Cool. If folks want to see some "behind the scenes" discussion of how the RPG sausage gets made, here's your chance!
I will be tagging all material from or developed for the published version of the casefile with SPOILER tags, just in case.
Okay! Tate's original version of the casefile is quite different than the published one. It's more up-front investigative, over three or four scenes, where all the various clues eventually lead the PCs to the performance/ritual. Looks to work pretty well in that regard. Also, proto-Prospero is a sorcerer and worshipper of proto-Sycorax (a plague demon), and is purposefully trying to summon her.
The published version's set-up is different (see below).
Oddly enough, the original adventure, which I ran at Origin's for the DFRPG release, was closer to the final published version than the final draft I turned in. I'll come back to that.
As some of what's listed could be construed as spoilerish, we'll continue with the spoiler alert.
Where did you get your basic ideas for the casefile's plot? When I volunteered to write up an adventure, I started with the idea of how to do a good 3-4 hour game. I needed to work past my flaws and think ahead. I run very free form games and let the players drive the plot and pacing. To me, this meant reining it in and doing a closed-system game. The PC's needed to be limited in the amount of space they had to work with and given a set amount of time.
I game with theater nerds. Two have degrees in theater, a third is a set designer. Discussing things with them, it hit on me to place it in a theater. Not my forte (my degree is in video production) but I'd have enough help to give me an idea on how a theater works. From there, it was an extremely tiny leap to using Shakespeare. I wanted to avoid either the MacBeth or Hamlet cliché, so I took a look at the Tempest. It was perfect.
Once I chose the Tempest, things flowed for me. I decided that the play was a metaphor for the truth about Sycorax. It was so well written though that it established a link between the play and Sycorax. In the con version, Sycorax was an outsider. A force of nature so far beyond the scope of man that should it be summoned, it would put the world in danger. This made the con game an all or nothing, life and death game. Perfect for a 4 hour game.
How did you select/develop NPCs and Pcs? The NPCs came from again reading the play. Originally, I just used the names of the characters as place holders, but over time I just liked that the villain truly saw himself as Prospero and his apprentice as Miranda.
Prospero was over the top. Crazy is as crazy does. Willing to end the world to get what he wanted. And just powerful enough to pull it off. I wasn't looking for a tragic, sympathetic foil.
Miranda was his sidekick. Because of the way the spell worked, once Prospero got started with it, he'd need a magical heavy hitter to watch his back. The more I thought about her, the more I just realized she was a psychopath who'd do whatever was needed.
Arial (still a sylph) and Caliban (a flesh-masked bridge troll) were perfect as my sympathetic villains. Creatures of fea, bound to do Prospero's bidding. I wanted some second guessing with the PCs and using these two gave me that.
The chorus (the three goddesses), were there to just give the more physical PCs something to beat the living crap out of. They were flesh-masked ghouls in the con version.
As for the PCs themselves. As this was an introduction to the system and universe, I wanted to have a variety of characters to choose from. On top of that, I am a fan of the disparate group of people forced to work together genre. To this end, I came up with the following characters. An irish mobster with sponsored magic, his pure mortal bodyguard, the shape-changing reporter, the scion of Dionysus actress, the wet behind the ears wizard and the half-demon cop. I gave each of them reasons to be in the theater and inter-personal relationships to explain why they knew at least one or two other PCs.
Each of these showcased something different in character creation. And they gave the players motivation to interact with each other, although sometimes not to the betterment of each other.
How did you arrange your scenes? I arranged the scenes according to the acts of the play. The opening scene was set 10-20 minutes before the curtain rose. From there, I gave each act of the play/game 30-45 minutes. I'd then let the players do their thing, with time updates by letting them know what was going on on stage, in the front of the house and in the back of the house. They could then interact with anyone or thing of their choosing. By the climax, the players would know that something was definitely amiss and would be working to bring things to a halt.
Additionally, each character had a separate side plot. Most of these were set to bring them into contact with the other PCs or clues to the bigger plot.
How did it play at the con -- what worked really well in it and what didn't work as well? How did it play? Awesome! And I seriously don't think that's over-stating it. And it wasn't all me, it was the players as well. Hell, it was mostly the players.
What worked really well? The player interaction. The players really grabbed and ran with their inter-personal relationships. In most of the games, the cop, mobster, bodyguard and reporter had a great time manipulating and arguing with each other.
The build up to the final fight to stop Prospero also went amazingly well. As individual hints and clues started to come together, you could see things click in the players heads as they finally realized what was happening. The big clues were the hexing of any technology in the theater, the overly extravagant “special effects”, the fact that Arial really was flying and Prospero's single-mindedness to seeing the play go perfectly. The fight itself was fun to watch as well. By this time, the players had a handle on Aspects and maneuvers and declarations. One group took the brute force approach and just pummeled Prospero into submission and the other worked an on the fly ritual to counteract Prospero's own ritual.
What didn't work? The only thing that really stood out were certain players focusing on specific aspects and ignoring others thereby making their characters one-dimensional. The game itself otherwise worked. Of course, I play fast and loose and riff off of what is happening in the moment.
And that is the first manuscript I turned originally turned in. But, the editor felt it was too narrow and unbelievable. He thought it should appeal to groups wanting to play their own characters and have the potential to be part of an on-going campaign. From that advice, I added in a lot more investigating that could happen before the play happens. I gave the characters more clues to find before the show that would allow them to realize something was up and prepare for it. I stated up Sycorax and changed her from an outsider to a demon, as that was also suggested. I added all of that together and that is the version that was passed on to Chad.
In all honesty, I didn't feel as connected to the new stuff. I didn't feel it was bad but it wasn't what I'd ever had in my head.[/list]
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) I got to play the Pure Mortal bodyguard. And I managed to intimidate a troll! (with help.) It was a great session. Definitely in the top two of all the games I played there––and I managed to sign up for so many different sessions of DFRPG that people were recognizing my face by Saturday. It was great!