabbi using golems to avenge persecuted jewish residents in a moroccan slum.
In Ireland we investigated monster attacks that turned out to be a loosed djinn hopping host bodies, while our Divine received orders from heaven to take out signatories of the accords that lead to an Irish separatist movement (he totally refused; it was badass!)
In Russia we landed in St. Petersburg right before the Bolsheviks took over, and barely escaped after finding an old comrade doing bad things with corpses.
Hmmm…. i’m forgetting one, or maybe confusing a couple as i type from memory…. but we ended up in Germany, with an epic showdown in the Monument to the Battle of the Nations.
It was fantastic!
Aaron Griffin I’m in class at the moment but when I get home I’ll dig an older one out.
Andrew Fish Gargoyle in France behind front lines.
I came up with the first mystery for my ww1 game. Then I waited to design more after character creation. I had zero beyond that first mystery before character creation. I let player choice decide a lot and stayed fluid to handle interesting ideas.
Andrew Fish Sounds like an awesome arc indeed.
If we didnt have a player with severe audio problems, I wouldnt mind sharing youtube recordings!
Michael Kennedy Those sound like mysteries worth writing up.