Looking back at Quest campaign
Let's start here: I am one of those folks who frequently ends up GMing a game. In college, I discovered the game Legend of the Five Rings, which is, as I'm sure you can imagine, a bunch of weebs who wanted to make a tabletop game. I'm not the one to comment on the ways in which they do this well or not, but as a weeb myself, especially in college (shout out to the anime club), I needed to play it. Sadly, no one else wanted to host it, so I was the one. This meant that I became the de facto GM for my friends through most of college. As one example, when a friend was describing how he really wanted to GM well for me because he learned from me, I pointed out that his first GM was actually another guy, Doug. Doug said, "no, no, you were our GM in college, it's your title." All this to say, I've hosted games for many years and many times. So, it was really nice to be a player in Mint's servers for a while. But, I got the bug again and decided I wanted to host Quest, a game that I've already mentioned I was interested in for several years.
I had started with the simple idea: what if you did a Metroid-style RPG? What I mean, of course, was the idea of having characters start as established adventurers with some power and then take that from them? There are dozens of articles about how do you hook your players in and I've dealt with enough players to know that while the game is a contract in which the players work together to accomplish their in-game goal, some players will buck against this in one way or another and sort of force the rest of the party to make them come with. This was not something I figured I'd have to worry about with this group, but I wanted to give them a strong incentive and a real hook to care about shit in the world. So, I created a villain, made him the initial quest-giver, and had him trick the players. Tbf, all of them kind of saw that coming, but it was still fun, imo. To really seal this, I took from each of the players an item with high sentimental value, giving them two reasons to hate the villain: "I want to be strong enough to kick his ass" and "I want my personal treasure back." Overall, felt like it worked out pretty well, although I probably should've taken something different from Mint's character, whose favorite thing was his bird.
Anywho, the next thing was "okay, how do they get to a level of power greater than they were at beyond 'level up?'" Like, what's the in-universe reason? And what's the bad guy really after? These are questions that I think about and that I probably worry too much about making sense, to some extent. Anywho, this split into a few things: the bad guy wants these four objects for his plan and the good guys need to collect four other objects to power up -- one for each. I can't remember if that or the sentimental item came first, but those things became inter-twined for me. So, how do the sentimental items which the BBEG took in the first session get back into the hands of the players without them raiding his castle because his magic made it so they can't fight him? The answer for me was that he's actually possessed.
From there, I kind of spiraled out some in-universe lore about demons, how magitech worked, a sprinkling of how magic worked, and an ancient demon war that culminated with the banishing of the Demon King. Anywho, trying to tie some of that into the game for the players to observe or notice was a little tricky; I tried to throw those things at them early and sometimes they took the bait, sometimes not. To give you a sense of what they knew going in, here's a li'l campaign intro thing I wrote. Turns out I like writing fantasy lore, who could've guessed? (everyone, Rose, you're a giant fantasy nerd.)
In terms of the game itself, I tend to present problems to players that don't have clear solutions because I want them to come up with them. Playing "guess what's in my pocket" and being wrong isn't fun, so I try not to have an answer every now and again. Sometimes, this works well and other times, not so much. Near the end of the campaign, for example, I asked them to scale a mountain in a storm not unlike the one in Forknife where it deals big damage as long as you're in it. I didn't have an answer for that and it ended up being basically a fetch quest that the players kind of came up with. The players seemed to have fun, which is what matters most to me, but I was also unsatisfied with my own answers here. On the other side, you have the train murder mystery, where I basically played it Brindlewood Bay-style, in which there isn't a static answer toe the mystery--it can change each time you do it--and Ghost came up with a solid answer that solved the mystery satisfyingly for all of us. Actually, to be honest, Ghost is a really good puzzler--they figured out most of my puzzles, even if they were intended to be solved by someone else, which is okay.
Something else I really wanted to do was bring my players in more; historically, I've had a very "this is the story I want to tell and you guys are characters in it, messing with it." That's obviously changed over time and it became more "here are things I have for you, do what you will" and I think that worked fine, too. But, I want my players to feel more invested by having their own sort of thing in the world; so, Mint made up the continent that his character, Barquq, came from and gave him a backstory and I threw together stuff on that, so we collaborated on his character's homeland. Witty gave me a fair amount about the small town their character grew up in and their family, so I populated the town; Ghost gave me notes on what kind of stuff they think would work for the little dragon-lovin' island Abel came from and when they said everyone is dramatic, it launched one of my favorite gags that fainting couches are an integral part of the culture of his kingdom. And Shark gave me more than I could've asked for not just in terms of her character's family, but even came up with nonbinary pronouns that the parent used! It was super cool stuff! Mint also suggested the use of magitech (which I think I could've featured better) and suggested using Dragon Quest sprites, which I actually felt like really helped me out in terms of sort of conceiving of monsters to use and also gave the game a bit of a certain sort of fun, chill vibe? This is just kind of how I felt about it.
About 75-80% of the way through, Mint had to step away, for personal reasons and, frankly, the system was not hitting for him. This was difficult literally and figuratively. The hardest part in a literal sense was that the "dungeon" they were on was one I made for Witty's character to go through and now I had to figure out how to write Barquq out. I think I did pretty well. The players seemed really affected by it and it even sort of resonated in the sense that when they went through and did Witty's New Dungeon ™, Vesper, Witty's character, tried to do a self-sacrifice and the remaining two said "ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT" and literally Kool-aid-Man'ed their way through a wall. It was very honestly one of my favorite moments and I think one which had some good emotional resonance for the players.
Overall, it was a lot of fun. I feel like I both put a lot and very little work into this campaign world. The latter is sort of demonstrably untrue based just on my Obsidian, not even counting when I switched over to Notion, where I have a moderately robust database of NPCs, locations, etc. (use Notion for tabletop games if you can, it's really cool, imo). I also really liked fiddling with Foundry, it allowed me to do some fun things, some of which were fucked up (see: the invisible maze). Huge shoutout to Mint for turning me onto Notion and letting me use his Foundry. I won't rehash my thoughts on Quest; as a system, it's too basic and probably works best for short, punchy campaigns and stuff of that nature. But, we had a lot of fun, overall. That came down to my players and I having a great rapport though; I think this group could have fun in D&D if we tried hard enough (the modifiers though...). But I'm glad we gave it a go; narratively, I just had fun writing it and I had a lot of fun with my players.
One thing I need to mention is that Shark took an item that basically gives you the day's headlines, so, I created an NPC to give those reports. I named him Corvid Coldman after Korva Coleman from NPR. I really tried to hit that perfectly sort of dial-tone voice and delivery that most NPR news hosts give and the players loved it. Like, enough that when they got an airship, their first thought was "can we find Corvid Coldman? we have to meet him." So, of course their next quest was to save him from a dimension of doppelgangers. Name a more iconic love story than a random NPC you made up on the spot and the player characters, I'll wait.
Some fun facts before I go: the world was called "Rodimet", which is, of course, an anagram of Metroid; the starting island was called "Rastbirn", which is an anagram of Brinstar. I think there was something with Loscene, the starting town, but I cannot remember it. Other notable names include "Docolaro" and "L'strauia", which I think you can guess. The last two I was proud of were the Kingdoms of Kush and Kerma are just the names of kingdoms from ancient Sudan.
There is one lingering question which the players asked and I refused to give an answer to: what happened to their companion Barquq? Did he kill the Encroaching and escape the Dragon realm? We may never know. But, if he does, you can bet that I, Corvid Coldman, will let you all know. This has been your Albatross update.