Spelljammer Academy: Starlight Arcana, 8 Sessions (Sep-Dec 2024)
What it was:
An open table follow-on to my Spelljammer Academy mini-campaign. It was supposed to be run spelljammer-esque 3rd party content at the regular friday open tables
A vehicle to play through kick-started planar content - Path of the Planebreaker, Starlight Arcana, 5e Planescape and Planestriders Journal for LevelUp5e all came through the door around the time this was running.
The first of these open table runs I feel I fumbled.
What worked:
Pretty combat heavy stuff compared to what I usually did since this was more orthodox D&D; bad guys just drawing down and going straight to combat, straight-up murderous goblins as opposed to the ones that talk I usually run.
Adapting a big written adventure into episodic chunks worked better than I might have thought.
Retrofitting the campaign to Realmspace worked well; I dropped the ground location into the Dales, stuck some of the others on Coliar and then used Karpri in Realmspace for the ocean world
Pre-gen characters - I abandoned building characters with people who came without one - instead of having the table sit around while I worked with one person, I gave them a half dozen pre-gens to choose from and got things rolling.
What didn't:
It took too damn long to get the party onboarded with the continuing quest at the start of sessions. I tried having NPCs ask for help, tell them what was going on, etc - it all seemed to take too long while I watch the lights of interest gutter in their eyes.
Trying to maintain progress with different crews over multiple open tables - often the player who knew what was going on was playing a character who was just useless as a conduit of information from one session to the next - leaning too hard into their characters incapabilities through low intelligence or drunkeness. Characterful but sapped momentum.
(NPC) cast of thousands - even though practically it was three NPCs - but they were two different groups the Spelljammer Academy and the Starlight Arcana NPCs and it made the whole thing drag
Did not vibe with as many of the players that settled in as regulars compared to other campaigns. Not to say individuals were bad or did anything wrong but the table vibe was just not one that energised me.
Spelljammer does not work as a welcome wagon game - it is a 'twist' too far for beginning D&D folk and I was still often getting first-timers at the open tables.
Lessons learned:
For episodic one-shots, get things rolling quickly to a place where players are making decisions.
You can trust players to self-start where the setting is relatively vanilla but drop folk into a new or unusual setting and they will stall poking at the scenary to get a grip on where they are. Brancalonia is a relatively familiar setting, the uniqueness is the vibe and the non-lethal mechanics; Starlight Arcana/Spelljammer with the sky-sailing ships and the planar-influences plot was harder for people to grasp.
People far too often bring 'quirky' characters who are severely compromised as functional heroes - either unmotivated, unintelligent, unable to communicate, not actually an adventurer, etc. Getting them to do actual heroing was friction that needed to be overcome at the start of sessions.
The sessions
- started with Storm Kings Thunder opening chapters (salted with clues for Path of the Planebreaker) where the Gathering Storm opening to SKT was supposed to be the Prime material jump off to a planeswalking Tyrant's Key adventure.
- rotated to Starlight Arcana when some of the players from the first session wanted to continue the Planebreaker adventure but were unable to join for a few months. Had I started direct into Starlight Arcana and done only that, that would have worked too but the SKT material got me a couple of nice sessions.
Actual sessions went like this:
1 Gathering Storm - Nightstone town/keep
2 Starlight Arcana - meet Ayla, get Astralabe
3 Gathering Storm - goblin caves above Nightstone
4 Starlight Arcana - rescue Yarfer
5 Starlight Arcana - meet Sajal on Coliar, recruit Nex
6 Starlight Arcana - Coliar catacomb, Sajal joins
7 Gathering Storm - cloud giant castle + Starlight Arcana - tomb of the Starlight Knight
8 Starlight Arcana - Ocean planet
I had plenty of material to work with in the Starlight Arcana book - both the core path and a bunch of the NPC loyalty quests - these broke down into nice short-cycles with neat pick-up/stop points that worked well with the episodic nature of the open table sessions. Integrating the Storm Kings Thunder material worked by just making the villains the same bunch.
Of the players, we saw the now very familiar pattern of a few folk being most of the players - of 27 players who sat to at the sessions, 1/3 attended more than once and the top four attendees sat in a third of all the seats across the campaign.
On the characters - this campaign was an evolution of practice for me in that I handed out a lot more pre-gens than I ever did before - the set of characters who appear on the front of Spelljammer Academy. I found a couple of times with Brancalonia that someone coming along and building a character if they were new to the game was a big time sink with the other players sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I ran some open tables with pre-gens only and they worked well so I decided to adopt that as a rule.
With both of the input elements - Starlight Arcana and Storm Kings Thunder - being orthodox D&D, sessions had a lot more combat, leading to a lot more fore-grounding of the 5e mechanics which really highlighted the super-powers of your typical 5e character. That got really dull for me. I felt like the perfoming-monkey 5e DM as so often described in RPG Horror Stories and my Friday nights are too precious for that.
By the time we were running up on session eight I had had a number of duff sessions in a row - and while I had more material, I just had no enthusiasm to run it. I had considered running the Desert planet of Starlight Arcana for a 'Realmspace is solved' capstone then pivoting to the Tyrant of War adventure from Path of the Planebreaker. Instead I just scrapped things after the Water planet was completed and declared the campaign over at that point.
Just stopping was easy - it was drop in open table so I stopped offering it and done. This coincided with end of the year so it waws relatively neat.
All in all it felt like the material being fed in was good but something about the combination of combat grind and player vibe with the setting just left it feeling no fun at all. After this I decided to curate my players more and move to a more old-school hex-crawl exploration side of things to shove combat a bit to the background.
No comments:
Post a Comment