Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

As I wait for a compile to finish, I find myself reminiscing...

Ars Magica is the first place where I encountered Troupe-style roleplaying, where different gamemasters run different aspects of the same world. Normally, this just means that a given person is GM for a given night, and their player is an NPC. (In Ars Magica, where a wizard can stay home in the lab and get more powerful, it’s just fine to leave the NPC at home, too.)

I think one of the best examples of the Troupe style working well was when weregamer ran the scenario where a group of very low-powered hedge witches came to the magi of Amurgsval for help: the Mongol invasion was moving very close to their home town, and they couldn’t keep them away!

Now, magi of the Order of Hermes are under oath not to meddle in the affairs of mundanes, so even if they could have taken out the army (not implausible if we could take out their shamans), it would be against the Code and might lead to trouble. So the PCs started brainstorming alternate solutions.

One notion was coming up with a Mongol-specific plague. As it happened, the player characters had previously encountered one of my NPCs, a faerie hag called Griselda who had boasted of crafting a disease called the “marmalade sneezes”, which was a nasty respiratory infection that caused you to produce mucous very similar to marmalade. (She had a jar of the “blueberry buboes” in her stock, too, but “marmalade sneezes” was something she was very proud of.) So the magi paid a call on her, at which point I was running. I decided this was a tricky operation, so Griselda would need to get together with her two weird sisters to brew this up, and would need both ingredients for creating the special plague (including some sample Mongols) as well as a bribe for doing so. That led to a couple of adventures, one of which I ran (where the PCs had to go to the Strand of Nightmares to capture a Mysterious Semblance, which led to some interesting visions), one of which Paul ran (where the PCs got to procure the sample Mongols).

Now, it turned out that at least one of the Mongols the party captured were important leader types, and their shamans would be out scrying for them. But what to do if you have bait that will attract large numbers of Mongol troopes?

John Carey had previously run a scenario where the magi met Ænmishnu, a very old, powerful, and scary dragon, who made even our toughest warrior-magi worried. The magi decided that she might be happy to be given a nice snack of Mongols, but they weren’t sure there would be enough troops to satisfy her appetites, so they also went out and bought a hundred head of cattle and herded them into the edge of her domain in a swamp. With a detachment of Mongols closing in on this spot, our elementalist erected some fortifications around the swamp to make it look defended, and when the horde arrived, they made a token effort to attack the Mongols and then retreated deeper into the mists covering the swamp, then snuck out as fast as they could while the Mongols arrived.

The mists covered the actual consumption of the horde: all that could be seen outside was a wave of water that rushed out and swept around the edge of the swamp, crumbling the fake fortifications and sucking in all the Mongols and cattle. A small token was ejected from the carnage: a note suggesting that the magi return some seasons later. Since they didn’t want to be near a dragon who was in a mood to be feasting, they cleared out and didn’t come back for quite some time.

So between the loss of their vanguard and a Mongol-specific disease, the Mongols decided that the area containing the town that had asked for protection of the magi of Amurgsval was cursed and they swung around it as they went about their pillaging business.

With three gamemasters running different NPC groups, all the gamers got to have the fun of being PCs roleplaying amidst these mythic events; the gaming system held up very well for telling epic stories while still staying internally balanced.