Nobilis, Chuubo's, and Other Jenna Moran Works

Today, I'm going to talk about the experience of running the game, and why I made some of the decisions I did.

Almost all of this post is under the readmore, but I want to present this bit up-front:

On "Early Installment Weirdness" And Realistic Expectations

Now, the thing about BTL as presented here is that - even though it is an Actual Play, even though it is my best attempt to summarize - it includes quite a bit of after-the-fact editing. The quotes scattered throughout only include what I consider to be the most brilliant of quotes from the session - they're the best 5-10% of the words everyone wrote. I editorialized, sometimes quite heavily, backfilling my own explanations of things that nobody really realized or aimed for at the time.

I, personally, think that Between the Lights hit its proper stride in session 6, at the deathday party. But I don't recommend skipping. The events from before then were important, because they introduced many of the characters and places that were focal to the campaign.

It is completely normal for characterization to skip around inconsistently, especially in the first few sessions and double-especially in a game that runs in real-time. Maddie was already more or less established because her player had been running a Maddie variant for months in another campaign beforehand; the other characters were created for the campaign, and so the voices took a while to settle down. Often, I did not even bother making the voice of an NPC particularly consistent unless and until the players decided to pay attention to them.

It is the nature of a roleplaying game to leave hanging plot threads all over the place. Not even an expansive epilogue like the one I did could totally resolve them all. It would take far more editing than I have done to tighten it up to "literary" standards. That is how a roleplaying game goes. It is - to borrow one of the aphorisms that Sonja of Metaphors loved to use - a journey, not a destination.