Frankly, writing an advice column on good GMing wouldn’t be that novel when I myself usually just defer to Robin Laws on the subject. On the other hand, I’m happy to share my own experiences, for what they’re worth. While my plan for today was to look at my most recent GMing experience, the midnight madness D&D session of The Elemental Skeins, run by Ryan Downing, Chris Slater, Josh Upton and myself at this year’s Gottacon gaming convention, I got a little lost in the leadup, and will have to talk about it next week instead.

I don’t know if it’s the soft water, the grey weather, or simply the number of awesome GMs who live in this city, but when there’s a convention in Victoria, it is often the venue for a large, unorthodox D&D game. This started with Wizards of the Coast’s Living Greyhawk campaign, which made such a huge impact on the local gaming scene that the crater now supports more distinct ecologies than I am probably even aware of. For context, Living Greyhawk was Wizards’ first crack at a large-scale “organized” D&D campaign, designed to support the release of D&D 3.0.

The ground for Living Greyhawk had actually been broken by TSR’s Living City campaign some years before, but the hope was that Greyhawk would give players unfamiliar with Living City’s long heritage a fresh starting point, riding the coattails of the fresh new version of D&D, which was already being heavily promoted at conventions.

The basic premise of these Living campaigns–which still exist today in the form of Living Forgotten Realms, Pathfinder Society and others–is to expand a single D&D campaign over tabletops around the world. Players create characters under a universal set of house rules, enforced by their own GMs under the authority of a larger pool of regional and international referees, while GMs download special scenarios created specifically within the constraints of the campaign. The end result is sort of a mix between D&D and what we now think of as an MMO: players work to advance their characters, earn rewards and win bragging rights within the narrow constraints of a game played by an international community.

Campaign log and certs

When Greyhawk premiered, gold and experience rewards were tracked–as had been the case with Living City–on log sheets, while magic items were given out in the form of small certificates (certs), which were unique to and included with each adventure and needed to be signed by the GM upon acquisition. Scenarios themselves would be released once or twice per month, with each one “premiering” at a specific convention before becoming available for other conventions a couple months later and kitchen tables a couple months after that. Obviously, this incentivized convention play, but not nearly as heavily interactives: the proverbial unicorns of Living Greyhawk scenarios.

These were a holdover from Living City, and I don’t know if there is any sort of analogue in the Living campaigns of today. They were unique scenarios–each was run only once–that combined several concepts into the shell of a live-action-roleplaying game. The LARP forced players used to playing around a table to congregate in a room, auditorium or bar–if we were lucky–and solve some problem introduced by the non-player characters–typically played by every GM the convention coordinator had available. Once the player characters figured out the nature of the problem, it was time to split into parties, sit down at tables and game out the solution in more conventional D&D style. This earned special rewards, many of them created specifically for the event.

Within this shell, players could earn recommendations for player-run meta-organizations like knighthoods, interact with the campaign’s regional coordinators, who did their best to attend interactives whenever possible, and–most importantly–visit the marketplace: a table at which they could spend their in-game currency on “certed” magic items not normally available within the strict structure of the campaign.

While the non-standard rewards of interactives were their main draw for Living Greyhawk players–many of whom found the concept of LARPing intimidating, if not outright distasteful–the format held a certain appeal for the Victoria GMs involved, allowing it to endure long after Living Greyhawk itself had fallen by the wayside. There is something undeniably epic in the idea of eighteen heroes meeting to figure out a plan of attack, and then working together to execute it. In a scenario, where the characters needed to attack a castle, they might split up such that six attack through the tunnels underground, six cause a distraction at the gates and six featherfall into the courtyard from an airship floating above. While the GMs and writers planned for most contingencies and did their best to steer players towards this prepared content, there was always a chance that the players to improvise and go off-book, forcing the GMs present to improvise a solution. Also, because they were only ever run once, interactives could have important story ramifications. If the players lost and failed to stop the threat, it just got worse.

Even the title is a forced Lovecraft reference!

This was true of an interactive I wrote in September-October of 2001 (my first year in University) which, unsurprisingly, involved a cult that worshipped fish-men and resulted in large amounts of player-kill, which–to my credit–was pretty standard in year one Living Greyhawk. The players failed a rescue mission and directly caused the death of an important political figure, subtly changing the story that BC and Washington players experienced in the months that followed.

To digress on this a little longer, I’m pretty sure the module took me the better part of a month, and existed entirely on UVic’s mail servers, as I didn’t have a computer of my own at the time. Flipping through the hard copy, it clocks in at about 25 pages of single-spaced 10pt Times, including player handouts, and is really quite terrible. Frankly, I’m shocked that I ever had a hard time with university papers after a project like that, though its existence may explain the tardiness of one or two.

The coordination for this kind of multi-table cooperative play was no small feat for the writers and GMs involved, but the payoff was so spectacular that it has influenced the way the Victoria community has approached large gaming events ever since. I may one day get to a Gottacon post-mortem, but first, I’d like to continue my story of how we got to Gottacon in the first place, beginning in 2002: life after Living Greyhawk.

Henceforth–at least until I get too busy with other projects–I will be posting here twice per week on Tuesdays and Thursdays–maybe more often if I end up getting better at keeping a schedule. What form these posts will take is still unknown, but I’ll try to come up with some categories to demarcate what you can expect from them. My expectation is this will last about a week: if it lasts longer, maybe it will be worth looking at from time-to-time.
First post goes up tomorrow, so see you then, I guess?