Seat of My Pants Super-Spy Adventure

I didn't think it was going to happen, but I actually managed to squeeze in a real face-to-face game session this month. My wife is sprinting towards completion of her grad school program and my gaming schedule has been taking a beating as I pick up the parenting slack. But this afternoon there was a last minute window of opportunity and a majority of our play group was able to assemble for a session of Knights of the Astral Sea.

Unfortunately, one of the players who could not make it was the character who seems to be driving the current plot arc. That would be Queen Genevieve of the Autumn Court, who was about to lead an expedition into Faerie to reclaim her realm from Maoist ("meowist") rebels when last we left the party.

That left me in a bit of pickle. Genevieve's input was critical for the next stage of the mission. I could have let her stay in the background, but that would have felt very unsatisfying (not to mention unfair to the player). What I really needed was adventure that let other characters step into the spotlight while maintaing the ability to reintegrate Genevieve and the other absent characters in subsequent sessions. In a nutshell, I needed a one-shot.

I'm really comfortable with one-shot adventures, both for convention games and for my long-running Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG series, Slaying Solomon. But my intent for this campaign was to make things much more of an old-school sandbox. My challenge was to preserve that kind of off-the-rails, player driven story while still trying to end the game in a certain way (pretty much where we left off last session).

First off, I needed a story focus. For that, I took a look at the characters in the campaign that could use the most face-time. The obvious choice was Elspeth, the 1960's-era super-spy from an alternate history earth where WWII never completely erupted. In that world, Britain was a fascist state and Nazi Germany was the dominant power. Elspeth left her own world to escape the questionable morality of her own government, but Elspeth's player was still very much interested in returning to that world for a bit over-the-top super-spy action. And while the player has really come into her own in the Buffy game, she seemed to be waiting for her moment to shine in this particular campaign.

Next, I borrowed from my Fiasco experience and employed some narrative trickery. Rather than playing out how a subset of party might have found their way to Elpeth's world, I simply started things with the characters already there. The four player characters were all separated and various states of incarceration in a castle in Bavaria, each of them lacking memories as to how they got their. The players would need to figure out their present situations, reunite with their comrades, overcome local authorities who were justifiably paranoid about their sudden appearance, and finally return to Faerie to resume their original mission. If they were able to kill nazis and avert a nuclear war along the way, so much the better.

The best thing about this approach is that I hardly had to plan at all. The initial setup was sufficiently interesting that most of the session simply flowed from the initial premise. I had only vague notions of how the party actually arrived on the world and I invented more details as the character's memories started to improve.

True of all one-shots, the most important thing was timing. I needed to dribble out information over the course of the session so that the characters would eventually be able to return to Faerie with some sort of closure. Either I'm getting really good at this or I got really lucky. The session ended with the characters killing the SS mastermind and commandeered his helicopter to fly to the an ancient fortress that the mage character had deduced was the gate back to Faerie. A dastardly plot to activate sleeper agents inside the British nuclear command was foiled, but enough elements remained in place that future adventures on this world can easily be justified.