We ran our final session of Ashes of Angels a couple of
months ago. While not the longest campaign I’ve run, 12-plus sessions is a
pretty healthy run for me these days. The campaign started as a Lamentations
of the Flame Princess game and transitioned to Dungeon Crawl Classics
near the end. The conversion was pretty easy and injected enough interest back
into the campaign to keep it running for a few more months.
Everyone enjoyed the campaign, but what ultimately ended it
was my desire to move onto new games, settings, and genres. Specifically, after
a couple years of bleak horror games, I’ve grown weary of nihilistic “the world
sucks and you suck too” campaigns. My players, I could tell, were starting to
grow bored with the constant character attrition. They want a chance to grow
attached to the PCs for a while. I grok that.
Our last session revolved around resolving “Intrigue at the
Court of Chaos.” I’m not going to go
over the whole thing because that module is mostly just a series of riddles and puzzles. It’s very good and very weird, but to recap all
the events would be boring and spoilerish to the module.
Some highlights, though:
- The PCs all readily agreed to work for the various Chaos
Lords that approached them in their dreams. Belinda the Serpentblood, of
course, tried to charm the agent of Law.
- Madeline the Gravedigger apparently knows how to speak
Enochian and was able to decipher the angelic script on the Bull of Law’s
horns, sparing the PCs a fight.
- The party did a good job of figuring the puzzles, although
the rainbow liquids and cradle of clay puzzles proved to be harder than
expected.
- Liberal use of flaming oil and black-powder bombs made short
work of the party’s Lawful clones.
- The race back to the Chaos Rose while running away from the
Crystal Guardians devolved into a slapstick farce as the PCs kept stealing the
Yolkless Egg back and forth from each other mid-comnat.
- Garritt the warrior burned all his Luck and was bodily taken
to Heaven by the Crystal Guardians where Jack Chick’s Giant Glowing Faceless
God personally cast him into Hell.
- Back in the Court of Chaos, the fight over the Egg continued
until someone fumbled a roll and dropped the Egg, breaking it open and causing
the entire Court to collapse. The surviving PCs managed to step thru a rip in
space-time back to Berlin.
Afterwards, we as a group decided to step away from the
campaign and try some new things. We played three sessions of Mothership that
went very, very well. Many of my players had never tried a percentile-bases
system before and they loved how easy it was to pick up. Mothership’s a helluva
game.
Ultimately, though, we decided as a group that our next game
should be something totally different in tone and setting. So instead of semi-historical
horror-fantasy we’re shifting to optimistic space opera—Star Wars! I’m pretty
excited about it, and my players are all stoked about their competent and (semi)heroic
new characters.
