Exchange of Realities

Due to insurmountable time zone clashes, meddling relatives, and all the side effects of vacation, I didn’t game this week. It hasn’t kept me from working, though.

I talked about travel this week—travel and how to make it narrative-worthy even if it wasn’t a story in and of itself. As you might have guessed, I have a certain amount of experience with those sorts of in-game wanderings.

The big one was the spring and summer of my first year as a GM; my group had a friend to rescue, but due to some rather ill-advised comments to someone I thought they’d have the sense not to offend, they had to take the long way around. Which meant they were practically crossing the world to get to where they were going.

A journey by boat of a couple thousand miles isn’t going to be uneventful, and this one was no exception. Over the course of it, they picked up (and in some cases dropped) a little over half a dozen allies, got to look into the pasts of two PCs, saved a peasant village from an attack, received a rather unnerving message, were witnesses to the possession of one of their allies, met the primary antagonist’s three offspring (the unnervingly friendly Rukan and the considerably more demonic twins Krata and Esemeli), lost a friend to betrayal, foiled a kidnapping, were captured and then turned the tables, dealt with a plague…. suffice it to say they kept pretty busy.

Why did this work? Most of what I did served several purposes. One, almost all the events set up later events or did something else for the group (dealing with the village issue gave them a chance to hear about the “Red Lady”, a cover identity for Esemeli; the stop where they received the message both set off the possession incident and gave them the NPC responsible for the betrayal; the plague incident allowed them to hear about someone downriver who helped with several things that facilitated the overall rescue mission). Two, it let me show them the passage of the miles and the months by replacing forest in the background with plains and meadows, autumn leaves with snow with rain with sun. Three, while it didn’t cover every day in painstaking detail, it did give the players the time and opportunity to see how their characters and the dynamic between them changed over the time without having to just guess at it.

Shorter journeys in my work tend to be less involved. Mostly, I go by what I register in my own travels: a few landmarks, a major event or irritation, basically a few things that would stand out on the trip.

Either way, I don’t use narrative tesseracts—regardless of whether the journey is discussed or simply summarized, there is world between Point A and Point B, and realism is maintained.