Seven Stars in the Rearview (Part Three)

One of the recurring themes of the game, in retrospect, was travel. We had agreed that the game was to be a globetrotting adventure in the Indiana Jones mold, rather than an extended expedition to a single exotic locale, or a tale of pulpy masked heroes fighting crime in the shadows of a big American city, and almost every episode had the player characters visiting a new port of call: Shanghai. Hong Kong. Cairo. London. Rome and the Vatican. New York. San Francisco. Rio. Buenos Aires. Virtually no corner of the globe went unexplored, and that meant that as GM, I had to constantly be painting in new pieces of setting.

Seven Stars in the Rearview (Part Two)

With Dr. Song in place as the nominal villain of the piece, until it became clear that others were even more “Sinister”, the globetrotting adventure was ready to begin. Much of my early work was very uncertain, because although I knew that the campaign would begin in Shanghai (a setting so vivid that I could have run the whole game there) I wasn’t sure where the players would go from there. With Rob’s character Su Li motivated to thwart the plans of her evil father, all I needed to do was dangle his latest plot in front of her to drive the action. And Dr. Song, of course, was after the titular Seven Stars of Atlantis: fabulous gemstones rumoured to have magical powers and a connection to the lost continent itself.

 

Seven Stars in the Rearview (Part One)

There is a melancholy that comes with the end of a campaign, even one that’s been long and satisfying. Maybe the longer and more satisfying the game is, the harder it is to let it go. We’re all junkies for stories. We get tangled up in the lives of our cast of characters, their problems and their passions, and we wonder where their lives will take them next.

Review: NIGHT WITCHES

I know, it's been a while. Once again, the working world has caught up to me and The Blogging has suffered. I've got a few things I've been meaning to talk about here -- including my noodling around for a couple of weeks building a Harry Potter hack using FATE ACCELERATED -- but let's get back to business with a little review.