There and back again?
They say you shouldn’t focus on the destination as much as the journey, but sometimes you just really want to get where you’re going.
I’ve been running a Pathfinder game off and on for the last three years. It’s been my first foray into a long-running campaign as well as an epic fantasy game, and it’s actually been going pretty well though it’s taking a bit longer than I’d really expected it to. We usually play a couple Saturdays a month for a few months and then switch off GMs to play something else. Since I’ve been trying to achieve an epic fantasy feel to the campaign, we’ve had good stopping points for each time we decide to take a break. This last time, though, we stopped when they had recovered the artifact they’d been hunting for, but the entire party was still in the middle of a distant, inhospitable land.
We had spent so long getting to that point, I didn’t really want to spend any more time on getting them back home, but I also was really reluctant to just hand wave their journey back. The D&D I played in high school was all about the random encounters, so there’s a tiny part of me that feels sacrilegious for tossing playing the travel out the window. In addition, the journey to that point was a pretty wild one, so it seemed disrespectful to the wild, wonderful locales they’d already traveled through to say ‘nothing happens’ on the way home. I knew my players were on board with getting to the next part of the story just as much as I was, so I had to come up with something interesting but quick to get them home.
Initially, since we were taking the summer off, I was going to have the players each take a turn telling the group what happened on the way home. Unfortunately, with players that have families, jobs, new homes, and other such ‘adult’ responsibilities, this didn’t really get any farther than the idea stages. Real life always takes precedence, but I still wanted to try and come up with something that would let us start back at home base but still respect the fact that they were in a really remote location when we last played.
Eventually, the idea occurred to me, why not do the round-robin idea anyway, except do it face-to-face? Rather than running a regular session, I took our first night back and announced that we were going to take turns telling the story of how they got back from their last adventure. To give it a little bit of structure, I borrowed a friend’s copy of ‘Once Upon a Time’ and gave each player a handful of cards. The cards include words I hoped would inspire different things in the journey home. These included things like ghosts, chase, magic sword, hidden door, old woman, and so on.
Most players aren’t used to having complete narrative control in their hands, so my players weren’t sure what to do at first. It took a little bit of prodding (and reminding of where we’d left off), but once they began, most of them really got into it. Some of the more creative highlights of their journey home were:
- The party being split into two groups as a mountain fell apart around them.
- Tricking a young dragon they had knocked out of the sky into believing they’d saved him instead and convincing him to help them find their missing party members.
- A western style jail break from a small town and the subsequent chase through the countryside, including a battle atop an out-of-control wagon.
- Traversing an inland sea with the assistance of a friendly, old dragon turtle that just wanted some conversation and a little gossip about the rest of the world.
- Most of the party getting shrunk down to pixie size to assist a royal fairy family, only to discover the fairies were the evil ones and had tricked them, leaving them to find another way to get back to normal size.
- A sea battle against a ship full of gnome pirates in a half-submerged airship they didn’t know how to fly.
Most of my players loved this and had a blast building on the stories each one started. Only one player seemed to have a little trouble with it, and I think this stemmed from a reluctance to give narrative control of his character to anyone else. Ultimately, this method got them back to their home base and allowed us to start the next session fresh and without making it feel like we left a huge blank in the middle of their story.
What methods have you used to try and minimize travel? Do you just use the Indiana Jones red line across a map, or does your group take travel on old-school and throw in all the random encounters along the way?
This sounds awesome!
…. my only hesitation is it sounds like many of the bits you skimmed over this way would have been standout parts of the campaign if played out in full. (I mean, I don’t know your campaign, but they would certainly have been nice additions to any campaign I’ve run or played in.) I wonder if there is a way to have your cake and eat it too?
That was a bit of a concern of mine too, but there’s two things that make me not feel so bad. First, these are ideas the players came up with, so I might not have necessarily thrown those scenarios at them anyway. Second, it’s been a long campaign so far and they’ve only recovered two of six artifacts. I know they’re anxious to get further along too, so it seemed like a good compromise.
I like your technique; the random prompts seemed to spur more interesting events along the way back than “just tell stories around the fire” would have. I suspect because as a player without the prompt, you’d discuss the things you’d encountered on the way in–just remixing it–while this encouraged strange, novel interactions. (I like the shrunk to pixie size–for no other reason than the way it’d have worked poorly in the game with saves, etc., but it’s a great travel tale element.)
There were several bits that wouldn’t have really worked with the mechanics of a normal session, but worked great as a narrative way to get them where we needed them to be.
This is a great idea! I love Once Upon a Time, but I had never thought to include something like that as what’s effectively a mini-game inside a “regular” RPG campaign. Very cool! And it definitely sounds like it didn’t hurt the epic feel of your campaign, either. Would love to try something like this out.
Very cool and creative idea. I could see this being useful for any type of downtime. It adds to the overall storyline without taking up too much game time.