Metamorphosis Alpha Episodic Campaign

[dekelia]

I always find it difficult to maintain an RPG campaign. I can make time and opportunity to play RPGs but it is difficult to have a consistent time and consistent group. As I've been getting into MA, I've been thinking about this, along with the fact that I want my MA game to be very deadly, and I've decided to attempt to do my MA campaign more as separate, single session, episodes, than a continuous campaign.

The more I've thought about how that would run, the more I like it and think it fits in with what I like about Metamorphosis Alpha. My plan is to have a number of ready to go, 4-6 hour adventures. These adventures may or may not be linked to any previous adventures, in fact, they could take place at radically different times in the timeline. I will use some pre-made adventures, and some I design or make up as we go based on some premise. I'm thinking of this along the lines of the Outer Limits TV show or any number of the X-files style shows. Some of the characters may or may not be consistant, but the world is basically the same.

Here are some ideas of adventures to give you the idea:

In Flight - pre event:
- Dark Outpost (Jim Ward Eldrich Ent adventure) - While the Warden is still functional (pre-event) they send out a search party to find out what is wrong with the outpost they detected with their long range scanners. Maybe this is what caused all of the problems to begin with. The players play space marines.

Recent Post Event
- I may steal some ideas from MA4.
- Maybe the ship starts waking up marines.
- Could play android or robots repelling the recently mutated.
- PC's could have to try to repair ship sections.

Far Past Event - Standard MA adventures - This will probably be the time period I play most.
- Marines woken by the ship, but hundreds of years too late. May have memories corrupted.
- Marines are woken up/cloned by the ship - however, they have all mutated and when the ship discovers it they are hunted down by security to dispose of them.
- Standard villager scenario where they don't know they are on a ship. Could start in lots of different places. Each episode might be a different village in a different part of the ship. I definitely will have at least one based on "Non-Stop" where they are between decks (maybe under the city).
- Some outside group finds the Warden floating in space and boards it for parts.

These would not be run in any particular order. What I like about this, is it lets me come up with adventure ideas on any part of the ship and just place the PCs there. One thing I like is that the adventures almost always start out with the characters having to figure out what is going on in this one and trying to survive. The game is really to stay alive. It is possible that if enough actually live through one of these, we would reuse those characters at some point on another adventure.

Does anyone else play this way? How has it gone?

[Finarvyn]

I haven't tried a MA campaign like this, but the episodic approach has worked great for me in past OD&D campaigns.

It's also highly similar to the way a lot of my favorite "Appendix N" works were written. (Most Robert E Howard, Zelazny's Dilvish, Leiber's F&GM, and so on.)

I think as long as the players are aware of the format you'll do fine. For my episodic OD&D advantures I often start out by saying something like "you know that treasure you found? You spent it on wine, women, and song. Now you wander into the next town, not quite penniless but close..." If they want to buy stuff I encourage them to do it before we end a session so they can afford it.

[kesher]

I think it'd be awesome, especially bouncing back and forth through time. There's so much possibility for players finding or experiencing something in one episode and suddenly realizing it's somehow connected to another episode that happened at an entirely different point in the timeline ...