I ran the first session of a Shadow of Yesterday mini-campaign last night and it went really well.  Five players, one new to our group but a friend.  We'd chatted about character concepts and hashed out the general setting via email over the previous week, so the game got started with a minimum of fiddling around.  Since we'll be playing for five or six sessions, I really stressed interconnections and mutually beneficial key combinations.  The PCs are all members of an extended family, the Standards, and have various tense relationships with one another.  I'd done about an hour of actual prep and thought about it quite a lot.

The game is nominally set in 1898, during the Klondike gold rush, a time and place I dearly love.  I've lived in Alaska and hiked the Chilkoot trail and hung out in the towns of the Lynn canal.  The first session was really preparatory, introducing some important NPCs and thematic elements as well as painting a picture of Skagway during the stampede.  Almost all the conflicts were between players, and there was no violence - the threat was there, and it will come later, but it was a very civilized session.  Everybody really stepped up and used their keys, creating conflicts for themselves and others.  One of my favorite plot threads:

Aunt Hettie Standard, the headstrong and deeply religious matriarch, befriended a "soiled dove" during the trip up the inside passage, an uncouth young woman named Betty McNelly.  With the help of her refined but practical daughter Annie, Hettie sought to gently reform this brazen and ambitious prostitute.  There were some great conflicts about needlework (thank you, TSOY!), and with Hettie's brother, the family partiarch, who didn't want a whore in his stateroom.  Young Nahum Standard, a sissified book-smart milquetoast, doesn't even know what a prostitute is, and befriends Betty, completely miscommunicating his intentions.  Nahum later visits her at the "dance hall" in Skagway, where she matter-of-factly asks him to take his pants off, and he runs away in terror.  Later on, the whole family is headed for the Presbyterian church (the result of another conflict, since rough uncle Zeke didn't want to go.  Pain was Brought Down.  Key of Religion was invoked.)  And who should be standing around guiltily in her wanton best but Betty McNelly, afraid to enter the church yard.  Hettie takes her under her wing and shames the pastor, who at first refuses her entry (Key of Religion was a real money-maker this session).  So we're treated to the wonderful scene of Betty slowly being reformed while Nahum, sitting directly behind her, smells the perfume in her hair, smitten and terrified. 

TSOY, of course, absolutely delivers - my friend Robo, playing Nahum, created a character who is an utter failure, a physical wreck, a bookish fop raised by women who desperately seeks his father's approval.  He lost every conflict he entered, and Robo raked in the XP and had a great time.  Everybody was like "Oh man, one day Nahum is going to come into his own and some keys are getting burned and he will throw down."

One thing I really loved was my ability to invoke details based on personal experience - the cloudy, silt-filled water of the Taiya river, the telegraph office in Jeff Smith's saloon, what the mountains looked like, devil's club choking scree slopes.  Having intimate experience with the region really helped me bring it to life and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. 

Man, this sounds awesome.  I've two questions/requests:

1. Can you break down the Needlepoint conflict?  I crave details the way I crave a good PB&J sandwich.
2. I'm am intrigued by this Key of Religion, and wish to learn more.

Cheers,

Doyce

I think it's actually the key of "got religion", technically, and I'll let Segedy or Isbo weigh in, if they're following this thread.  You get XP for inserting your faith into decision making and conflicts in an ostentatious way. 

Lessee, needlepoint.  Hettie has the secret of Hidden Meaning related to her ladies' crafts, and we're using that like a precision-guided munition to allow her to influence conflicts through gift-giving, keepsakes, decorating, etc.  So her and Annie, her daughter, grab Betty McNelly from among the prostitutes heading for Skagway and make a project out of her.  They teach her some needlework - she doesn't want to learn.  They use their own needlework to bring home points about upright living and civility and win a tiny bit of mindshare.  They give Betty a sampler as a gift.  Then, awesome of awesomes, in a later scene Nahum, the 20-year-old momma's boy raised by Aunt Hettie, is visiting Betty in her brum crib, a complete innocent, and she assumes he's come as a customer.  There's a conflict over whether he loses his virginity, and Isbo, Hettie's player, narrates her own needlework sampler tacked on the wall of the crib to bring in a bonus die. It turns the tide, Nahum sees his foster-mother's handiwork over the bed, and flees. 

I believe the Key that Hettie has is actually just the Key of Faith, straight from the book:

Key of Faith

Your character has a strong religious belief that guides her. Gain 1 XP every time she defends her faith to others. Gain 2 XP whenever this character converts someone to her faith. Gain 5 XP whenever this character defends her faith even though it brings her great harm. Buyoff: Your character renounces her beliefs. (see Key of Religion?)

