One of the strongest aspects of the campaign I’m starting up to run in place of The Magical Millennium (which I wrote about yesterday) is the feeling of it I had in my head. Sure, I could talk about the core themes and how I imagined the general story of such a game might play out, but it’s a lot easier to build a set of touchstones I can refer to in order to indicate specific things about the game. These often come up in tabletop games, at the individual campaign level or at the ruleset level for games that are seeking to convey a particular feeling no matter the specifics of the game. For instance, one of my favorite games that I’ve never played (though I hope to change that eventually) is Beam Saber and the rulebook starts out with a bunch of references to various mecha anime to use as a touchstone. The general purpose of a list of touchstones like this is to get as many people as possible some idea of what the game being played should feel like. Beam Saber is a game about struggling to live during a massive galactic war that you can’t hope to influence, with an emphasis on either coming together or doing what you must to eventually get out alive, so all of the anime the referenced point in that general direction. It’s a good way for specific genre games to indicate what part of the genre the game is emulating. At the campaign level, it tends to get more specific about aspects of the particular continuity of a game that you’re playing through. Typically, I tend to start out with strong ideas that don’t necessarily need touchstones, images to help paint a picture of the world, some music if I’ve had the time to figure it out, and also some of my own writing if I’ve had the time and energy to put towards it.
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Starting Something New: The Magical Millennium Is On Hiatus
After a hiatus following the departure of a player (though not caused by the departure of said player), four of the remaining five of us met up to play and quickly discovered we did not have it in us to play our usual game. Live’s been a chaotic mess for all of us and we lost quite a bit of momentum because of when our break arrived. It cut us off from any opportunity to build energy or establish story because we spent the previous full session going through a time skip and our last partial session doing some maintenance and upkeep, so there weren’t any existing strands of story or character to use to pull us into the game again. Additionally, due to some decisions I made while creating this game and building out the world, I’ve been struggling to feel excited about this part of the game we’re in. Some of the NPCs I’d made had begun to take up too much space in my mind because their real-world analogues have become dramatically more prominent in my mind as a result of how the world has changed in the year or so since I spun the bones of this story up. It stopped being fun for me to explore the ideas associated with them and while there was still space for me to shift things and make changes in order to avoid building the association any more than I already had, I was also struggling with how close the world was to our own. Which, it turns out, was also a bit of a struggle for some of my players as well. It’s difficult to enjoy fantasy escapism when we’re not actually departing from the world we are already familiar with. So, as our chatter peetered out and it looked like we’d be just departing rather than pushing ourselves to play a game we weren’t in the mood to play, I pitched an idea for a game I’d had just the day before.
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