Hi Alex
Genuine question from someone who has never (not yet anyways) played D&D: what would have happened to the campaign in Rusty Quill Gaming if the party had gone tpk?
Have a nice day!
I mean you already saw a TPK in the Paris arc.
Unfortunately in an entertainment show you can’t just say “rocks fall everybody dies see ya!” So I had a couple of deus-ex-machinas cued up just in case but a TPK has to hurt so each TPK would have cost us at least one core character either in physical death or massive personality changes due to trauma etc. Also NPCs would treat them differently.
As I’m relistening to RQG recently, I was struck by the fact that Hamid starts the story with a little bit of power, grows into a lot of power, and then basically has all of that power stripped away from him. He loses his magic, his family and money matter a lot less in the new world, and he presumably lost a ton of public respect and influence during Cairo with the scandals. Was this a deliberate choice, or just how things worked out with the story? It’s really interesting that when so much of Hamid’s arc was about learning to be responsible with power, he ended up having very little.
So Hamid’s arc was always to my mind an examination of personal responsibility in a world with a horrendous power imbalance.
Given that, there were a few ways it could have panned out depending on the player Bryn’s actions:
1) Hamid could have been corrupted by his power.
2) He could have rejected it.
3) He could have grown into the proper wielding of it.
4) He have been denied it and been forced to adjust.
I think in his heart Bryn was hoping for number 3 but we ended up at number 4.
To be clear, this was not a foregone conclusion, I would not be arrogant enough to claim complete control over the story that unfolded but I would say #3 would have been hard to achieve at my end without falling foul of power fantasy tropes.
As it is, I often catch myself examining the ending of RQG and looking for better alternates if I were to travel back in time and do it again but ultimately that’s not helpful. It is what it is and I should be glad we managed to bring the plane in to land at all!
In RQG, did the party ever clock that what the British Museum sent to François Henri was the Rosetta Stone imprint for the translation that Carter drunkenly bemoaned in Cairo?
I quite liked that little microcosm we saw of the consequences of upending infrastructure with no change management, particularly as that idea echos across the campaign.
Oh you caught that did you! I don’t think they ever did. I could be wrong though. I love putting in little stuff like that, stuff that doesn’t really matter but gives you something to discover on a re-read.