However, we also added our own "Key of Got Religion", which was intended to be more of a holy-roller specialty, where faith isn't necessarily involved, so maybe she was using that:

Key of Got Religion

Your character's got religion! 1XP for quoting from the good book appropriately, +2 XP for making a decision or getting into a conflict based on a passage or blasphemy, +5 for bringing on armaggedon because of that confounded book! (see also Key of Faith)

This leads me into a follow-on question about the Secret of Hidden Meaning, but damn that's some fine and funny play.

The needlework conflict was based on the Complex Crafts ability, as was the cooking-oriented test that went before it (a tasty pot of beans to lure the hungry soul to the discussion).  I think the first stakes were something along the lines of "put a seed of doubt in her mind that whoring is the only role for a woman in Skagway".

I don't recall where we picked up the "Secret of Inner Meaning" (perhaps <a href="http://random.average-bear.com/TSOY/HomePage">randomwiki?) but it goes like this:

Secret of Inner Meaning

Your character's art carries a meaning beyond the surface. Use any non-physical Instinct-based ability at a distance via a piece of your character's art. Cost: 2 Reason.

Oh!  "INNER" meaning.  I was searching around for "Hidden" Meaning.  I *knew* it sounded familiar.

On needlework:
If memory serves me correctly, Hettie weighed into the Betty soul-saving with good ol' fashion Sway, receiving a bonus die from Annie's Craft roll ('wow, needlework really is cool...not giving up sinning cool, but still...').  I'm hoping to see more of Betty, so I am all about small steps leading to bigger payoffs (and potentially juicy tension with Nahum's nascent interests in Betty).

I went for the Key of Got Religion--I plan to get into more tussles over religion than converting people to it.  The conflict with the preacher made me happy--nothing quite so fun as shaming the preacher in his own church!

And, yeah, Nahum's painful incompetence joined to his eagerness to please his father was a real show-stealer.  His uncle Zeke's efforts to introduce him to manly activities like gamblin', drinkin', and shootin' look to be great seeds for conflicts with Annie and Hettie, who are both looking out for him in their own way.

Our second session was last night, and I threw them a big curveball - passing through a savage blizzard near the summit of Mt. Hoffman, they emerged in a Frank Frazetta painting.  That is, a weird fantasy land where nobody wears enough clothes and the bad guys ride around on giant lizards.  So there's this hardscrabble 1898 family of stampeders out to strike it rich, and instead of panning for gold, they are rescuing maidens tied to poles as sacrifices to gigantic cave bears, and fighting snake-worshipping volcano men, and so forth.  There's a magic gate, you see, and somehow they can travel back in forth.  The family patriarch vanished into this land 13 years ago, and they will get to meet his widow and son.  The locals are a civilized but primitive people who look longingly at their WInchester repeaters.  And of course there are those snake men, and they've got their hands on some long guns, so somebody else is using that gate.  It's all very colorful and fun - I did some homework on the Pleistocene era, and am introducing all kinds of crazy-ass beasts.  The good guys ride three-ton wombats. 

The most interesting and satisfying thing about this session was the immediate lock-on to social drama.  Once the player characters got acclimated to this strange civilization, keys started changing.  That woman tied to the pole as bear food, Lady Sakaa?  The crusty old seventh cavalry uncle bought the key of Love for her right away.  But she's promised to the gallant knight of House Mesazu, Dampener Ku!  And speaking of Ku, apparently Annie (played by Steve) can't resist a man riding a diprotodont, because she's fallen hard for him.  And their mountain guide, Junior Powles, is way in love with her, so there's suddenly a love pentagon or something.  It's all player driven and just instantly sizzling. 

Hi, Jason,

How did the players react to the sudden change in setting? Had you discussed this with them beforehand? I'm feeling that if my SG had made such a radical change to the game without my input or consent, I might get pissed, so I'm interested to know how your group went with it.

Well, there was some question about whether Jason's scheme would go off well, but two of us already had forewarning (though we kept it to ourselves) and several of the others know Jason well enough to not be too suprised.  In fact, one of them started beating an old drum about how we can never get a "straight Western" game, because we always have to introduce ancient Aztec cities, nazis, morlocks or some other anachronistic thing.

