About ten years ago, I had abandoned a very long-running chronicle set in the World of Darkness. I had initially been enamored by the dark and gritty tone of the first edition of the numerous core lines of the setting and my players and I found countless hours of entertainment, intrigue and introspection as we were all transported onto the endlessly wet nighttime streets and alleyways.
As the years went by the game lines began to steer further away from their initial vision and began to feel more like a strange kind of dark, supernatural superheroes game. While there’s nothing wrong with that kind of play, it wasn’t the same game that had captured me before and I found myself loosing my enthusiasm for running the games.
Then White Wolf announced they were ending the gameline, and produced the last books for each line. I found those last books fascinating; particularly the idea of ending the game setting. I happily announced to my group that I was going to follow suit and end my World of Darkness along with the release of these books and didn’t consider their feelings about the matter. I launched into what I thought would be a very profound and satisfying campaign.
Very quickly, the group began to miss games, and when they showed, the life seemed drained out of the room. Clearly, the group wasn’t happy that I was ending the world, taking away years of storylines and characters they had grown attached to. Their lack of enthusiasm affected me too, and so, with a whimper, and not the bang I had planned, I ended my chronicle, or perhaps it’s more appropriate to say, I simply abandoned it.
We went on to other games and had a blast creating new characters in new worlds with just as much depth and enjoyment as ever before, but there was always that dark, shape-shifting, vampiric elephant in the room that no one was talking about; the World of Darkness. So, with the revival of the X-Files, which influenced our games quite a bit, I decided that maybe it was time to dust off the old books and try to give the game a proper send off.
For my group, I’ll be running the Classic World of Darkness in a chronicle based off the Red Sign Ritual, which takes place just before the “End of all Things.” Since it’s been so long since I ran this chronicle, I wondered how to go about it, particularly how to start a chronicle that had been in torpor for so many years.
Luckily for me, I had kept a document listing every character used in the chronicle up the point in which it ended, but very little information on storylines, events and even my own personal touches to the world survived to this day. I know for sure I didn’t want to re-boot it (a practice I had utilized before one too many times). So if not a reboot, how do I piece together a chronicle that had lasted for over a decade? Sure, I had a long list of statistics, but many of them I had forgotten. Who were they, what were their goals or purpose in the chronicle?
I decided to not reference any of the past events that weren’t relevant to the story, allowing my players to recall anything in their character’s past they wanted, or allow them to forget what they decided didn’t fit anymore (or what they couldn’t actually remember), chalking forgotten events up as the effects of old age or what have you. This freed my time up to craft what I hope will be a compelling and satisfying send-off to the characters they loved so dearly.
Reviving this old chronicle has me excited again, and the stress of thinking I had to account for every story, every event and wrap up every loose end I started all those years ago went away, when I realized that, no, I didn’t have to do all that work! My players will let me know what events or loose ends are important to them and taking their cues, I can help craft a story that will be more cohesive, meaningful and satisfying to them than any all-encompassing chronicle wrap-up I may have tried to force on them with storylines they may not care about or have long-forgotten.
So if you’re also considering resurrecting an old chronicle you may have kept less than perfect records of, try this approach, and just allow all the information not relevant to your reintroductory story to fall away and allow your players to pull the strings that are important to them!
Alex Montoya
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- Retro Review: Cyberpunk 2020 - November 25, 2016
