How to Run a Game (Part 22) - Creating a Legacy

I remember back when I started going to conventions in the early to mid 90s, where I met a range of people who'd actually been running games for 15 years. I had read about long-term campaigns in RPG magazines, but generally thought they were urban legends until I met some of the people who had actually taken part in a few of them. 

As far as I'm aware, a bunch of those folks are still running the same campaign worlds. The characters have certainly been and gone, I've heard that many of the first generation of players have literally died of old age, and the original narrators have passed on the mantle to new ones. Many of these games even shifted through game systems, from early D&D to Advanced D&D, then 2nd edition, sometimes even swapping to completely different game systems as the needs of the narrative shifted, perhaps moving to Pendragon, Ars Magica, or Rolemaster.

These were the kinds of epic campaigns that I always wanted to be invited into, or wanted to run. The catch was always that the narrators of these games knew what they had, they seemed to have achieved the sweet spot of what they could run, and people who were a part of the games didn't want to stop coming because those who knew of the games were basically on a waiting list to get involved.

But I always had that problem where players have their lives get in the way, sometimes key players move house, sometimes scheduling changes due to jobs, sometimes new boyfriends or girlfriends. That, or I ran one off games at conventions, possibly running sequels the following year.

That's where I started the idea of making games that feel bigger than just the immediately narrative of the characters at their table. I guess a lot of narrators do this, introducing old NPCs and player characters into new campaigns to show that the story is a part of something larger. I'm basically doing this two ways at the moment. The first of these is being used in my lunchtime sessions, and my sport sessions, where I try to coordinate the games of three (or more) separate groups. Particularly in the sport sessions, where I'm running it like a TV show, and having each Wednesday afternoon session working like an episode of a TV series, with each full term of play forming a seasonal story arc. Those sessions are up to season 3 at the moment, and with the passing of 2023 to 2024 we lost a bunch of the old players as they graduated from junior high (where sport is mandatory) to senior high (where it isn't and therefore they were no longer a part of our sessions). The good news is that we picked up a range of new players with new students coming into the school, so that seems to be a fairly self sustaining ecosystem of play (if nurtured properly).

I need to get the lunch-time group to follow that self-perpetuating pattern, because I'll probably lose three-quarters of the players next year as they completely graduate from high school. However, that's where my new legacy experiment is happening.

We're playing Vampire the Masquerade, and I wanted to get a feel for the setting by using what I knew rather than reinventing the wheel. Of course, what I know is from 20-25 years ago...specifically the years 1998 to 2004. This is the time when I was LARPing Vampire and Werewolf, and when I met Mrs. Vulpinoid. It was a rich and deep game, with hundreds of players over several games playing an interconnected narrative that set the local storylines for the global White Wolf LARP campaign. I remember many of the characters, I remember what many of them thought of each other, and anything I don't remember can be written off as changes that have occurred between people after years of stories and interactions. To help improve the connection between the new game and the old, I've even managed to get back in contact with a number of the old players of those characters (many of whom haven't thought about their old vampires in decades...but who were grateful to have their memories kept alive). 

This gives the feeling that we're running a game that's been going for 25 years, but we've just skipped over the boring bits. Maybe some of the vampires have been in their unconscious state of torpor for a decade, maybe things have just been quiet in town. The point is that I can draw on events from the past, and feed those events into the modern narrative, perhaps through the voices of unreliable memories, perhaps as facts that I remember from our games from a specific perspective as the domain storyteller who oversaw the grand events of the time, even if I wasn't always privy to the minutiae. I don't know if the players in the current game are feeling this, but I feel the continuation of the story and I'm really hoping the depth of the story is being adequately conveyed.

I've mentioned a few things to my new generation of players, specific events from back in the day, whether mentioning them as in character events, or describing the things we did in the real world as a part of the game. Scavenger hunts across the Sydney CBD with dozens of players dressed in character, using abandoned building and government offices as our regular play spaces, high-end restaurants (as mentioned a couple of posts ago) serving as the backdrop for vampiric feasts... Of course, there are certain things from back in those days that I can't reveal to my new players since they're high school aged, and it's probably not good form for a teacher to tell their students certain re-enacted rituals and stories involving thousands of dollars spent on adult entertainers to set a mood of sin and debauchery during a specific live-action game that got pretty intense. (Man, that was a hell of a night...) I've got plenty of photos from those times...somewhere.

The idea of revisiting those characters from the distant past is fun. It's something I'd like to do more of.