Never On Sunday

Such are the nights that make GMing worthwhile.

We’re playing a conspiracy-thriller campaign set in a fictional bronze age, and, after long picking at the edges of the disturbing mysteries, one PC has recently been recruited into what the players have quite naturally taken to be the Conspiracy, which he hopes will provide information and opportunity to destroy their plans. His first mission has taken the PCs to a distant island, unknown to the uninitiated, where the PCs have found magical artifacts in a world where magic is anathema.

And the players, again quite naturally, are beginning to develop the sinking feeling that they’ve been on the wrong side all along. You had to be there, but to those involved, it was a great reveal, the moment when everything they understood about the world has just proven wrong, which—believe me—is tough to engineer in a way that surprises the players, as opposed to merely surprising their characters, when the players know full well they’re in a conspiracy thriller. The players loved it, even as they hated it.

But I loved it twice as much, because they’re only half right.. In true <i>GURPS Illuminati</i> fashion, the powerful and mysterious society the PC has just joined is in turn secretly being perverted by a deeper, more secretive, and enormously more evil conspiracy. So all I need to do is allow the players to go about “repairing the damage they’ve done” before revealing that everything they know is wrong <i>all over again</i>. And having been properly hooked once, the players are now satisfied that they’ve been done, and definitely won’t be looking to find themselves used as pawns of the Conspiracy a second time. It’s awesome.

That kind of ha-ha-gotcha can’t be kept up indefinitely without the players giving up in frustration, but pulling it off twice, with the second reveal occurring as the world truly teeters on the brink of destruction, makes for a tremendous climax. I’m wallowing in self-congratulation for demonstrating that most essential of GM skills: leading players by the nose without letting them know it.