ESCHATON Report #4
Welcome to the third play report for ESCHATON, my Campaign26 entry. This covers session 9, the start of our second "season".
Season 2?
This session marked a turning point in the campaign. The beginning is over, and we enter the (hopefully) action-packed middle. Less explaining to do (though still many mysteries to be solved), more concrete goals to accomplish.
In my experience, this is really where a game sinks or swims. Solid premise and/or characters can carry a game for several sessions through a beginning, for sure. But it's the middle bit (which is sometimes the longest bit) of a story-driven campaign that shows you where the game will bend and where it will break.
I have - in live theatre, in screenwriting classes and attempts, in many many RPG experiences - heard just about every piece of guidance that exists when it comes to the dangers of the middle. My favorite is: "The middle of a story is where characters express themselves".
Without giving spoilers for where the campaign is headed (my lovely players read these!), I will just say I hope I'm headed in the right direction and there should be plenty for these four characters to push and be pushed by...
Session Report
We begin where we left off, no timeskip. The hunters briefly discuss options - Agent Maine of the Containment Bureau has let them know about two leads he wants to follow up on, and given them their choice of when to tackle which. Between 'go back into the Night Zone to look for Olga's parents' or 'run down a lead in North Dakota about a witch sighting', the group quickly settled on the latter.
Cue 12 hours in unmarked vans with Agent Maine and Pythagoras, his golem partner. The drive is eerie - the snow-blanketed Great Plains are ghostly and the highways are near abandoned. In the first week after Montana fell under the Night Zone, Agent Maine says, people fled to big cities. Everyone left out in the cold has chosen to hunker down...
All's well until, as I lay out a map of the boom-and-bust oil town of Avoca, Olga starts asking Agent Maine for more details about this lead. How did they get it? Which witch is it supposed to be? In a confusion, it becomes clear Agent Maine can't recall any of these details, which gives him the willies...right when the hunters in the rear of the two unmarked vans spots something big (like a polar bear) charging out of the driving snow towards the vans!
The hunters decide to get out of dodge and into town when the starving polar bear coughs up a black wolfshead, which turns out to be its real face, around which the bear jaws unhinge and open like flower petals.
Olga, now driving the lead van, stops the convoy at a bar & grill, to find it and the rest of town seemingly iced over and abandoned. She begins to suspect Rime, one of the Feasting Coven witches, is at play here.
Bridger and Valentin clear the restaurant, finding a little girl (Alicia) terrified of her "sick" father who has locked himself in the walk-in freezer. Valentin speaks with the man while Bridger distracts Alicia. Valentin starts to suspect this man - like those he defeated in the grocery store battle in Columbia Falls - is turning into a monster...
Outside, the Freak Bear attacks again! This time the hunters are ready, and they nearly down it in a hail of gunfire, even disabling one of its rending paws...but not before it grabs Pythagoras, smashes him up, and drags him away into the snowstorm.
At this point, Valentin's player had to duck out to deal with a family emergency, and we all agreed to play until the next beat was resolved, then call it for the night.
That next beat came in the form of Father Mercer and his right hand Erin, two civilian hunters who pulled up in a pickup truck, drawn by the gunfire. Marvin talks with Father Mercer, discovering the gun-toting pastor to be a real piece of work. Mercer demands to see the "sick" man in the walk-in, and makes a case to Marvin that the afflicted man should be killed before he turns, since "he's strayed from God's grace".
Marvin goes ballistic, Mercer threatens him with a shotgun, Erin appears to menace the group, and finally Olga is able to pressure the standoff into dissipating. Close one!
Talking Shop
For starters, this session was under-cooked (from a prep perspective) but ended up very fun regardless. I credit this to A) the players picking the mission option I was much more prepared for, and B) our group's miraculous knack for making the most out of every detail set in front of them. The former is pure luck, but the latter is an ability of these players I always marvel at. Given a few NPCs with conflicting needs, a small set of vaguely-defined locations to hang out in, and a single threatening monster...they can easily fill 2.5 hours with fun!
Prepping Avoca was pretty simple - I sketched a VERY rough map in Affinity, then printed it out once the players arrived. Each location on the map had a name and - at most - 2 sentences of detail.
Prepping the situation in Avoca was only a bit more complex. I made three groups of NPCs, named 2-3 from each and furnished those with 1 sentence about appearance and 1 sentence about vibe, and gave each group an objective, a schedule, and a "response type".
The response types are basically a metric for me as GM to improvise how they'll respond to threats, opportunities, and disruptions to their schedule. One group is "AGGRESSIVE RESPONSE". Another is "CAUTIOUS DEFENSE". And a third is "CONFUSED AND SCARED".
This was the prep structure for the entirety of the Avoca mission, which I guess will fill 1-2 more sessions after this one. Pretty easy!
Shoutouts to my players as always for a fun ride! And sorry Valentin's player, you missed a priest showdown...Next time!