Backlinking

There was no game yesterday, so there won't be any review this week. Instead, I want to talk a bit about fan continuity. Once you've run a fair number of games, you start to get a reasonable backlog of plot events, NPCs, and even artifacts. Sometimes these jive with canon storyline, sometimes less so. Either way, there is often a temptation to draw in elements of previous stories to the current one. There are a number of pros and cons to this.

First, and most obviously, these characters and events are already documented; if you're like me and keep logbooks of old adventures, you may even have character sheets with the last known damage configuration of people or equipment on them. These are pretty easy to drop-in. Second, if you have players in the current game that played in the previous game, they already have some knowledge of, and attachment to, the prior material.

Each of these coins have an opposite side, of course. The old material may be built for a previous incarnation of the rules, making conversion non-trivial. There are no conversion rules in A Time of War for MechWarrior characters, and taking the skill bonuses over wholesale is a dangerous proposition -- a +4 means a lot more in A Time of War's 2D6 system than it did in Third Edition's 2D10 system. In addition, although players may have attachments to old NPC's, they might not be positive -- some NPC's, even popular ones in their time, become silly when taken out of their context. Finally, new players in your group won't have the same back-knowledge as the old players, resulting in a natural divide within the party. The results of such a divide vary wildly based on player group composition.

I have historically been a big fan of backlinking -- it gives my players a sense of continuity within the universe, and a feel that their actions will last beyond even the campaign and the group of players. Some of my adventures, though, have taken significant excursions from the canon plotline, making continuing them more difficult in the Jihad arc. The most significant of these changes was likely the destruction of CS Narbonne in September of 3063 in my timeline, after an attempted Word of Blake takeover of the ship. Given that the Narbonne would be plot-silent until Case White, that didn't seem such a huge problem to overcome. Given the largely new-party composition this time around, though, I decided to punt my previous plotline, for the most part -- Narbonne participated as destined in the Case White landings in Ten Years on Terra.

Even now, though, I haven't completely cut myself off from my previous universe. Dante-class frigates are rare, but not irreplaceable, and certainly not in the 3060's, the height of WarShip building in the 31st Century. If I chose to build in a convoluted scheme that involved a fourth Dante, either built after 3063, or somehow to reveal the Dante #4 was, in fact, standing in for Narbonne during the events of the previous game, I could retain continuity. Indeed, with clever plot placement, I could even cause player to re-evaluate the events of the previous game in the light of new revelations, making the earlier campaign seem like a side-arc in the current one.

It tickles me a bit to think of connecting the two campaigns, but I haven't come up with a reasonable way to link the events of the current game to the event, and even if I did, the point regarding having new players still stands. If I were to connect them, it is more likely that there would be subtle references to previous NPC's in Word of Blake documents discussing items actually pertinent to the plot of the game we're actually playing. These become more in-jokes than anything else, and kept to a certain level, they can contribute to the attachment of the older players without splitting the party into the knows and the knows-not.