Numenera: Auspar - The Long Game

Hope everyone is enjoying the festive period. I want to say thankyou for the two and a half thousand views over Christmas week.

 Me and the TSC group have been on hold for two weeks and this week things finally start rolling for Saturday's game. Firstly there will be two player additions to the game; two gentlemen by the name of Danton Scalar and Gur Tallan. The player of Chloe will be taking over a new role of Jarvi Keito. With this addition the game dynamic has changed. The setting will be taken out of Auspar and into the Steadfast of Thaemor and the wider world. I'm still wanting to learn more mechanical story elements and so my second addition will be a homebrewed version of the Stars Without Numbers' factions system.

I don't know how much of next season will be influenced by my seriously long playtime with DA:I but factions and war have become a little bit of an inspiration.  I knew I was sowing the seeds of a war but the style of how it was presented in Dragon Age gave me an idea. I am always keen to run a living world and for a 'war' to take place there are factions and therefore needed a mechanical narrative aspect to them. The reason I chose the SWN system was twofold, one because Adam Koebel /@skinnyghost 's thorough walkthrough of turns on Twitch and YouTube, but also because part of the initial group for TSC was brought together through that game.  I may perhaps in future dedicate a small portion to the GM turns I will take with this system. For now I have set up the initial parameters for five factions, with a spot open for a player faction.

These factions are the Nibovians, the Purple Order, The Shadow Guard, the Hawk-Eyes and the newly created Shadow Guard. The latter is an amalgamation of three factions; Melch, the Rings of Melch and The  Grapnel Guard. The narrative explanation for this is due to the new leader of Auspar and Thaemor is under Melch's control, but due to the Chancellor not  showing signs of madness, the City Guard have sworn allegiance again to the monarchy. The name itself will not be used in game and will therefore not serve as a narrative link between the merging of factions. Although much can already be inferred from season one about the state of affairs in the monarchy, I am keeping the full disclosure ready for if one of my players explicitly links it all together.

As for planning things have gotten far easier since I moved the game out of the city. It has allowed me to use the Numenera Maps Glimmer and since I'm using Roll20, covering the entirety of them in places to go. These are now due to a list of quests with the average first destination placed on the map for player reference.  As I was talking earlier of a player faction, this is where the Darkperch quests come into play, the more they do for Darkperch, the more of a faction reputation they build. There are also Auspar quests, the city is currently being rebuilt after the disaster but if my PCs want to return to this place then they can help the rebuild efforts. The last list is bounties. As revealed in season one, the Hawk-Eyes are not just big game hunters they are also bounty hunters, although this fact is lesser known. As multiple members of my PC party are affiliated with this group I thought it fitting that there would be presented a few straight up, generic kill quest; of course with a few twists. My players also have an option to follow individual quests about their own characters as well as having the option to generally explore.

For the generated quests I have turned to a very useful tool I had used previously to help me tie all the narrative threads together for the first season. That programme is Visio, a flowchart maker. I have found these invaluable for plotting for my essays at University and have found endless uses for structuring narrative. This programme also allows me to map a quest chain. The points I  plot are specifics, such as background lore, cyphers, or roll conditions. They are dispersed between plot points, narrative anchors that act as waypoints. Between point A and B is not my decision, I can only try my best to get my party to B if that is my intention. This also allows me to look at where I present player urgency.

Sometimes a sequence of events will result in a GM asking questions, even if unintentionally. Usually it is these latter ones that cause an on rails to suddenly go off track if given enough freedom. To me this will always happen, I tend to improvise my games and sometimes even I decide to do something cooler in the heat of the moment and not really think about what it would mean for the rest of the game. So  I have tried  to at least guide myself on the questions I should be asking by plotting those as the 'events' that my players must get to, allowing anything else that happens in-between to occur as naturally as possible. There is however also a portion of control you can take, limiting situational factors as well as understanding your players motives rather than their characters can help change the course of action by putting what you want to happen after an event that a player will be drawn to and complete. Saving life, restoring peace, finding a love for the rest of their life, or a one night stand. Knowing how your players' needs  play their characters and their character's needs will allow you to guide the plot if you so desire, as long as you meet the needs of the individual.  Using this format has also allowed me to link events together, to create parallel timelines and events that do not have to occur sequentially but are linked in some way, allowing me to create a layer of complexity in a visual fashion.

• GMs: Research flowcharts and try to write up the last encounter for your players. Analyse what factors contributed to the event and what decisions were available to your players, not just the ones you asked.
• Players: Tell your GM about your short term and long term goals, tell them what motivates you as a player and as a character. 

To my readers, if you have a favorite PC, NPC, location, theme, event or Numenera, in fact any suggest for season two and you will be duly accredited, I'm hopefully going to include a lot more of the community in my games from now on. 

/Drew - Tesla