I didn't get nearly as much done today as I had hoped. A mixture of just not feeling great and not making good life decisions has led to this. In my defense, my day hasn't been entirely unproductive, it's just been uncreative.

A lot of what is left for Segira is just assembling it, which is really nice, but there's one big thing that's still going on that I'm really having issues with, and that's the intro adventure.

The issues with the intro adventure are three-fold:

1. What can you have that every possible group will enjoy, because Segira doesn't lock you into a particular faction?
2. How can you make a plot that is compelling and dramatic without forcing the player characters into a good versus evil conflict where there's only one morally acceptable path?
3. What do I need to do to actually make it work?

In the Hammercalled Quick-Start, I made the closest thing to a dungeon crawl I've ever written. For this, I want to have things go more loose and fluid.

1. Anyone Can Play

The way the adventure is set up is that it's built around the notion that the players will be vying for the attention of a local warlord in the mountainous regions of Segira.

Rather than having battle-maps or a particular sequence of events, players compete with a timeline and have a short list of important characters and places. They also face an OPFOR, though who this is depends entirely on their own role (GM improv; the OPFOR stats can double as friendly NPCs if the players are from the appropriate faction, and vice versa).

This is a strategically important region, because it would provide a way around the stalemate happening in the plains to the south, but also because the whole place is fortified (both naturally and by design) and provides a great base to launch assaults from then return to if you like hit-and-run tactics.

However, the local warlord has a major role in the conflicts in the region; a Segiran partisan previously unaligned with any other movement, whoever he sides with will be considered to have that much more legitimacy in the struggle, to say nothing of the whole matter.

I think this gives some room for any faction to participate; NATO-aligned or Soviet-aligned groups play an outsider role, while other Segirans can be trying to form an alliance and the plot still works.

2. Beyond Good and Evil

Sorry, I like working in Nietzsche references when I can.

The original adventure I was working on touched on Syria-style events with a chemical weapon attack and everyone pointing fingers in the aftermath.

First, that's incredibly dark for a game, and I just didn't feel like it was the right storyline to put in.

Second, unless you want to write it as "Plot-twist: It was the players/their enemies" relative to whatever happened, you wind up with someone who's a defined villain, breaking the first requirement for the adventure.

There's a lot of things that can go into this, but basically it was always going to end up with players either effectively saying "We're going to be moral and we have no part of this." or "We're awful people who don't care about war crimes."

I'm attracted to moral ambiguity, but the thing about moral ambiguity is that it has to be ambiguous. If something is blatantly amoral, it doesn't pass that test.

Likewise, Segira's not trying to glorify war, but it's not trying to burrow itself in mud either. It's about people caught in a hard place trying to make the best of it.

This new plot, with the warlord, is basically 50% Heart of Darkness and 50% 12 Strong. He's ex-Royalist, but has no attachment to the existing contenders, so he's willing to look pragmatically at the situation around him.

At the same time, he's interested in perhaps being influential in the government of a new Segira, if he can play his cards right. This gives him an incentive to work with nation-building third-parties, or with any Segiran independence movement that can help him move toward this goal.

He is, however, a warlord and military man, and he's willing to use tactics that are euphemistically described as pragmatic and more accurately described as underhanded. Parties that play their cards wrong may be sold out.

What do I need to do?

The thing that I really like with this setup is that it gives players lattitude in how to accomplish their objectives, which means that I just need to create "attack surfaces" for their own goals.

The idea is that players need to do two of three things: convince the warlord that they are the winning side, ply him with supplies and resources, or do things for him until they become invaluable.

Rather than fleshing out individual encounters in detail, the adventure covers the course of a few weeks; Hammercalled is built to handle combat engagements very quickly, and is generally built to flow well.

Each event that comes up will provide some advantage or disadvantage for the players, forcing them to keep on the ball. I'm half considering using a random table here (with a big "You're the GM, do what you want!" caveat stapled to it) for some of the exterior events.

The main fixed timeline is OPFOR; players need to act before OPFOR manages to win over the general, kill them, or both. In a surreal moment, the two groups may actually get a chance to meet, under the warlord's supervision, which could lead to some interesting outcomes.

Wrapping Up

I got very little done today on paper, but it was some good thinking time as I've been outlining all of this stuff and getting ready to write it. I'm still hoping to get Segira "done" tomorrow, though I'm probably not going to have a publishing ready version until Wednesday or maybe even Thursday.

First thing on the agenda tomorrow are sample characters. They shouldn't take that long, though there is always the hard part of making them be distinctive. I'm contemplating reducing the number of talents characters get because backgrounds pull double-duty there, but I'm not sold on it yet.