Retrospectives: Egg of the Wyrm

I just finished my latest campaign, Egg of the Wyrm. This campaign focused on a heist in a fantasy setting based in medieval Indonesia and with very restricted but impressive magic. It was the first campaign that I've really leaned into meta advantages. It was a wild ride, and I have a lot of thoughts afterwards. We tried a lot of new things, both in terms of game-play, rules, and setting.

This game was a lot of work, and it was over very quickly. I took notes on each session, and we finished the game in 10 sessions two hours long each. That's rather fast, and the game took a lot of work to set up: I set up maps, politics, rival thieves, specifics on the eggs defenses, a 10-day celebration schedule, and a magic system. We actually voted to run this game two years ago, and then ran a different campaign instead because I wasn't ready yet (due to the magic system). The work-to-time ratio isn't sustainable, but we were all really excited to run this game, so I don't really mind it. I just can't do it for every campaign.

I've wanted to run this game for a long time: a lot of that prep work was me getting excited. I got so excited that I made a sculpture of the giant Wyrms in the campaign's name. I got all fired up to use the Sriwijaya book, and I built a political system based on that. I dreamed up a magic system where each wyrm had a power set. And we learned a new type of adventure: the heist. So all of that prep wasn't drudgery.

I did have to step back and say "Stop planning this campaign and run it". I was worried, because Heists involve a lot of planning by the players, and I wanted to make sure I could give them all the information they needed, and I didn't want them to get swept up in indecision. 

To counter this, one player suggested the play patterns from "Blades in the Dark", basically allowing players to spend meta currency to go back in time and do things. Gurps allows this fairly naturally with impulse buys, which I had to explain to most of my players, but were pretty straightforward to use.

Impulse buys were interesting. They didn't actually turn into the classic cinematic mode of  "Plan as the Action Unfolds". Turns out I already had all the information gathered, and the information I didn't have we could discover in play. My players were very good at scouting and if I didn't have something decided it generally wasn't critical. The impulse buys did make sure we didn't spend lots of time worrying we'd missed something. And in the end, the heist was pulled off slightly earlier than planned in an opportune moment of chaos made possible to exploit only due to impulse points.

Impulse buys and meta-currency were very strong in this game. Possibly too strong. We run 2 hour sessions, half of the "expected" 4-hour session that impulse buys were designed for. We also run combat light games, and this one had almost no combat at all, meaning the number of rolls is fairly low. Players began to take a "use it or loose it" attitude with their one impulse point per session that regenerated, and they leveraged them to great effect. Maybe that's the intended effect, and maybe I'm just new to challenging people with access to impulse buys, but I found that the players got to say "I win" to a scene once per session.

One interesting feature that sort of engaged organically was the collecting of rumors. Otherwise known as gossip. I allowed each character to do one thing in a morning or afternoon or evening. Sometimes they had something to do... and if they didn't they went looking for rumors. I made an enormous sheet of rumors after the second session and exhausted it by the seventh. The rumors turned into the beating heart of the game. Hear a rumor, investigate it, find out more stuff about it. I should have had a way to feed "useful" false rumors to the PCs on a success: things that aren't true but reveal interesting things in the process of verifying them. Having a default action for a PC that wasn't otherwise being used was great though, and tended to pull drifting player back into the game. I'm surprised rumors were that effective in this short of a game.

At least some of the players struggled with the political geography of the setting. In retrospective maybe this could have been avoided if I used the word "Maharaja" for the leaders of great cities and "Rajas" for their vassals. Or even just "Emperor" for the highest level. Or maybe not. Playing games based on history adds a nice level of political nuance, but you need to be able to engage with that nuance. And possibly we did: Three of four players had personal relationships with their Raja or Maharaja. So maybe its just a matter of "expect a learning curve on new political setups".

I enjoyed thinking up the magic system, but statting it out for the players took a while and significantly slowed down the start of the game. A few different posts on this blog are from having to work out issues with the magic. In the end, the players chose two power sets, and they were the only power sets present on screen. Some of this me not pulling in more magic-users, but a lot of it is the secretive nature of a heist and the tendency for the spell-casting to happen off-screen. If they're not a direct obstacle, you don't care about their specific stats. So I didn't get some of the testing for powers that I wanted. On the other hand, the power sets that were used worked out just great. And I don't know that I really could have created fewer power sets: I tried that initially and my players asked me to build them out so they could pick. Perhaps I'll post the full magic system.

So this was a very short campaign, but it required a lot of work and it went well. Impulse buys did their job, but were perhaps too strong. We did a heist for the first time and ran in south-east asia for the first time. So its a good campaign, and I wonder when I'll be able to do another game that got me quite that excited!