Overall though, it went really well, I thought, and everybody seemed to have fun.  The inter-player drama was really tight, and Keys were pinging like crazy.  The moment when half the player characters were caught in the leading edge of an avalanche (because they were all busy trying to save each other) was an experience point tornado!

Sounds awesome!

On average, how much XP did each character earn over the session? And how long was the session? I'd like to get a sense of the XP rate.

Hey Ricky,

I did have a slight concern that the change-up would be considered bad faith, or GM muscle-flexing, or just lame, but everybody rolled with it and it opened many interesting doors - one guy has a character who will absolutely thrive in Frazetta world, who had some serious constraints in Klondike world. I'm hoping Aunt Hettie tries to convert them all to Christianity. 

This is a mini-campaign and I really stessed interdependent keys, and my expectation is that a key ought to be burned off every session if we're hitting on all cylinders.  That has more or less happened, and I'm guessing people are getting around 15-20 XP per session?  That'd be 5 per hour, I guess.  Anybody want to correct me there?

I should add that there was plenty of foreshadowing of weirdness to come in the first session, so I doubt that it came as an absolute shock that things were not as they seemed.  There were some satisfied nods around the table as odd stuff they experienced in Skagway fell into place. 

Jason wrote:
This is a mini-campaign and I really stessed interdependent keys, and my expectation is that a key ought to be burned off every session if we're hitting on all cylinders.  That has more or less happened, and I'm guessing people are getting around 15-20 XP per session?  That'd be 5 per hour, I guess.  Anybody want to correct me there?

That xp estimate is right around what I pulled in this session--and I haven't even burned a key yet, although I'm starting to think hard about one or two.  There were a few conflcts this session that nailed two or more keys at once--my struggle to get Pa Standard to take his son, Nahum, hunting pinged both my key of the manipulator and my key of masochism (maybe family, too, although I can't remember) when Pa brought down the pain.  And the avalanche, whew, that was good stuff--bloodied, broken (masochism), and put myself in danger for Annie (Guardian).

And I, for one, was waiting for some kind of strange twist--I didn't know what it was going to be, but I did not feel like Jason 'pulled a fast one.'  He had given us a number of clues that there were strange goings on (exotic swords, jeweled harnesses for men, indians talking about 'haunted mountains'...).

--Ian

I always imagine a little cash register sound when keys get hit, and that avalanche was like Black Thursday - people were really raking it in during that scene.  It was great!

Also, Ricky, your group's mileage will definitely vary - look up Tony LB's TSOY game AP reports to see a wildly different progression of XP. 

Session three last night.  It went well - I threw in one key scene (Pa Standard getting semi-eaten by a 20-meter-long Wonambi naracoortensis constrictor snake that was sacred to the locals) but otherwise just had a sheet with bangs for each character.  I managed to hit about half of those and it was enough. 

Three of the characters have fairly complex love relationships blooming and one (aunt Hettie) is set on the path of the missionary - she convinced the locals not to ritually kill and eat the hearts of some captives, but to instead show mercy and free them.  The locals have had some contact with "Outlanders" and a few are already Christians of a sort, so wheels are definitely in motion on the faith tip.  That will definitely be interesting.  Two of the love relationships are pushing hard for the player characters to "go native", and Nahum, the weak milksop son, is toughening up and buying in whole-hog, preparing to marry Lady Uha, a scheming and powerful combination of high priestess and temple prostitute.  That'll end in tears, I suspect.  There was a very satisfying BDTP conflict between Hettie, who is a manipulator and Sway master, and Ladu Uha, over Nahum's fate.  It went down to the wire but, with Nahum's help, Lady Uha broke Hettie (Isbo, with the Key of the Masochist, was delighted) and claimed the boy for her own nefarious purposes. 

My only real concern right now is Pa Standard, who is being played as an obdurate old man, set in his opinions and ways.  His player roundly rejects any connection to the local people and hasn't formed any relationships with his family members beyond taking responsibility for keeping them generally safe.  It makes it hard to present interesting situations for him.  Everybody else is just psycho GM gravy, with built-in conflicts and lots of interesting angles to work with. 

Also noteworthy - this session was, for us, an XP explosion - several people hit mutliple five point keys and topped out around 25 XP for the night.  Robo, playing Nahum, burned two Keys and bought up others.  Isbo, playing Hettie, took her Sway to Grand Master.  I fear her righteous transcendence!

Having just finished a slower-paced, year-long TSOY game, I have to say that I like this intense, short-run format a whole lot better.  We'll wrap up in five sessions total, maybe six.

