Daemonium: Retrospective
Last year I started running a campaign, titled Daemonium. It ended near the start of this summer. Here I will reflect on the campaign.
Daemonium was set in the Kingdom of Cashua on the continent of Ambern. This kingdom was in the process of being invaded by the Empire of Aeon, a magitech fueled empire with the major advantages of having firearms and airships.
I hadn't run a TTRPG for a while, as most of my irl friends whom I played with had moved away or lost interest. I figured it was time to run a game online! I had played a bit in a friend's 5e game, and decided that I could make online refereeing work for me. My first interest was just to get players. I spoke to my brother and the other prospective players and folk were most interested in 5e so we played that. I had three players initially. A Bard, a Paladin, and a Monk. A Fighter and Druid later joined.
THE FIRST PHASE:
The campaign was first made up in a linear fashion, and then became an open sandbox. The goal was to vary the gameplay from scenario to scenario. Each scenario featured major NPC from the game's overall story. Thus:
1: A Seven Samurai scenario in which the party had to defend a village from bandits funded by Aeon.
2: An espionage and stealth sequence into an occupied port town. Goal: steal the airship!
3: A mini escort-hexcrawl - bring the princess to the hidden Wood Elf Kingdom to negotiate an alliance with the Wood Elves!
4: A full on murder mystery during Wood Elf negotiation.
This took around 15 or so sessions. After this, I converted the game to a B/X based system and created a region for hexploration.
Each of these scenarios honestly worked very well, especially the defence mission and the murder mystery. Both of those had strong NPCs with strong goals and lots of roleplaying to be done. The Escort-Hexcrawl also worked very well, and many of the characters/places they went during that segment would continue to be relevant.
5e was not really a problem per se but basically sucked to run. Everything was a little more complicated than it needed to be, and the bonus abilities of the characters annoyed me (This was my first time running 5e and second time playing it overall, btw).
For example, instead of just doing more flat damage or something the Fighter gets a whole bunch of active abilities which, ultimately, just result in the Fighter doing more flat damage. I made a whole post about this. This issue extends to all the other classes. Players would slow down and think about shit that doesn't matter, because the system has a bunch of shit that doesn't matter baked into it.
The other issue is that a lot of the 5e lore assumptions really annoyed me. When the party ran into a dragon the first question they asked was "What colour is it?" These little assumptions cheapened the setting/scenario to me.
THE SECOND PHASE:
Switching over to a B/X based, sandbox hex crawl definitely bothered some players. Two of them, due to personal reasons combined with the change in system, basically never showed up again. Lots of other players joined: sometimes we'd have six or so players at the table at the same time. While some players disliked the lack of structure, others thrived.
The Monk player (Whose character ignominiously died while playing dead) had made a Ranger named Cadillac Monteau. Instead of engage in the aforementioned murder mystery, he decided to... just leave. Thus, a whole separate splinter of the campaign was born. As we switched over to B/X, having the entire hexcrawl at the ready allowed for me to run two simultaneous campaigns with no issues. The campaigns were also very different in character. The original group was concerned with fighting Aeon, clearing demon infested dungeons, and increasing Cashua's power. Cadillac's group engaged in bounty hunting, tomb raiding, and robbery. The groups impacted each other in interesting ways. As an example Cadillac killed Tomlinson Leery, who was a very important ally for the other group.
Aside from the hexcrawl, I designed three dungeons. Two of them were explored in depth, one of them was cleared. These went great. Highlight here was the war against the dragon of the Red Duke Ruins. It took five player characters and twenty allied Orcs to take down the dragon; the combat was super fun to run and was probably the most involved combat we had.
Creatively the sandbox campaign was much more satisfying.
THE FINALE:
When the open hexcrawl portion started, I gave the players about 100 days before Aeon launched a final invasion bolstered by summoned demons. They spent that time preparing themselves for the final confrontation. I used the BECMI rules for all the war stuff and it worked well. It was nice to be able to map the conflict onto the hexcrawl. For the final confrontation, the party performed two interventions. One group, on a stolen airship, went to intercept the flagship directly while the other held down a key fortification against demons on the ground.
I've heard lots of people have trouble handling finales in RPGs but this went really well! For the biggest campaign I had run, I was glad to have a real conclusion.
