[Age of Paranoia] Moving to 1974

[Jere]

For my http://www.innocence.com/games/age-of-paranoia/">Age of Paranoia game (see http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11933">here and http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11206">here and http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10812">here) we've recently jumped ahead in time 3 years from http://www.innocence.com/games/age-of-paranoia/index.php/Main/May1971">May 1971 to http://www.innocence.com/games/age-of-paranoia/index.php/Main/Year1974">October 1974. This is important to us because one of the premises of this game is exploring the lives of these career intelligence officers over the later half of the Cold War and beyond. As the game is Tarot card based (using Chris Lehrich's Shadows in the Fog) we decided that the best way to represent the passing of time was to have the players do readings of where they were in October and use that to flesh out background.

Most everyone used a traditional Celtic Cross, though one player used an astrological spread and the other a cabalistic spread. Out of this we got http://www.innocence.com/games/age-of-paranoia/index.php/Main/TarotSpreads1974">six readings, one for each character, which they in turn had a great deal of latitude to interpret.

Things went well, mostly. I was surprised by one player moving his character into a political arena as quickly as he did. This caused me to reshuffle a lot of my plot around to take in account the political side. Luckily I have the ramifications of the Church committee (and all the other committees of the post Watergate world) to draw upon so my up runneth over.

The other major difficulty was a player wanting to change history to an extreme extent. Which prompted a good discussion of theme and mood of the game, having changes in history serve a purpose to a character's development, and player empowerment. Very productive for our social contract (which is on the http://www.innocence.com/games/age-of-paranoia/index.php/Main/AgeOfParanoia">wiki).

think we had a good example of play contract and system in play here. We ha a good understanding of tone and a good agreement on what t do if there was a disagreement in the case of player controlled narration. And from that everything else flowed. I was quite happy with the results.

I'm also happy that the spreads told me very clearly that everyone wants more personal time with their friends and relations (the last storyarch was very very claustrophobic focusing on a mole hunt). This sort of feedback is invaluable for e and will shape the course of the campaign. Many of the players gave specific things they want in the future that both they and I are now responsible for working towards. Which made this a valuable exercise and probably the best way I've seen to handle moving forward in time (and I've done both pendragaon and Ars Magica to death here)

Jeremiah