Ripping the Demon from My Skull - Planning Stage

[Jason Lee]

This is an account of the planning stages for what turned out to be eight sessions of play.  The whole group planned out the flow of events and major elements, while leaving the details up to individuals, and play, to determine.  We focused a lot on distributing spotlight time in the planning stages, as well as the more difficult parts of everybody in the group GMing a different time period in the same geographic location.  I feel like I've left a lot of important stuff out, but the text is already quite lengthy.

The whole set of sessions went awesome, from start to finish.  I plan to write up what actually transpired, time permitting.  It had some interesting twists despite the fact that our success was planned from the beginning.

(Players are in {}'s, characters are not)

*****

A brief history lesson:

Way back near the beginning of the campaign (about six years ago) the only other person to survive the initial transit that began our brave crew's adventures in time and space was an NPC named Elliot.  I stuck a demon in poor Elliot's head, well actually it was an evil wizard who captured him - I assume no fault in the matter.  Taking pity on the poor bastard the four others from Cyberpunk decided to drag him along.  They also chained him up and threw things at him, because of his tendency to go psycho on account of demon possession.

Later, a magical spring gave Elliot a partial cure.  He underwent a physical transformation, gained more control, and inherited kewl demon powerz.  However, from this point forward he was fused with the demon.  Let's call her Seera, because that's her name.

Over time, Elliot became the ship's doctor and engineer (the ship is a plant).  Putting everyone else on the ship in a position of depending upon him, due in no small part to his paranoia preventing him from training anyone else to fill the role lest the crew no longer need him.  Which, is interesting all on its own:  "I hate you, you're evil!  But, we can't do without you, so I guess I'll cope."

Much later, a PC named Frank got the idea in his head to fix Elliot and began researching a cure.  Unfortunately, he was torn apart by giant insects.  Gil was in on the Frank project, and continued the research even after is coworker's untimely rending.

Some time passes, and we are brought to about three months ago real time and a couple of weeks ago game time.

Elliot is, by the way, my character.

*****

I'd been kicking around the idea of de-demonizing Elliot.  I had a lot of other things going on with my other characters, so I was waiting for a 'theme-lull' before doing it.  However, Gil {Paul} had been working on it for a while and Paul mentioned it.  After talking about it a bit, I thought it should be a big event.  After all, he's been like this for six years of playtime; this is a huge change and it should require some effort.  So I said to {Paul}, "Let's build up to it.  Work hard and one day you can be a de-demonizer."

I'm chit-chatting with {Tara} and {Rene} about this, and we all come to the conclusion that Gil doing this all on his own was super lame.  Gil never works with anybody else, and the whole crew, particularly the few that are friendly towards Elliot deserve to be in on the fixing.  A theme rotation was in order! (A theme rotation is where everybody GM's the same place or concept in a sequence.)

So, {Tara}, {Rene}, and I plan a bit.

"Seera's got time powers, how about something time related?"

"What about that 'everybody runs the same place except a different time' idea we had?"

"Hey yeah, but, ummm... why?"

"Collecting items for a spell?"

"Ok, sure.  What items, what spell?"

"Well, a de-demonizing spell of course."

"We need a time machine."

"I don't want the crew to have access to a time machine."

"By the end of my run we might have a partially functioning time machine we can borrow."

"Only if we can't keep it."

"I don't think that'll be a problem."

"I dunno about the items, but we need six of them."

"Why six?"

"Because we've got like twenty characters on the ship right now, and we can have them split off into three groups of six, so everybody's only playing one character at a time."

"Hey yeah, but {Paul} and {Al} only have two."

"They've both got one in the cooker, we can pick them up before we do this run."

"Collecting just items is lame, how about someone we need to talk to?"

"Why do we need a time travel for that?"

"Hey, I know.  Because the world was destroyed by Kord!"  (Evil necromancer, he a made a big mess a while ago)

"Hey that makes sense.  That'd put the planet near pre-destruction Mooravia, which is where Seera came from."

"Yeah, but how did she get from Mooravia to this place?"

"Teleported from the demon realm, err...demon star."

"Word, Yo!"

... and so on.  Eventually, things started to make more sense and fall into place.  

*****

Then we got everyone together to pound out the details of what we wanted the place to look like, how exactly the spell was supposed to work, which characters were going to which times, who was GMing what time, what we needed from each time, and a bunch of little niggling details.

There was a big contention point: whether or not we want the spell to require a human sacrifice.

{Al}, standing alone, was opposed to the human sacrifice option.  

Al says, "I don't like the idea of human sacrifice, I don't want to pretend to do it.  Besides, it'll just create problems.  My character's won't approve."

Fierce eye rolling ensues in his direction.

"But the point is that most of the characters won't approve.  It's a hard choice, and not everybody will agree.  It's supposed to cause problems."