For the other campaign splinter, things didn't work out so smoothly. Cadillac had been making all that money for a reason: to buy a ship! Once he did, we had this idea of doing a pirate sea-crawl. Unfortunately this kind of petered out. After making all that other stuff I was just lacking in creative juice and motivation. This was honestly kind of shame. I still really would like to run a sea crawl. I've taken a break from running games since, though I'm gearing up to launch a new campaign now.
LESSONS LEARNED:
I don't regret starting in 5e. The goal was to get a game going, and I didn't want to futz around or overprep beforehand. The best way to do something is to do it. The system really does suck though, and transitioning over definitely left us with some detritus. I ran a session of the old Lost City module just a few days ago and one of my players commented that it's really nice that we don't have any of the 5e baggage. And I agree! Daemonium lacked in the identity it should've had because it had to carry over a bunch of 5e spells, classes, etc, to maintain continuity.
We ended up with a really large playgroup. Some players were a lot more comfortable with the open ended structure while others just never really got into it. Even with private conversations some players just followed the lead of others the whole time. This was really disappointing, honestly, and I will be more choosy with my players next time.
Similarly, some players had trouble adapting to the way I run combat. Enemies are pretty smart, and it's important to use good tactics. Without the 5e push-button style combat, some players really struggled.
The hexcrawl was inspired by Wolves Upon the Coast in terms of its format. This worked really well! Compared to the more linear campaign the hexcrawl is more fun on a moment to moment basis as a ref and when it sings it really sings. Cadillac had to capture the highway man Axle Lowe and the party used the geography to figure out where he'd most likely attack. They then busted up their carriage and pretended to be sitting ducks. The resulting combat ended up using the river that ran through the hex they were on as a major feature. That kind of thing is awesome!
Similarly, when Tomlinson was hired to chase down Cadillac I actually got to run this NPC through hex crawling procedures. That kind of thing provides a really nice verisimilitude.
The hexcrawl structure is at its best when you get this confluence of time and geography impacting the gameplay. The freedom and flexibility is really nice. However, the thing missing in this game was variety, and that's something which I think is a lot easier to do with a linear campaign. The solution, of course, is to make sure to include more varied scenarios within the hexcrawl. In general I just prepared places and let the scenarios happen. In retrospect, I could've included more adventures nested within the hexes themselves.
After the system change, almost all characters were Fighters of some kind. One successful character was an engineer and one was a Bard, though he rarely joined. All told, every single successful character was a Fighter-type except that Engineer. Nice.
With Cleave rules in place, Fighters really start to get powerful around level 4-5. At that point, for example, the Fighter Gene Erickson was able to fight 20 2HD Wood Elf soldiers at the same time. He used the terrain, some items, and had magic plate, but that's still a testament to the power levels you get at that point in the game.
IN CONCLUSION & BEYOND:
The campaign kicked ass! Lots of memorable moments, great characters, and improvements in play to both players and ref.
I am in the midst of preparing a campaign called Vs. Devil Castle. It's going to be a more linear affair, which will exercise different design muscles. The next hexcrawl I'd like to run is something more exploration focused. I love exploring in games but find that players don't actually do a lot of that (All hexcrawls are point crawls, yadda yadda). When the players were actually forced to blindly explore (During the escort-hexcrawl) many of them found it very discomforting to not know how to get to their destination, and one player flat out disliked it. I'd like to explore the discomfort of the unknown in some kind of weird-fantasy-acid-science-fantasy crawl. Just fill it to the brim with fucked up shit, and have it be on a planet where the characters are real strangers.
HIGH SCORE'S:
Za'vak Al-Hadim, the Unbreakable, was nearly a sixth level Paladin by the adventure's conclusion. Hero of Homble, Slayer of the Vile Dragon Argemus, Avatar of the Gods, Destroyer of the Demon King Belial, Saviour of the Wood Elves, and Liberator of the Kingdom of Cashua. He died dueling the Wood Elf general Petunia. He also bankrolled the entire party.
Gene "The Machine" Erikson became a fifth level Fighter at the adventures end. He was a Woodfolk Hero who never had an honest duel. He slew the Wood Elf general Petunia, sealed the evil sword Durandal, destroyed the Cerberus, and aided the Crab King. He retired by adventure's end.