I had a vague idea of how I wanted the Father Coughlin storyline to come to an end, but I really hadn’t decided on the specifics yet other than that I didn’t want to drag it out too much longer.
Then, a few weeks ago, someone posted on an RPG related Facebook group about having an idea to run an adventure where the characters are trapped inside a different game. Now, as a rule I’m not a big fan of the Arcade/Murderworld sort of stories that have shown up in comics occasionally over many years as filler material. Escaping the Escape Room, back before Escape Rooms were even a thing. They’ve been overdone, in my opinion, and it’s difficult to see much originality in each new incarnation.
But I was really intrigued by the meta-RPG aspect of this idea, and so I launched into a temporary D&D-ification of my campaign. The amount prep work involved would be significant and I didn’t want to go through that effort for just a session or two, so I ended up building a story structure that would be broken down into six distinct parts. I’ll be grouping them all here under the Chapter 10 heading just for organizational purposes, but in reality this single “chapter” will likely encompass more material than all our previous chapters together – at least in terms of the amount of effort required to set them up!
It’s been a serious time commitment so far – figuring out what spells, class abilities, etc., I’d need to bring over, then implementing them in Mighty Protectors rules; finding a series of fairly complex maps (unlike the crude ones I usually draw on a washable grid on game night), figuring out ahead of time enough of what each segment of the story would entail so that I could work out the necessary monsters and NPCs, create the necessary tokens, and in general write up some guidelines to flesh out how the meta-world would work. Remember, I haven’t played D&D since the 80s, so I ended up reading through a lot of material about the 5th edition rules and classes to try to make the cross-over as seamless as possible.
We’re now two sessions in, and in spite of my having screwed up on a number of issues, it’s been very well received.
Firstly, I had to create character personas that corresponded roughly to typical fantasy-game class archetypes. During the meta-game, the characters would not have access to their normal gear and would have most of their powers switched off; exceptions to this were intrinsic defensive abilities like Velocimancer‘s armored skin, or points put into raising basic ability stats. I ended up with the following document as a guideline for the available classes:
Secondly, true to the D&D side I wanted there to be something of an actual economy in this world, so that the characters would have to do things like pay to stay at an inn between sessions, buy arrows to replenish supplies, and have the opportunity to purchase mild armor or weapon upgrades from merchants. (I’d also planned to have a limited number of magical scrolls or potions available from one vendor, but that list wasn’t ready yet for the first session, and as that session ran its course it seemed less necessary, so I decided to focus my time elsewhere.) So as I built each segment of the chapter I had to make sure there was a reasonable amount of treasure available for looting, without providing too much. Then I needed a price list to hand out to players once they’d met up with some vendor NPCs.
All that accomplished, it was time to delve into the real details of Chapter 10, Part I.