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
How These That Was Me! Shaped Our NBA Campaign
As I said, each of these offered both clues and bread crumbs that would become meaningful as the player agents hunted Örümcek and responded to the vampire war however they decided to respond. I wrote twice as many That Was Me! summaries as player characters, and many of them included other themes. By choosing the That Was Me! summaries they did, the players were telling me what they found interesting. In doing so, they helped shape the overall arc of the campaign and the nature of the supernatural. I was playing with the idea of Angel Hair, which is associated with UFO sighting and manifestations of the Virgin Mary. By choosing the That Was Me! summaries involving the Santa Coloma Church and the Virgin manifestations and the cell mate screaming about angels, the players unknowingly directed me toward a supernatural vampires rather than alien vampires.
Likewise, by choosing the Mr. Bungle cover band, the Kiss of the Spider Woman, and the Triesen bartender That Was Me! summaries, the players gave me three ways to feed them information and three ways to draw them into the mystery. Clues and breadcrumbs that would catch the player’s attention because they’d chosen them. But again, who was the Mr. Bungle informant, what was their agenda, and who were they working for — Örümcek? Örümcek’s vampire enemies? a third party? I didn’t know at first. Likewise I didn’t know who left the Kiss of the Spider Woman in the PC’s luggage; just that I could drop Kiss of the Spider Woman references and use the novel as a cypher key. And the bartender of indeterminate gender. A phone call or text, or showing up in person, had potential. (As the game progressed, I decided the bartender was an innocent who just really hated the satanic Norwegian biker gang.) Also, while the player didn’t know it, they chose to add a satanic Norwegian biker gang to one of the two cospyramids.
None of these initial That Was Me! summaries, no matter how obscure or weird, were random events. As the PC agents were hunting Örümcek, they were caught up in its web. However, this wasn’t a Brindlewood Bay style game where the players’ interpretations of facts made them true. I had some specific facts set down after the players decided their One True Thing about Örümcek. Before they stated their one true things, the only element about Örümcek I’d chosen was its name. I don’t recall what rabbit holes I fell into, but after they’d defined their One True Things, I followed the Turkish spider connection to Bulgaria, and through Bulgaria to ancient Thrace as one path, and to Angel Hair as a second path.
I decided Örümcek was a splinter faction broken off and at war with an ancient group of 8 vampires who mostly hibernated in some strange quantum state and appeared as something like a menhir and where hidden away in secret caves. While hibernating, they could communicate with their servants, vampire cultists for lack of a better word, and supernatural creatures. The vampire affiliated with Örümcek was out of hibernation, and Örümcek had killed three of the other vampires. (At the start of the campaign, I didn’t know if Örümcek was a vampire, an organization serving that vampire, or a name for that vampire’s faction). With that knowledge, I wrote the This Was Me! summaries, focusing on the weird with the understanding that what they meant as we played.
As I said, this wasn’t a Brindlewood Bay type mystery. I’d decide how the This Was Me! summaries played out, but I let the narrative help me decide that. I decided the bartender would be an innocent because that not being affiliated with the vampire conspiracies seemed the most interesting option to play off the decision that the Norwegian satanic biker gang served one of the vampire conspiracies. (When I wrote them, I was focused on the bartender as a meaningful NPC and thought the bikers would be a weird red herring.)