{"id":79,"date":"2024-09-23T15:04:06","date_gmt":"2024-09-23T19:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gunnhrafn.com\/caw\/?p=79"},"modified":"2024-10-09T09:24:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T13:24:41","slug":"forget-the-tavern-that-was-me-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gunnhrafn.com\/caw\/2024\/09\/23\/forget-the-tavern-that-was-me-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction<\/a> or to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first two Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! <\/em>posts, I discussed how I use the That Was Me! <\/em>activity to start a campaign in media res<\/em> \u2014 with memorable action \u2014 and with a party that has a shared history. In those two earlier posts, I focused examples from a D&D campaign. Here, I want to talk about how I used it with a Night’s Black Agents<\/a><\/em> campaign and the changes I made to better fit the context of our NBA game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Night’s Black Agents<\/em> That Was Me!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Night’s Black Agents<\/em> game, our campaign frame was based on the organizing trope of Plegane Press’ The Gaean Reach<\/a><\/em> RPG based on Jack Vance’s science fiction series (technically, it was inspired by Kenneth Hite’s article “Call of Chicago: Why Do You Hate Chandler Vaughn?<\/a>” that applies the trope to other Pelgrane games. In the Gaean Reach<\/em>, each character has been seriously wronged by an intergalactic criminal known as Quandos Vorn. The point of the game? Quandros Vorn must die! The PCs have banded together because each of them wants to kill Quandros Vorn. At the start of the game, each player gets to name why their character wants Quandros Vorn dead and they get to name one true thing about Quandros Vorn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In case you don’t know, Night’s Black Agents<\/em> is ex-intelligence and special forces operatives and criminals gone freelance who discover there is a shadow world behind the shadow world they operate in, and that shadow world is run by vampires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, as we began making characters, I told the players there was this figure \u00d6r\u00fcmcek who might be an individual or a name for an organization, and that \u00d6r\u00fcmcek was why they left their old job. Maybe \u00d6r\u00fcmcek framed them and they were fired, or \u00d6r\u00fcmcek killed a loved one and they’ve sworn vengeance, or maybe \u00d6r\u00fcmcek was always two or three steps ahead of the PC, and the rules of their agency kept them hamstrung, unable to do anything but follow \u00d6r\u00fcmcek’s trail of destruction and never able to catch and stop \u00d6r\u00fcmcek. For whatever reason each PC was after \u00d6r\u00fcmcek , the group had come together as they realized each of them believed \u00d6r\u00fcmcek must die. Each chose what \u00d6r\u00fcmcek had done to them personally, and they had a number of That Was Me! <\/em>summaries to choose from to create a collective back story for their team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you can see, these That Was Me! summaries are longer than those I used with the D&D group, and you can also see that I included a question for the player to answer for their That Was Me! The third big difference between what I did for the D&D campaign and for the NBA campaign is that I divided theThat Was Me! <\/em>summaries into two categories. The first round only included That Was Me! <\/em>summaries that I wrote, and each of them had to choose one of those. The second round included those written by the players. Unlike the D&D That Was Me!<\/em> summaries, the ones I used for the first round had specific connections to ideas I had for our campaign \u2014 the GM section of the core NBA book includes a chapter on creating a unique vampire (or vampires) for your game. I decided that \u00d6r\u00fcmcek was at war with another vampire group. Whether \u00d6r\u00fcmcek was an individual or a group, I hadn’t yet decided at the start of the game. So, I knowing the basic natures of these vampires, and a rough outline of how the war was being fought \u2014 a war in which the PCs were going to learn that they were pawns \u2014 I wrote each of the That Was Me! <\/em>summaries as eventual clues and bread crumbs the agents could follow deeper into the conspiracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a few examples of what I offered them to choose from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n