This is my first time playing TSOY and so far what impresses me most in terms of 'tips for doing it right' is patience.  I cannot emphasize how much cooler the game has been, story-wise, because players have only burned keys when they *really* felt driven to do so based upon the drama of the game.  We have all had 'temptations' to burn them a little earlier, but waiting for just the right moment just takes the game to another level.  Examples:

Zeke, former Cavalry man in the West with a real dislike of Indians, has the chance to burn the key of intolerance when Hettie talks him down from violence against recalcitrant indian guides.  He doesn't, but instead burns the key when he falls in love with a princess he rescues from a giant bear. 

Nahum has the opportunity to burn the key of impotence when his sisterly cousin Annie is in dire need of aid when raiders have her cornered and are about to drag her off.  She throws the gun to him, pleading for him to step up.  He doesn't burn the key, but instead panics.  Which gives Annie the opportunity to burn her key fo fraternity with Nahum in the most painfully story-rich way (which she has had some chances to do earlier, with Nahum's previous inability to step up)--"I've helped you your entire life and this one time when I needed your help more than anything else...".  Later, growing more and more enamored with the courtesan Uha, he burns the key of impotence and steps up to show off for her his newfound manliness. 

I have been thinking I would burn the key of religion, get Hettie a little more cozy with the locals.  Nothing quite seems right for it though, so I bide my time.  After losing Nahum to Uha, though, I not only don't burn the Key of Religion, but burn a whole other batch (family and manipulator) so that Hettie can step up and really bring the Truth to these misguided locals.

We had our fourth of five sessions last night. 

Of interest - I barely prepped at all, since each of the characters had some pretty powerful motivations.  I really had no idea how things would turn out or who the players would side with in the larger conflict I had established earlier between the mountain and the valley people, or what form that would ultimately take.  I had no idea what the fate of their mysteriously vanished father/grandfather Nehemiah was.  They provided what we needed as a group and we had a great time.  I think this was the busiest Key-burning session yet, and everyone ws really raking in the XP and transforming their characters. 

I particularly love the complex web of relationships in this game.  For example:

Ku, humiliated by:
Zeke, who loves:
Sakaa, who is promised to:
Ku, who is hated by:
Junior Powles, who loves:
Annie, who loves:
Ku.

And I amped it up even further by getting Sakaa to convince Zeke's impressionable nephew Nahum to try to assassinate Ku.  It was like a Mexican telenovela on Mars.

The pace we're playing at means that some of the intricacy will get hand-waved, unfortunately - there's just not enough hours to explore every relationship to its logical conclusion.  As a GM I feel overburdened with a dense cast of characters at this point, and they won't all get their moment in the sun.  Looking back on my notes, I had 17 speaking NPCs.  Damn:

Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, Wanatooxa, Clyde Wellington-Tombs, T. Elbert Clemmons, "Red" Betty McNelly, Thakur of the Pakuginga, Robert "King" Kelly-Standard, Boots Kelly-Standard, Lord Takopa, Princess Aza, Princess Josa Standard, Paul Standard, Lady Sakaa Takopa, Croucher Chupun, Love-Taker Uha, Dampener Ku, Junior Powles.

We finished this mini-campaign last night and the final session was a little lackluster.  I'm not entirely sure why.  I'd prepped with bangs for each of the players, and they had all shared ideas of what they'd like to see happen.  All of them got at least some of what they specifically wanted for final resolution of their characters.  Keys were burned, characters changed at the same pace as the rest of the run.  A few things that didn't go so well:

I re-introduced a key villain (Soapy Smith) last week, and the players promptly dominated and abused him, rendering him pretty impotent.  They did the same thing to other potential adversaries, tying people up and throwing them in holes.  It made it hard to present any sort of external challenge.  When I asked them about this mid-session, the consensus was that they wanted a Big Bad villain.  So there was a disconnect here. 

I was taken aback at the abuse all my NPCs were in for last night - there was a surprising amount of torturing, shoving, slapping, hair pulling, putting guns in their faces, pistol-whipping, and so forth.  I'm not sure where that came from.  I made it very clear from the outset of the session that I had no stake in the outcome and any choice they made was fair game - they just made some mean-spirited choices that I didn't really enjoy as a participant.

There was a key showdown between a PC and an NPC, sort of the set piece finale for the PC.  He was slightly over-matched in a sword duel, it would have been a nail-biter.  The player burned a key, took the Secret of Imbuement, and turned his sword into a +3 harm weapon against his opponent.  He killed his enemy in two strokes.  It was a little anticlimactic and we all regretted it.

