Critical Miss: Issue 5 (Ending Your Campaign)

Ending Your Campaign

Ending The World

I think this technique's pretty self-explanatory.

"...and so at exactly midnight tonight we will detonate our hydrogen device and destroy the city of New York - unless you agree to the formation of an independent sovereign state of Idaho!"

The President shrugged. "Whatever..."

Dark Liberty stared in amazement at the tiny video-phone screen. "I'm sorry..?"

"I really don't care," the President told him. "Do what you want. Four days ago the Deep Space Tracking Network detected an asteroid heading towards the Earth. It's the size of Rhode Island and it will impact early tomorrow. There's nothing we can do to stop it. All life on Earth will be destroyed except for two thousand people in our deep underground survival bunker in Colorado. I'm on my way there right now as it happens."

The President leaned in to the camera and spoke a final line:

"Bye bye!"

Timebombing

Timebombing is the technique of building an exit into your campaign right from the start.

CHARACTER TIMEBOMBS

A character timebomb is something that you put into the character when it is created, so that you can later dispose of it. Disadvantages give you a good way of doing this, and also give you a way to force the players to "buy in" to the scheme.

Say you are doing a standard GURPS campaign, where characters would usually be built with 100 points. Announce to the characters that your are putting in 20 points of "secret" disadvantages, which won't count towards the usual -40 point limit for these, and that the players can therefore build their characters with 120 points.

If the players enquire about what these secret disadvantages are, explain that they are all plot hooks which will be much more interesting if the players are unaware of them.

Some examples:

We have already mentioned the idea of giving a character multiple personalities or a serious perversion. However, the player will be much less able to complain, if he had already spent the points gained for those disadvantages way back when he created the character.

There are some other good ones though.

Secret Enemy:

By the way, you have a secret enemy. Oh look, here he comes. Oh look, he's ripped both your arms off. Oh dear, you're dead.

Eggshell skull: Did poor old Blair Peach* in. Allegedly.

* AFAIR: A teacher who went on some kind of protest demo in the '70s and died amid allegations of police brutality and counter allegations of cranial flaws.

CAMPAIGN TIMEBOMBS

Campaigns tend to be open-ended, which is in marked contrast to most novels and films where there is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. A campaign timebomb is where right from the start you build in a possible definite ending, which can be triggered at any point where you have got bored and want out.

The key thing here is for it to be a clear, apparently triumphant ending, the end of the quest. But done in such a way that there is no longer a rationale for the campaign. The story has ended. Ended well, but ended.

The GM reads:

"You advance slowly through the open doors into the chamber at the heart of the pyramid. Inside lies a pulsing ball of energy. Raw magic crackles restlessly. You realise this is the source of the Demon King's power. This is what drives his unholy spells. Destroy this, and you destroy him, and you liberate a land. No more will communities live under his evil yoke. No more will virgin blood be split in his perverted sacrifices No more will boy-children be conscripted into armies to fight his wars. No more will adventurers such as yourselves be forced to take up sword to fight against his evil. Destroy this and you can go home. Become the farmers and artisans you would have been if he had never ruled. Destroy this and you give birth to a peaceful land, with no wars or bloodshed. Destroy this and your children can grow up happy and safe."

"What do you want to do?"

Morphing To Your New Campaign

Remember the Red Dwarf episode where they crashed the star bug thing, all died, and then woke up to find that the previous four years had been nothing more than a virtual reality roleplaying game? (Which, incidently, they had been playing really badly). They all turned out to be the opposites of their "characters". The Cat was a trainspotting geek called Duane Dibly, and Lister was a secret policeman.

Or how about Pam's dream in Dallas?

Or do any of you old timers out there remember the old Marvel New Universe comic called Justice?

Justice was cool, definitely my favourite of the old New Universe titles. The premise behind the New Universe was that it was EXACTLY the same as our universe until a day when a thing called the White Event happened - which gave some people superpowers.

The storyline behind Justice was that ALL ALONG there had been a parallel fantasy universe, with good and bad wizards who fought an eternal war. Now the bad wizards had broken through to Earth, were selling drugs there, and using the negative energy that drug use created to fuel their magical war back home (which they were now winning). At the same time as the white event, Justice, who was a bodyguard for the good guys, foiled an assassination attempt on his queen - but in the process was blown through to Earth. There he still had his justice's powers of sense aura, which enabled him to tell if someone was good or evil, the shield, which was a kind of forcefield, and the sword, which was a bolt of energy which, well, incinerated people.

He then ended up wondering this strange world as some kind of psychotic vigilante, incinerating bad guys, attempting to penetrate the network of bad wizards on Earth, and all along attracting the attentions of the local police.

But although Justice was a very cool comic, it totally trashed the universe continuity in two ways:

a) How could there always have been a parallel fantasy universe in a world which was supposed to be ours up until the white event?

b) How come he had powers which weren't derived from the white event, and that he had in fact had before the white event.

Oops! The explanation they later gave was something along the lines of "launching eight new titles and a new universe" had been a lot of work and this little continuity glitch had somehow slipped through.

So they solved it.

One month (about issue 8 or 9 I think) I pick up my copy of this, one of my favourite titles, and see big writing across the front saying: "Everything you know is wrong!"

The new back story was this:

Justice had in fact been a DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agent, who had been captured by a drug dealing network. When the white event occurred, they were in the process of interrogating him with a pretty potent mix of drugs.

The white event gave him paranormals powers of sense aura, shield and sword.

The drugs turned him totally loony. From then on he was living in a paranoid fantasy delusion world where he thought he was a warrior from a parallel universe sworn to protect his queen cleanse evil from the world.

100% complete fruit loop.

Anyhow, in this issue the women police detective tracking him uncovered the truth, found him, and told him his real name and his story.

There was no fantasy universe. No corps of warriors. No queen. No bad wizards. Just an insane DEA agent and the drug dealers he was tracking.

I can't remember what happened after that. In cleaning up the continuity they had totally removed all the fantasy elements that I loved. A few months later Marvel cancelled all the New Universe titles.

Now perhaps that's not the best example, but it does illustrate a basic point I want to make. With a bit of imagination you can totally change the basic premise of a campaign, whilst notionally keeping it the same campaign.

A wizard in a fantasy world can wake up the next morning to find that he's a cyberpunk hacker who got his consciousness sucked in by a particularly powerful AI and has only just come out.

A pilot in a modern-day campaign can fly the team aircraft through some kind of "funny looking storm" and crash land in a fantasy world.

A nuclear war can devastate your cyberpunk world, leaving the characters no option but to spend the next 5000 years in the suspended animation chambers they conveniently found, and emerge to a world with no technology, funny looking people, and strange non-scientific powers...

So instead of ending your old campaign and starting a new one, you can simply change it to your new one. Let the players keep their old, loved characters - they'll just be a bit different.

If none of those fit...