Campaign Story Advice; Or So TFT killed one of the two PCs...

[Prootwaddle]

And I loved it! The sort of ineffective healing rules made it easy to ramp up the peril in my story, and actually kill off a PC in a dramatic way that really drove home the "brother against brother" narrative I've been building in my campaign. It was also a good growth moment for me as a GM.

The only problem is, it derailed my campaign slightly... and I've been rather rushing the conclusion as it is anyhow. I'd originally planned for there to be a short battle wherein the PCs and the Prince & Princess they've been traveling with would get captured by their former "Wyrmfire" magic academy classmate turned rebelling noblewoman's retainer... only to be freed\captured again by evil Imperial Troops and dragged before the emperor. I was then planning on having them sumo wrestle each other for the Emporer's amusement and also the fortune\misfortune of being the first test subject through his newly reactivated Minoren gate. They'd be rescued by the remainder of the party, the old Wyrmfire friends of both neutral and rebellion persuasion, having realized that they had been manipulated by the Emperor into fighting one another. The evil Emporer, his plan unraveling, would then flee into the gate and the mists of time\space. That would be set up for later campaign spin offs involving some of the old TFT modules.

Now, however, with one PC dead from a stray arrow, it looks like the conflict between the neutral Wyrmfire students and the rebelling ones is really about to heat up... any suggestions on how to handle that, and maybe also not rush the ending too much, as I had planned to cram all of the above into one session?

I don't want players to feel like everything suddenly falls into place all at once, yet equally I also want to moving things along to a point where the Emporer is no long in charge of his half of the country and a threat and we can get to playing some of the old modules from TFT in a two player mode. The Prince & Princess being open to negotiating with the rebels is an RP opportunity I'd be OK with pursuing later. I feel like not neatly wrapping up the Civil War may be a good idea in the long run? This being the first big campaign I am trying to partially wrap up I though I'd try and get some of the old hands advice on the matter.

[Skarg]

Especially in an ongoing large campaign, I like to set up the situation and the factions in it with various goals and plans, and then try to let it play out during play, let the players interact with it and make choices, and see what happens. My favorite outcomes are when the players and/or the gameplay surprise me with how things turn out.

I also like the starting conditions and NPCs' strategies to make sense. In your vision of what would happen, why is an emperor vulnerable in this situation? Is there a betrayal involved amongst whoever would normally be protecting him? If a bunch of wizards and factions are going to be present (and it seems like there could be even more, if there's a Mnoren gate involved), I'm imagining things could get extremely chaotic if several people start creating illusions/images of the emperor or other people, and/or use Shadow and/or Walls to prevent people knowing what's going on...

In any case, I'd figure out who all will be there and what they're all planning to do, and then play it out and see what the players do and let things play out to see what happens.

It sounds like there is an interesting choice about who the other player's next PC will be.

[larsdangly]

You might have trouble meshing any game with a high level of risk in combat to your intentions for your campaign. If your idea is that a campaign entails a story or plot that carries the PC's from one foreseeable situation to another, it is inevitable that fights will derail your plot if the rules allow for a high level of uncontrolled risk. If I were in your shoes, I'd either switch systems or change up the style of your campaign so the action is all a bit 'looser'

[JLV]

Frankly, I agree with Lars -- I've found, over the course of the past 35 years, that TFT actually plays a lot better as a more "sandboxy" campaign than it does as a controlled story arc.

Even if I want to use a story line, I create a series of vignettes or snapshots of major events, without tailoring them too much to any one specific character or set of characters. This creates something on the order of a "scene outline" with the connections between scenes being fairly open, since there is no telling how your characters may attack the problem, or even which characters that might be -- fatalities being all too common in TFT... You could think of it from the bad-guy's perspective and it becomes clearer. Those vignettes are how he's mentally outlined his plot, and since he doesn't know or care about our heroes when he puts the plot together, they don't figure prominently in his planning. you can then figure out the connections between scenes based on the players' actions (and whatever your timetable is for the culmination of the bad-guy's plot). That makes the whole thing more organic and less "railroady" than it would otherwise be...