"Dude, you just light-sabered like twenty people in half last week.  You're all about the pretend killing."

So {Al} makes his grumpy face and says, "Well, my characters will leave."

"Alright, that's sort of a valid concern.  You want to keep your characters."

"How about we cover it up?  After all, Gil's a sneaky little git."

"It'll come out eventually though."

"But it'll be more fun when it does then.  Human sacrifice and a cover up, oh goody!"

So we decided to go ahead with the human sacrifice, and simply conceal it from {Al's} characters.

*****

A lot of decisions had to be made even before we ran relating to spotlight time.

First off, {Paul} seemed to want Gil to do the ritual all by himself, because he'd done all the work up until this point.  I say 'seemed' because it was all terribly passive-aggressive from my point of view.  Everybody else wasn't very interested in 'The Gil Show' as an end to a rotation and wanted to participate (particularly now that they had to make a decision about a human sacrifice).  We basically told {Paul} 'tough noogies' and made the ritual require three people.  At this point we weren't clear on who would in fact be participating in the ritual. Gil was going to have to go ask for help, and then we'd know for sure who'd be assisting.

We also had to decide what to do with the extra characters.  Someone had to stay behind to watch the ship, but just leaving them sitting there was pretty dull.  We thought, what if we take the characters that are friends with Elliot and assign them to some super-important tasks?  It means they won't be played, but they'll be an important part of events.  So, we dreamt up a number of vital single person tasks, assigned key characters to them, and built our mission groups out of what remained.

To make our group assignments we first figured who was going to the various times, then we picked a leader for each group, then started tossing crew members into each group based on who they get along with.  We had to fiddle with it so that the person who was running the time period a particular group would be going to wasn't also the player of the team leader.  Partly because that sounded like it would lead to being dragged along by the GM, and partly because it was important for the team leader to be actively played.  

While we were doing this we hit a snag in our second wave of missions, we either assign Mark {Paul} to the kidnapping mission (remember the human sacrifice) or assign him to team leader of the time period {Paul} was running.  We once had a whole rotation where Mark got kidnapped over and over again, and he's been bitter ever since.  We couldn't assign Mark to the other group, because that would have meant assigning Freak {Paul} to the world war {Rene} was planning on running, which wasn't an option because Freak gets empathic feedback from violence, so the character would have been no fun to play in that run.  Poop.  What we ended up doing is having {Paul} pick up another character he had in the works halfway through the rotation.

*****

When we were done with the planning we had ourselves a coastal region with a nice river and some mountains.  We had six time periods: the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the renaissance-ish age, the steam age, and the modern age.  There were two waves of missions; three groups of five that would go back twice, and the groupings would change after the first wave to allow people to play different characters.  Our extra tasks were: someone to man the time machine, someone to be collateral for the time machine, and a few people to run an important errand with the ship.

[Ziriel]

I've got a little to add:

First and foremost, if we hadn't gotten our collective asses in gear and planned this rotation it iz more than a little likely that (Paul) would have gone ahead and done something himself without talking to us about it.  He felt very strongly that Gil had put in a lot of work in on the project and actted as if he owned the entire idea, and hence seemed very emotionally invested in his own vision of what should happen.  Now I say he *felt* that he had put in a lot of work because I disagree on that matter.  He had mentioned a few times that Gil was working on the problem, but it never really came up in play so it really didn't feel valid to me.  He also has a nasty habit of getting an idea in his head and then refusing to change the vision to accomidate others.  This izn't always a problem but when it starts to interfere with other people's characters it can be very unpleasent to deal with.

This was repeatedly an issue as we planned for this rotation and also as we played.  It became obvious that he had a very specific vision of what he wanted to happen and it didn't involve anyone else.  I will even go so far as to say that I suspect he already had plans in the works before we started and had been planning this for a future run of his own.  When it came down to it we had to make a choice of whether or not we were going to let this fly or not, and decided that it was contrary to our play goals and where we wanted to see the story go.

The situation came to a head when it became up to his character, Gil, to ask for help in a situation that neither (Paul) nor Gil wanted it.  Compromises had to be made.  As a group we all agreed to give Gil a central role in the ritual because it would help appease (Paul) and, afterall, Gil had put some work into it even if it was always off screen.

Interesting sidenote:  My character, Caspian, had also been working with Frank on the project before his demise.  Caspian had never given up on curing Elliot either and in fact gave Elliot his solemn oath (something that actually means something to the boy) that he would do whatever he could to help him.  In the end this meant stabbing a nice girl, and he has been depressed ever since, but he kept his word.  The only diference between Gil's level of involvement before the rotation and Caspian's iz that I don't tend to mention what I'm doing off screen so it was easy for people to forget that I was working on it.  That and poor Caspian iz illiterate which cut down on some of what he could do research wise.

- Tara

Personal Rule #32: 13 people can keep a secret if 12 of them are dead.