Feeling rather proud of myself today. Last night was another in a string of four or five dynamic, entertaining RPG sessions. In the last several sessions, an alien culture (from lands beyond the sea, lands that simply do not exist in the archipelago’s cosmology) has invaded, a PC has been indefinitely captured (it’s okay; every player has multiple PCs they play in rotation), another PC has been revealed to have arranged his own daughter’s kidnapping, another PC has visited hell and made a literal as well as figurative deal with a demon, the PCs have murdered one of the Evil Conspiracy’s major agents, and the PCs have learned the real purpose to the Evil Conspiracy’s machinations. I’ve dramatically surprised the entire group four times in the last five sessions. In some ways, this was inevitable: given enough time, the conspiracy-themed campaign has reached the tipping point where the perceived urgency of striking back at the Evil Conspiracy, or at least actively defending against its latest thrust, outweighs the perceived value of keeping a low profile lest the Evil Conspiracy decide to destroy the PCs. It’s only natural that months of lurking and plotting should suddenly spiral out of control—in a good way.
But in a larger sense, it wasn’t inevitable at all. About five years ago, I ran an abortive campaign that failed largely because I couldn’t keep the players engaged that long. It’s also possible that events, poorly managed, could have spiraled out of control in an entirely bad way—for example, all of a player’s characters dying, or all of the PCs at a particular location dying, and with them the secrets they died to learn, or threats multiplying so fast that the players lose hope. But in a conspiracy-themed campaign, discouragement is the real enemy.
The PCs, after all, are up against an all-knowing, all-powerful, and utterly ruthless enemy. That’s not the literal truth. The Evil Conspiracy has its blind spots; it cannot literally control everyone and everything from minute to minute. But it does know enough and control enough to make any move at all to oppose them seem more dangerous than simply sitting on one’s hands. Pervasive paranoia usually works better in a novel, where a single author controls both hero and Evil Conspiracy, than in an RPG, where different people control those parts of the narrative, for that very reason. Conspiracy games have many pitfalls, and typically look better on paper than in reality, because fear is a powerful disincentive to action, and without action there is no game.
But done right, they’re terrific.
Things I’ve learned (or rather, suspected and had confirmed) in this campaign:
Be as generous with hints and clues as necessary, even if it makes the Evil Conspiracy look slightly incompetent. That’s better than dooming the game to inaction by confusing your players. If the Evil Conspiracy begins looking too much like a bunch of chumps, you can retroactively re-engineer their plans so that the exposed part of the plot turns out to be a deliberate fake-out.
Avoid PC immunity if at all possible. (I did it here by insisting every player have two or three PCs.) Maintain tension by making the Evil Conspiracy’s retribution rare and terrible but incomplete, rather than continuous and crippling.
Demand of your players PCs who will persevere no matter how terrible the threats against them. A PC who will duck out when things get bad enough will inevitably find they do get bad enough.
The first time your players rouse themselves from the small tactics born of fear and indecision to major action against the Evil Conspiracy, reward them. Pavlovian conditioning is a powerful force.
And, of course, all the standard advice to GMs applies as well. But keeping the action moving is the key.
(As an aside: you know you’re doing something right as a GM when one of your players tells you he wants to play one of your NPCs in the next campaign. Unfortunately, that character is the demon mentioned above…and I’ll be a player by then.)
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