Crimson Sundown

Maybe we can bring back the light

I have been participating in pen & paper role-playing games since I was in the 8th grade.  In that time I’ve been a Jedi Knight, a Shaman, a Vampire, a Drow sports agent, a Kazekage for the Sand Village, and an insane Changeling just to name a few.  For the longest time I felt like my calling was to be a player character, to simply react to what a hard working game master / storyteller would give to me.  This had always been my lot in the world of RPG’s.

I had tried my hand at GMing a few times during my high school days, but it was a mixed bag at best.  I always had fun ideas, but my initial problem was that I would have one really great idea and cinematic, but didn’t have anything else.  I didn’t plan very well, I gave too much to the players, and I couldn’t improv very well.  Suffice to say, I was taken advantage of, but not in a bad way.  What my friends Steve and Tom taught me in those sessions where they beat the ever loving crap out of me, was what to plan for.

Player characters are an interesting breed, and with having the GM experience and my own what I found is very easy to understand.  Players want the most power and positioning, because they want to ensure that their character makes it to the end.  They want to be able to say once a GM closes their book, laptop or RPG screen is, “Not only did I make it to the end, but look at all the stuff I did and got!”  Just like in real life, perhaps even more so, they want to brag about their accomplishments.  They want to complete the goals that were set out for them, either determined by the GM or by themselves.

I didn’t get back into GMing seriously, until I started reading the White Wolf system.  This, pretty much everyone knows already.  What was not readily apparant is how I would take the system and use it to this very day.  When I made my first World of Darkness campaign, it was all Vampires.  What did I want to do with it?  I can’t even remember to be honest, but I had accounted for having large amounts of people in it, and I introduced a character who has lovingly haunted me for a little over four years.  To quote Fight Club, his name, was Jimmy Jackal …

With each passing session in which I had to plan for, Jimmy’s life came to me in new small doses.  Stephen King once wrote about how sometimes, a story just comes to you even when you aren’t thinking about it.  You’d start writting down your ideas, and a thought or a character from a previous story would come crashing in, and you wouldn’t even subconciously know about it.  This is what happened to me.  Jimmy Jackal just kept showing up in my plans.

It started in London, and he was there causing trouble but also guiding the PC’s towards what they needed to do in order to survive Gehenna, the Vampire Apocolypse.

In New York he wasn’t immediately known, but he did have somewhat of a role to play.  I never told Pedro this, but his character Damen Locke who was a Malkavian … he was embraced by Jimmy Jackal.  Jimmy saw great promise in the man, in both brothers to be specific.  For some reason he knew that the priest would come in handy at some point and had a role to be played.  That destiny is coming …

In Paris, he had a more immediate impact but one that many had to think about.  How was it that Jimmy Jackal had just left a position of power in London and immediately ascended to a high ranking role in France?  Odd indeed.  He was there and this was where the death of Jimmy Jackal took place, at the hands of Longinus … or did it?  Even then I knew that he wasn’t going to die, I had plans for him to come back.

Yet that adventure fell through and by the time I had found another group of players, the new World of Darkness had come out.  There were points where the two worlds could cross over, assuming you wanted to go that way.  For me, I had to finish what I started.  In order to finish it though, I had to figure out where it began.  I figured out what Jimmy Jackal was planning, and that was for the supernaturals to not live in peace, but at least to live in understanding.  The difference was, you didn’t have to like the other groups.  Hell you could loathe them for all he cared.  All he wanted them to realize though was that they all have to live in a balance for each to continue through.  If one of them gets too powerful, it throws off everything and they just end up killing each other.

With that established, it gave me the opportunity to begin a true crossover, one where I could explain why all these different groups were getting together.  Next issue I had to address of course was, where did it all begin.  New Orleans …

Mostly because the city is a feel good story where after such a terrible tragedy such as Katrina, the town got back together and rebuilt as much and as quickly as possible.  Yet there are still parts that are doing badly, and that causes conflict in real life, and it can obviously do the same in game.  This was the spot I wanted to focus on, and I wanted to do it in an effort to display the city in different lights.

So why this very long, tired blog post?  This weekend, marks the start of the New Orleans RPG end game.  I have all of the things that I need to get across written out, and they all have consequences.  All the last bits of the adventure are going to come out, and at some point in the near future, the group will have either succeeded or failed.

My favorite GM, my friend Steve from High School once told me how you had to approach a campaign such as this.  He told me that for most of the campaign, you want to tell the story and flesh out your characters.  You want them to survive.  Sure they can get hurt and go through tough times, but in the end you need them to make it to the end.  Once they are there though, the threat of death is real.  It has to be because the characters are fighting for their lives, and in order to resolve whatever conflict you’ve given them.  You can only hope that they have built the character and planned just as much as you have in order to do that.

That is where I am at right now.  The characters are at that dangerous point where death can come if they don’t play the cards right.  No matter what though, and this is a thing that I will emphasize, this is the story of Jimmy Jackal.  Will the characters help me make it a story with a happy ending?  Or will be the last we see from him?  I look forward to seeing the result, either way.