This is part of a series of posts on advice for starting a campaign.
Go to Forget the Tavern: Introduction or to Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 1
In the first two Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! posts, I discussed how I use the That Was Me! activity to start a campaign in media res — with memorable action — and with a party that has a shared history. In those two earlier posts, I focused examples from a D&D campaign. Here, I want to talk about how I used it with a Night’s Black Agents campaign and the changes I made to better fit the context of our NBA game.
Night’s Black Agents That Was Me!
In the Night’s Black Agents game, our campaign frame was based on the organizing trope of Plegane Press’ The Gaean Reach RPG based on Jack Vance’s science fiction series (technically, it was inspired by Kenneth Hite’s article “Call of Chicago: Why Do You Hate Chandler Vaughn?” that applies the trope to other Pelgrane games. In the Gaean Reach, each character has been seriously wronged by an intergalactic criminal known as Quandos Vorn. The point of the game? Quandros Vorn must die! The PCs have banded together because each of them wants to kill Quandros Vorn. At the start of the game, each player gets to name why their character wants Quandros Vorn dead and they get to name one true thing about Quandros Vorn.
In case you don’t know, Night’s Black Agents is ex-intelligence and special forces operatives and criminals gone freelance who discover there is a shadow world behind the shadow world they operate in, and that shadow world is run by vampires.
So, as we began making characters, I told the players there was this figure Örümcek who might be an individual or a name for an organization, and that Örümcek was why they left their old job. Maybe Örümcek framed them and they were fired, or Örümcek killed a loved one and they’ve sworn vengeance, or maybe Örümcek was always two or three steps ahead of the PC, and the rules of their agency kept them hamstrung, unable to do anything but follow Örümcek’s trail of destruction and never able to catch and stop Örümcek. For whatever reason each PC was after Örümcek , the group had come together as they realized each of them believed Örümcek must die. Each chose what Örümcek had done to them personally, and they had a number of That Was Me! summaries to choose from to create a collective back story for their team.
As you can see, these That Was Me! summaries are longer than those I used with the D&D group, and you can also see that I included a question for the player to answer for their That Was Me! The third big difference between what I did for the D&D campaign and for the NBA campaign is that I divided theThat Was Me! summaries into two categories. The first round only included That Was Me! summaries that I wrote, and each of them had to choose one of those. The second round included those written by the players. Unlike the D&D That Was Me! summaries, the ones I used for the first round had specific connections to ideas I had for our campaign — the GM section of the core NBA book includes a chapter on creating a unique vampire (or vampires) for your game. I decided that Örümcek was at war with another vampire group. Whether Örümcek was an individual or a group, I hadn’t yet decided at the start of the game. So, I knowing the basic natures of these vampires, and a rough outline of how the war was being fought — a war in which the PCs were going to learn that they were pawns — I wrote each of the That Was Me! summaries as eventual clues and bread crumbs the agents could follow deeper into the conspiracy.
Here’s a few examples of what I offered them to choose from.
- Laying low in Triesen, Liechtenstein while the team was trying to access 1873 bank records, you got restless and wound up in the Take 5 Club Lounge. The booze was reasonably priced, the food good, and the billiards tables busy. You were surprised when the bartender slipped you their phone number as you ran out the back after killing a Norwegian satanic biker gang member with a billiard cue. The team cut and ran, and you haven’t been to Liechtenstein since.
- Question: What did you do with the number, and what do you know about the bartender who gave it to you?
- Tracking down a lead, you were given a backstage pass to a Mr. Bungle cover band gig in Venice. After the gig, you waited in the empty green room as instructed, and eventually the singer, still dressed in full clown costume, arrived. They handed you a flash drive and left. On the flash drive was a cipher key, instructing you how to decipher the set list of the band’s gigs. Since then, you’ve received tickets to six other gigs in locations across Europe. Each has given you good intel. For the most recent concert, you received another backstage pass, and like last time, it was just you and the singer, only you realized the person you were meeting wasn’t the singer you saw on stage or the person you met the previous time. When you raised the issue, the clown raised a finger to their lips to indicate silence, and handed you something.
- Question: What did they give you? And what kind of clue is it?
- After arriving in Manchester, England you found in your luggage a near-pristine first edition copy of El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman). Throughout the novel, individual letters have been cut out. Someone used gray ink to draw brackets around the section in which Molina recounts the third movie to himself. (You’ve identified the ink as Rohrer & Klingner scabiosa (iron gall dark grey) fountain pen ink. In the middle of the section was a note made of the letters cut out of the novel and glued to a Crane Stationery Wharton card. The message read: “Una historia encantadora, ¿no? Aunque prefiero la cuarta película.” The card was trimmed so that any personalized inscription was removed, and there were no fingerprints or other traces on the book or the card.
- Question: What do you think the message is trying to tell you?
- You ran into an old colleague drowning their sorrows at a street cafe in Barri Antic, the old quarter of Andorra la Vella, the capital of the small Pyrenees principality of Andorra. You’re not sure who was more surprised at the chance meeting, especially as you two didn’t like each other. Out of sympathy? Curiosity? Suspicion? You stopped and listened to their tale. They’d been framed for killing their lover. Woke up covered in blood and a knife in their hand. That’s when the visions started. They’re on the run, but they are too tired to keep it up. “The Virgin promised she’d show herself to me, just over there” they said, pointing down the street toward the early medieval Santa Coloma Church. “She didn’t come. Why would the Virgin lie to me?” They then looked you in the eye and said, “You should go. They will be here soon. The police.” You got up and watched from a distance. It wasn’t three minutes before the police took your former colleague away.
- Question: Why are you certain your colleague wasn’t lying about the visions?
- After a botched mission in Bratislava, Slovakia, the team split up and you were caught. You know your cover was blown, only you weren’t sure if they knew who you really were. You were held in a cell with two others, one of whom was asleep when you arrived, while the other barely acknowledged you with a nod and kept silent. Eventually, the sleeping one started shouting about angels. It was clearly a nightmare. When they woke up, they took one look at you and lunged, screaming about you being an angel who had come to kill them. The guards eventually dragged your attacker away as they kept screaming about angels. About 30 minutes later, you were let go. You know the police had you dead to rights, and you have no idea why they let you go.
- Question: In the bag containing your personal effects was $1,000 in unmarked $100 bills wrapped in paper with a small symbol drawn on it. It was the same symbol you saw tattooed on the back of the neck of the prisoner who had attacked you. What is that symbol?
In Forget the Tavern: That Was Me! Part 4, I’ll talk about how these That Was Me! summaries helped shape our Night’s Black Agents campaign.