Gold Horizon: Retrospective
I can't sleep tonight. I had a great training session which left me very jazzed, so my mind is somewhat to active to wind down. That being the case, I figured I'd drink some mint tea and write a blog post.
Earlier this year I ran Gold Horizon. It was campaign I was very excited for and that ultimately had to be abandoned after about a month of weekly sessions. The group we had was excellent—one of the best groups I've had the pleasure of playing with—and every individual session we had was good, one in particular was great. The main issue with the campaign has been discussed at length: since last September I've been focusing my creative efforts on writing a novel. This particular campaign was to be more intensive than the very arcade style Devil's World Heroes campaign I had previously run, with higher context and more personal stakes for the characters. This demanded of me a similar creative energy as my writing and, ultimately, was too much to manage.
Though this was the primary reason for the campaign's abandonment, it is also the least interesting because it's purely personal. There were some mistakes in how I actually conducted the campaign that compounded this primary issue. First among them was using a daily calendar. What? the people say, spittle dripping on their neckbeards, how could you not use strict time records? Basically I've never found it effective. It becomes very easy for me to become too caught up in the details of that daily rhythm which makes the scale of the game "too small." While it's more useful in more dungeon based OSR play, in a game that was intended to more trad, pulpy, and sweeping in orientation it became a straitjacket of my own devising, unnoticed until after it was removed. Next time I run a non-arcade game I will track time the way I did when I ran FATE, that is in broad phases that correspond to narrative arcs rather than the strict passage of time.
Next is related to system: we ended up running the game, after a false D&D start, in Fantasy Violence of my own creation. Fantasy Violence kicks ass—one combat we had where three children had to fight a blind man in a cave is one of the best fights I've been a part of an RPG, it was super satisfying with very human sense of stakes. FV works for what it works for: human scale combat with personal stakes. Violence has large consequences. This is great and cool, except that I love fucking stupid anime bullshit and my games trend in that direction and I'd rather run a system that allows for that. The other thing is that by default Fantasy Violence doesn't provide any support for resolution outside of combat. This isn't too much of an issue for a beast like me, except that it means I often don't elide enough which slows the pace down; this is a learning experience thing, of when to skate and when to stop in terms of resolution. Doing this more or less totally freeform is more difficult than having, say, a skill system.
Next time I run a non-arcade game I will probably just use my own variant of FATE. I'm comfortable with the system and find it very good for pulpy action. For that next campaign, I'd like to run XANADU KNIGHTS, which will be a fantasy campaign set during a war between Charlemagne's paladins and Saracen invaders, inspired chiefly by Orlando Furioso and Mobile Suit Gundam. I've already got plenty of the ground work set up, so after a year or so of my current campaign, Evil Labyrinth, I will once again try to have success in a non-D&D type game.