Ashcan Lantern: Fix it while it's flying
For about two years, I have been dragging a half-dead idea around. Trying to make it perfect. Then, I forgot about it. Having another child. Getting a new job. Embracing general chaos. Then, picking it up again, tinkering, fiddling, running a few games here and there. All the while thinking about how perfect and good it will be.
Thinking of it as a pristine piece of work that will fly and dazzle the masses has not been beneficial to productivity. A concord of RPG design.
Instead, it should be the homemade hot-rod of a plane that was built midair. An infernal machine that cannot be turned off until it reaches its destination. It always has cargo, baggage, and passengers. Sometimes, things need to be bolted on to improve this plane's efficiency or provide more capability to the pilot and passengers.
As it chugs through the sky, smoke often billows from its exhaust. Sometimes equipment and modifications stop working and need to be fixed or removed. Sometimes things need to be removed to manage the weight in the air. Bags, trunks, and luggage might be seen falling from the sky.
Sometimes even passengers.
All in service of getting this hunk a junk to its destination.
With this in mind, my thoughts in the last couple of Ashcan lanterns led me back to Bibliotecs, a cairn hack.
I've written about this before, but all those blogs are gone now.
I stopped writing here. Over the weekend just past, I play tested Bibliotecs again, and it has changed my thoughts and direction.
I don't like gonzo.
But at this stage... Bibliotecs feels very gonzo. Silly and obscure. The session went well. There were three players and me. We made characters, built some connecting threads between them and set off into the library (I set the adventure in the Mortlock Wing of the South Australian State Library).
As they moved through the adventure, chatting with weird little freaks, killing mutated pants, and looting long-destroyed mega-mechs... it just didn't sit right. Everyone had a good time. Everyone was engaged. Everyone wanted to know when it would be released. However, I'm unsure if it was my feelings of self-doubt or a keen intuition, but the session didn't feel right.
It had the same flow as a Cairn adventure. They interacted with the world in the ways I thought they might. They made connections I hadn't thought of and therefore enhanced the adventure. But there was still something nagging at me.
For all my love of post-apocalyptic media, I haven't actually run many games set in those worlds. And the ones that I have been ridiculously zany and gonzo (lookin' at you, Mutant Crawl Classics). There were two things that weren't sitting well. The first was a lack of experience with the genre in this format. I've never played in someone else's post-apoc campaign, nor have I run anywhere near the volume I've run in fantasy settings. I played video games, read books, and watched movies, but running the game felt strange. The second was a mismatch between the setting details and random tables, and the style and themes I actually want to explore.
So, what am I on about here? I think i have two questions to explore.
- Do I want to explore this game more?
- Will I spend more time on setting and exploring how the world will be presented?
- Or do I cut out the bolted-on things I like and jump from the plane?
That's what I am going to decide over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, I like OSE. I played it over the weekend. This Friday I am using to run an open table at the local gaming club. Let's go.