Two characters transcended in the first hour of play, and the players held the event in reserve until it made sense later in the session.  I think this sapped some of the fun out, since it should be a big deal and it really wasn't by the time it came around.

This was the first session where I felt some frustration with TSOY, because I wasn't able to provide any challenge for the amped-up characters.  They were working toward a unified purpose for the first time, and it felt like four DitV Dogs all beating on a guy.  All the excitement of the previous four sessions had emerged from players with perpendicular and incompatible goals. 

There were good moments, too - quite a few actually.  One of my favorites - Zeke shot and killed the sacred cave bear of the Ja'at, and Hettie sawed the thing's head off, using that as a weapon against them as she converted the Ja'at en masse to Christianity. 

Let me start out with what I liked.  As Hettie's player, the whole cave bear thing was fantastic--I was pleased as punch that I was able to transcend at that moment rather than earlier.  The scene just sticks in my head: Hettie emerging from the burning Ja'at meeting hall, glowing volcanic rock littering the field, their sacred cave bear's head held above her head, as they emerge, shaken from their caves.  Hettie throws down the head and starts preaching the new world order--and orates the crap out of it (6 successes against their 0; all + dice for me, all - dice for them; that was visually pleasing in itself).  That was dice and story joining together in a pleasing way for me.

I also was very satisfied to have the moment with Annie (Hettie's daughter) at the gate back to the real world, telling Annie she belonged out in the real world, that she was going to be fine, that she had a great head on her shoulders, but that Hettie herself had a sacred duty in the crazy frazetta world.

Now, that said, I also accidentally sucked the wind right out the session's sails with my scene and I feel a little bad for that.  With Hettie and her christian soldiers climbing up the mountain, it made sense for everyone who was leaving the valley to leave, and those who weren't to stay.  Which meant my exit also meant the exit of Annie and Nahum.  I think that forced Arley's player's hand--he had been hoping to take a rich share of the Apijani gold, but with Hettie all holy and Zeke wanting to set up house in the valley with his Apijani princess, that just wasn't going to happen.

I think the flat elements of the session can partly (not entirely) be tied to the story--Zeke and Hettie dominated the last session because they had built up stories that firmly tied them to the valley.  The other characters had some conflicts to play out, but none were quite as 'integral' to the world. 

This was complicated, I think, by the fact that the *players* didn't necessarily want to get in the way of Zeke and Hettie's plans because they didn't have any strong story stakes.  Arley was probably an extreme of this--he really only had one big goal left (get gold!) and, while he could have brought down the sway to force other relatives to stick it out with him, that felt artificial.

The large supporting cast worked against us in this regard, too.  Most of the really juicy conflicts of the early sessions were between family members, with supporting cast entering primarily as elements of those conflicts.  I think the last two sessions saw the family conflicts settling down, which left the last session largely to be the players playing out the denouement of those now settled family conflicts.  I think the new npc's made that easier, keeping the family focused on external conflicts and players reacting more to them than to each other.  It also made it easier to move the spotlight off of NPC's with which we did have real juicy conflicts (like Soapy) so that there was less build-up around them.

Mechanically, I wonder if it might not make sense to force players to spend a certain portion of their current XP total within a session, especially when playing these intense, fast advancing short run games.  One thing that happened with Nahum is that he had so much XP laying around that he could go hog-wild crazy with advances and secrets before fighting Dampener Ku.  It is a little difficult for the story guide to prep an encounter when a character can become grandmaster competent, with a +3 harm weapon and a larger vigor pool, in the blink of an eye when, mere seconds ago, he was a not-so-vigorous adept with his uncle's old cavalry sabre. 

Heck, it might even make sense to provide a hard limit to the number of named NPC's in a session, so that there is a clear place to transfer conflict to once the inter-player stuff has started to work itself out.  Maybe allow for other named NPC's to enter into the session when another is clearly removed for story reasons.

Thanks for your thoughts, Isbo.  It was *much* harder to run than, say, session three, because of the external focus.  I kept thinking "what's he doing?  What's she doing?  When's he coming back?"  At one point (when Junior Powles brought back Soapy Smith at gunpoint) I was faced with the ridiculous situation of having to have a conversation between two NPCs (I managed to avoid it, and if I had been forced to I would have pawned off Junior on one of you guys, but it was a dumb situation).  So a take-away for me is to sharply limit NPCs in number.