Has anyone had any problems or situations arising with Shackled City in the area of "making the campaign come alive" for the players? I have and thought I'd both share them and ask for others to post their experiences in this area.
Somehow with this "canned" campaign, the players in my group never seemed to bond with the location and care about it nor its people. They simply acted as if we were playing a module, which we were.
I have veteran players who don't usually take such a tack so I've never had to even worry about such a thing for years.
So I mentioned the problem to them and announced that starting with the following week, the campaign was going to change. It would no longer be a canned campaign. It was now my campaign and it would be run Gericko style.
The next week, I set several goals. I upped the drama. I gave them a good chance to make some "friends" in town that they would care about, who had taken risks to help the group. The combats included innocents and chances to be heroic. I made sure they felt appreciated by the cityfolk they interacted with. I set up a crush from one of the NPCs towards the big burly fighter. Thought he'd run from it, but he actually embraced it.
Basically I encouraged the group through encounters to change from gold and adventure level hunting to adventuring for a cause.
The campaign shifts from this focus to that at the low levels before tying things together in the storyline of the campaign. I needed something sooner than that to motivate my players to care about things. So I used the people of the city as the motivation. They sacrificed for the party, so the party would want to sacrifice and risk themselves for those they had come to know and appreciate.
Every chapter now will include a list of things in the city that will help build that repore between adventurer and citizen.
Now, has anyone else had to deal with making the "canned" campaign setting come to life? What problems did you have and how did you deal with them? etc.
Dear Gericko,
it tremendously helps if the campaign is something personal for the characters and players alike, and it´s the DMs job to make that clear on from the beginning.
The Characters of my personal SCAP once were all orphans of the Lantern street orphanage and had childish streetfights with those snotty highborn brats, who later would become the Stormblades, they know Patch and trust him because they did that when they were children and they adore Sarcem for the same reason (Valanthru, claiming to be an orphan of the city, too, on the other side made them suspicious, because they didn´t expect such a degree of amiable social bluntnes from an elf ...)
I think that keeping it personal is one of the keys to sucess, because it grants the motivation to stay in character for the player.
I´m looking forward to enjoy more discussion on that topic - gratefully yours, Claremont the Elder, Lord Buckley
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Dear Gericko,
it tremendously helps if the campaign is something personal for the characters and players alike, and it´s the DMs job to make that clear on from the beginning.
What I have done that has helped in zounds towards the players totally buying into the campaign was to set it in my homebrew world and place it a distant time in the future: but all of the previous campaigns and games that we have run before as a group has made an impact in the society and the history around the campaign.
Now the players often times hear or learn something that they as players remember being a part of in a past game with other characters and they love learning that they had a hand in shaping the future (present).
Robert
One of my players has a wife and a house in Cauldron. Other than that, I need to create more reasons for them to care for the city. Especially the rogue who is "just passing thru" as he calls it.
Potentials:
Buying Keygan's shop.
More romances?
Wow, I cant believe you had this problem! Cauldron is the most important NPC in the entire campaign and my players loved the city from the first ally encounter. Even last night as they were approaching Skull Rot one of the players worried what might come of Cauldron should they fail to foil Adimarchus. The two most important things I did to help my players connect with Cauldron were 1 - Establishing and maintaining a newsletter, done as town newspaper. This really made the players feel connected to the place especially when the began reading about their own successes and failures (and those of the Stormblades). 2 - After the opening scene,the PC's all wanted to go to a tavern to discuss what to do next. They asked me for a local watering hole, and I told them to create their own. They named it, mapped it out, and I filled in the NPC. It has been their tavern ever since.
Just some thoughts, but Cauldron, and its people truly are the most important motivator for the entire campaign. Good luck, I hope my suggestions help, and let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
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Yeah, even if you take it out of the Greyhawk world it should still be in the crater of a volcano. That's memorable. And heck, the huge glossy poster of Cauldron with Dungeon 97 is enough to get PCs intrigued. Once this intro grabs their curiosity it shouldn't be too tough to set the tone for some good role-playing of NPCs. And more than likely your players have heard the hype given to SCAP -- they ought to be impressed.
-W. E. Ray