Aslan Route Interlude: Mid-Season Break

"You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." - Donald Rumsfeld

The sun and the beach are calling, so I must away for the moment; but I've learned a number of things from this season so far.

First, what works best for this group at this stage of our lives is what Savage Worlds calls a Plot Point Campaign; a selection of scenarios loosely coupled into an overall story arc, with limited agency for the players. Give the party a patron who sends them on specific missions, but lets them work out how to achieve the objective for themselves; Charted Space works well for that, as the party is generally weeks away from their patron. RPG gurus online extol the virtues of sandbox play, the West Marches style, the Traveller free trader game loop, and so forth, and frankly it all sounds great; but I've tried those approaches with my crew of exhausted, jaded grognards in their 60s, and they don't work for us. There comes a point when it's best to accept that and move on. You sit down to play with the players you have, not the ones you had 40 years ago, even when they are the same people.

Second, said Plot Point Campaign needs to be agreed as part of Session Zero. Unless the PCs are specifically designed for the campaign, the players will decide that the current PCs have no motivation to engage with the story. Rather than come up with their own 'daring schemes for the acquisition of wealth and power', however, they will then sit there and wait for another commission to be offered. Which they will also avoid unless an acceptable patron engages them to undertake it. I've noticed this in several campaigns run by other GMs with various mixtures of the same and different players, so I don't think it's me, or them; it's something wider than that. Maybe it's a generational thing, and boomers are especially prone to it?

Third, and related to the first two, I've tried various things as scenario and campaign generators for the Aslan Route, in an attempt to avoid prewritten scenarios; 5150, Five Parsecs from Home, Fronts, Mythic, Stars Without Number, The Scheme Pyramid, Traveller, and Just Making Stuff Up, most of them offscreen. None of them has produced viable scenarios for this group, although once I have a scenario, The Scheme Pyramid is pretty good for working up a location for the PCs to infiltrate or assault - that's not what it's intended for, but it does it well all the same. Now what's interesting about this is that several of those approaches work just fine for solo games; I'm not sure why that is yet - for further study.

Fourth, while I do have a number of one-shots left over from earlier campaigns which I could - in theory - stitch together to make a new campaign, when I tried that I realised there is usually a very good reason why the one-shot hasn't already been used, and I only managed to get a couple of sessions out of them. Triple Ace Games' Daring Tales of the Sprawl make a nice little cyberpunk mini-campaign, and I would run those, but I don't think they work for the current PCs or location. Maybe later.

Finally, and this is less about the Aslan Route and more about my increasingly dispirited attempts to find another face to face group, our play style is no longer typical. There are several RPG groups locally, but they are divided into those who will only play D&D 5th Edition published campaigns, and those who have enthusiastically embraced Daggerheart; neither of those games appeal to me, even if I could attend the sessions, which are at inconvenient times and places.

So I'm pleased to take a break for a few weeks, as I am now completely out of ideas for where to go next. I had hoped this game would run to the end of 2025, but if I can't think of, or find, any more scenarios during this break I should probably draw things to a close as gracefully as I can, and move on to the next thing.

The Aslan Route will return in about a month. Meanwhile, here is some dance music, and a few reviews.