How I failed at Red & Pleasant Land

No Fucks for Zak

So you may be aware of this awesome game setting, A Red & Pleasant Land. 

The (now defunct) local group I was playing tabletop with was running through someone else's game/railroad, so I decided to take some of the mixed, manic, and semi-linear thoughts I'd been kicking around since I'd purchased the book and run a g+ hangouts game. I decided for DCC because, well, have you read it!?

So made this (obviously incomplete) 0 lvl occupation list for kicking things off: 

So far, so good, right?

I figured the next step was a good kick-off situation - something with immediate action. Eventually I hit upon the idea of the PCs being the meal/entertainment for a Nephalidian wedding. All the PCs (so the premise went) had the Charm effect they'd been laboring under wear off at the same time. I gave them a couple rounds of action to do things like check out the banquet table, view the surroundings, etc. - and then the Red King's forces attacked. Caught in the crossfire, their unleveled characters dropping left and right, the players sensibly ran, though not before grappling and staking one of the wedding party (used a croquet mallet to drive it in! :D ).

Below is the map I started with, which went about 80% unused. The wedding itself was taking place next to the flooded area on the far right side.

So the players book it south to that cemetery (the place full of crosses, naturally) and there they found a merchant's shop. I'd decided that the merchants are actually all clerics of The Mirror - some vague worship of self-reflection, lighted places, and boundaries between places - and that they formed a network of resistance across Voivodja, active in a way the hidden communities in the Orb Loc were too scared to be. That really never came up in the game though.

Instead they agreed to a simple test of trust and skill - clearing the basement of some troublesome mome raths which were probably kept around for just such moments. In exchange, the merchant gave them some equipment and directions to some allies who could get the PCs out of the crazy land: through the Long Hall/Haul...

The party easily got past a Rose Nageire and into the Hall:

And that's when I lost it. You see, though the map shows a long, winding path (each circle represents a full Turn of travel), from inside it appeared perfectly straight. Just a long, wallpapered, belamped hallway stretching off into the vanishing point. 

I'd had a lot of fun stocking the rooms using the many lists in the book. For each one I randomly determined: the type of room, what the encounter would be, an item, and what special properties it possessed. 

 Turns out, however, that what is fun for me to generate doesn't necessarily make for fun or interesting play. I know, that should probably the furthest thing from shocking or news.....but there it is all the same.

What it ended up being was a LOT of slogging. The PCs didn't know how long the hall was, or that by entering the side rooms they could short-cut to further along, so for the most part they just kept going forward with little or no deviation. 

There were some really enjoyable encounters for me to run. There were some puzzling moments. There was a lobster adopted for a brief time. But mostly it just became repetitive: 

You travel for a time down the hallway. You find an object seemingly out of place. You travel down the hallway. You find a door (which were all lettered and spelled out a message in both directions of travel - whatever). You travel down the hallway. You see a figure up ahead. You see an aquarium up ahead. You find another door. You travel down the hallway. 

Who knows how long you've been going? There is no day, no night, no reference to anything normal besides doors, wallpaper, and whatever objects and animals they would find. 

Characters leveled up. Characters died. Characters were charmed by vampires and wandered off with them.

The players were very, very patient with the fumbling monotony I was presenting them with.

So what went awry? How did I manage to take this interesting, intrigue-ridden setting and turn it into something so...blah?

I now suspect that I was missing a baseline of normal to contrast against. Instead of madness, I presented disconnected non-sense. Though I had formed a sense about how the encounters and factions present in the various rooms were interacting around the PCs, I presented no compelling reason for those rooms to be explored. And in the absence of all that it really was a long haul, and not a particularly interesting or enjoyable one.

Blinded by my excitement for a cool new toolbox, I forgot to use it to make something playable.

Anyway, here's to you not making the same mistakes I made, and me making different mistakes in the future.

And also, here's some other maps I made!