Thursday, July 12, 2012

Turmoil In Truk

Working more on Turmoil In Truk, the mini-campaign I'm writing for IHW: Pigboats. This is surprisingly difficult for me. I'm so used to running a game from a postcard of incoherent notes that laying all this out in a comprehesible-by-mere-mortals manner is... jarring. As the beta testers said, the point of this is not so much to make a fun game, as it is to lay out how one creates a mission for Pigboats. That it should be a fun game is secondary, but to me only slightly less important.

I am currently working on the Pearl Harbor section. One of the things about any of the games I run is that the time away from the mission is just as important as the time on the mission. The structure starts in Pearl because that's home base, and it gives many advantages:

1: The players have time to feel their way into their characters' heads.
2: The PCs have time to bond with each other before the shooting starts, when they will have to depend on each other for their lives.
3: It gives a space for relationships outside the ship to happen. If there's on thing that ruins the flavor of a game, it's a bunch of PCs who are socially inept monkish orphan recluses whose only joy in life is killing. In Pearl, they may be far from their families, but they may find girlfriends, buddies, and enemies. These things give spice and meaning to life.
4: It gives the GM a time and place to hold training runs, to familiarize the Players with their PCs' jobs under safe conditions.

This short time in Pearl will be doubly precious to the PCs as depth charges rain down from above and attempt to batter their sub into pieces.

-clash

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