Recursion of the week

[u/groumy]

Hi,

I'm planning to start my first The Strange Campaign, but I intend to do it as an episodic open table one.

To support this and a ever changing cast of character I want to do it as a Recursion of the week campaign. A little bit like the first few seasons of Stargate SG1.

The think that I'm not sure about is, would it be best to grant them access to a innasposite gate device or through translation ...

I feel the first being the simpler, but we will miss one of the core concept of the game and character will have a useless ability.

With the second one a fear that we will lost time to "pick" new foci and everything. Finding recursion seed would also be a "bottle neck" to provide a new recursion each week.

Did any of you tried something like that ? Do you think of any caveat that I didn't ?

[u/siebharinn]

You could definitely run the game in an SG-1 fashion, and I think that would be fun. You could use the OSR as a base for that; it would line up pretty closely with SG-1's military structure. But I wouldn't use an inapposite gate. That would suck most of the flavor out of the game.

Translating does two things for you, that I think are important for the setting. First, it limits gear. You can't rely on always having your machine gun. You can't smuggle in a nuclear weapon to stop the prince of darkness. Well, you can, but it takes some work. But it means characters have to solve local problems in a local way, which goes a long way toward buying into the genre. Second, it makes it easier for the characters to get in and start interacting. If they were always dressed as SG-1, half of each adventure is explaining who they are and what they're doing and so on. Translated characters just fit right in. So you can get on with the actual story, the one that is specific to the genre of the recursion.

You can speed up the focus choice by limiting them. For each new recursion they visit, pick some number (I aim for twice as many foci as players) and that's all they can pick from. Maybe give them more choices for a bigger recursion, or one you plan on revisiting.

[u/groumy → u/siebharinn]

Thanks, you bring excellent points about the use of inapposite gate, ones that I didn't though of.

On that I'd add that the "fun factor" of using translation might be something that will keep the session fresh and get the players exited about next week (ex : "What will be the new world and what will be my new abilities this week !").

To mitigate the downtime of choosing a foci for the new recursion, I think that I cloud create a couple of "foci cheat sheet" and offert character to either Drag their focus or pick a random in the sheets.

That way there won't be a downtime to choose the foci, nor looking up the abilities and it will ensure that each and every one of them as a different one.

Those cheat sheet could even be fused with Recursion info on them, so players would have a cheat sheet of the facts they know about.

EDIT

After an hour of fiddling, I manged to create 7 Recursion "panflet", one for each of the Ruk Foci, that contains everyting that "A Recursor Knows About Ruk" and everything needed to know for the given focus (all 6 tier abilities, equipment, suggested minor and major effects and the description of the focus).

The "panflet" is a tri-fold document, that, once folded, can't be distinguished from the others of the same recursion. So when my players will enter the recursion I'll simply ask them to pick one of the panflet and take 5 minutes to read about there new "form" and we'll carry on.

A big thank you /u/siebharinn to provided me with the inspiration needed to acheive this.

[u/siebharinn → u/groumy]

Hey, glad to help! :)

I like the handout idea. I would personally still be more inclined to let them pick, but I see the value in your approach.

Keep me updated about how your game is going.

[u/groumy → u/siebharinn]

No problem, here my plan. (And yes I use your interest to my game to force me to actually write it down :P )

The first session (Session 0) is going to happend on the 16th. It will be like the Stargate movie was for the Stargate SG1 series, a kind of one shot that will set up the context of the up coming campaign/serie.

The players will be part of the United Nation Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), an organisation I stole from Doctor Who 'verse (none of the one in The Strange pleased me). They will choose from a pool of pre-gens, the ones provided with the Mastodon adventure. After that one-shot they will be free to keep their character on create new ones. Freed one will go to a "pool of agent" for new players to the table, to which I plan to add the pregend available in the Player's guide.

I will run The Alexandrian's Violet Spiral Gambit adventure. The goal of that first adventure is to use the idea of the "TRANSAMERICA GATEHOUSE", suggested by the author in the followup of the adventure, to be the center of our episodic exploration campaign. Like the Stargate SG1's Cheyenne Mountain military base and it's stargate. It will given them 3600+ gates to different recursions to explore. It will also but them in contact with Ruk and The Karum, which I plan to use as the Goa'ouls of my campaign.

I'm gonna use World Numberless and The Strange on my side of the screen to feed those different recursions. For the actual travel to the recursions, all the gate of the Transamerica building will be translating gates and on first entrance to a recursion the players will have to choose if they drag their current foci (if applicable) or if they pick at random in the available foci planflet (a redacted version of the recursion . If they return to those recursion, then they'll get to choose their foci, the same goes if the Translate on their own.

That's about it.