Today I’m going to talk about Jon’s campaign and the direction it’s taken, the circumstances with which it’s occurring, why it can work, and why it may serve as a cautionary tale for future campaigns amongst our group.
Our party managed to defeat a demon in an attempt to save the country from genocide, nice and easy right? Well due to a mixture of circumstances and a magic amulet charged with the blood of demons, the party has been split up, hurled through time. It’s a strange development. Jon is using this time travel to showcase major historical events in the history of his country that we as Player Characters have never witnessed, so from a story-telling perspective, it works. As far as actual actions, so far, not so much. Our time travel activities have been largely NPC interactions, minor stuff. The only person who actually took charge of the situation to have some fun in history was myself.
Allow me to elaborate, we had a brief interaction with a couple of soldiers in a tavern, I had a teammate seduce one of the soldiers (she uses her sexuality as a weapon) so that, while distracted, I could pickpocket him. He ends up taking a liking to my team mate, and tries to take her out of the tavern, and she attacks him with a called shot his groin with rather painful results. We lot the guy, and Jon rolls % for quality of loot and it turns out he has a masterwork quality weapon on him, which I take. I then try to sell the weapon to a local merchant who deals in weapons, but he doesn’t have the coin in stock to buy the weapon. I roll charisma and end up trading the sword for the deed to his shop. A few days later we time jump again and end up around 200 years down the line where that same hop is now owned by a master blacksmith reputed throughout all the land. I seek him out and trade the deed back to him for a weapon worth a fortune. This details my thought process, I sort of planned this out - I anticipated time skips, and I gambled that the merchant’s shop would become more successful with time, and it worked out. These sort of actions are something that’s possible and something any DM can use as an “actions have consequences” angle that works both positively and negatively. Do you help the stranger on the road? No? They become a bandit that creates an era of anarchy in the future of the country. Yes? She becomes a successful guard that ushers in an era of security. One of those is more beneficial to an adventuring party, the other is better for the survival of the civilization as a whole.
Unfortunately, the other player characters didn’t have much going on during this time. A negative of this process is that we’ve lost our powers, the thing that makes us special in the greater story. They focused on regaining their powers whereas I feel comfortable with or without them. Yeah, that sucks, but why should I fret over it? I don’t worry about the past. I’ll figure it out as I come to it. My thoughts when I’m a player character tend to be at the behest of whatever I think my character wants. This differs from my thoughts as a DM, which normally focuses on the groups as a whole. I hope this time travel adventure differs as things progress, as it’s largely been narrative so far.
There’s a common theme in post-apocalyptic literature right now. We’ve seen it in books like Wool, Metro2033, The Remaining and many other stories. That theme takes survivors of a post-apocalytic event underground to live in tunnels, bunkers or subways. We’ve seen it in movies, and television, too. Of course, this idea isn’t new. And authors have been writing about it for decades.
But it’s got me thinking. So I decided to do a bit of research. The results were startling.
Most people probably have no idea that some governments have already prepared for a fraction of their population to live under the surface. North Korea, China, Vietnam, Switzerland and even the United States are all examples.
You may remember a passage in the book, World War Z, where North Korea moves their entire population underground when the zombie apocalypse hits… but did you know China has an entire underground city? Or that Switzerland is one of the safest countries in the world due to the tunnels they’ve built deep in the mountains?
Governments have been preparing for the apocalypse for decades. It’s fascinating when you think about how fiction is in some ways, not fiction at all…
Well, it’s certainly not something invented by Metro 2033, and not a recent trend in general. It appeared even in Beneath The Planet of The Apes.
Barcelona-based Elisa Ancori demonstrates her obsession with the sea with an intricate visual exploration of humans entering into it. Her characters are part koi or jellyfish or lionfish, sometimes caught in the awkward, in-between of metamorphosis.
