Sometimes things can get too familiar.
When I started my first WitchCraft campaign over a decade ago, everything was fresh and new. I was the only one at the table who’d read the books; my players had to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the adversary of the week through trial and error. We had a blast and when it was time to wrap the campaign, everyone hungered for more.
A couple of years later I ran a new WitchCraft campaign with mostly the same players. It was still a lot of fun, but most of the mystery was gone. My players, if not their characters, had seen these types of adversaries before and were anticipating strategies against them. It reminded me of my AD&D days, when I faced a creature from the Monster Manual for the first and then second time. It just wasn’t as exciting the second or third time around.
I once ran a published campaign for Call of Cthulhu called Coming Full Circle. Rather than the usual mythos rogues gallery my players were used to, this campaign used only ‘classic’ baddies, like ghosts and vampires. While it was a minor tweak, it made the entire campaign feel different. I had a very similar experience running Delta Green.
When I ran my most recent WitchCraft campaign I also tried something a little different. While the threats were still magical/supernatural, I gave them a scientific gloss and each adventure used a 1950s/1960s movie for inspiration. It worked like a charm. My players were discovering threats for the first time again and enjoying the heck out of it.
So how about you? Have you ever bent a setting/genre enough to make things different without breaking it or making it feel like a different game? How well did it work? Did it go badly and, if so, what caused it to fail? Has your group ever lost interest in a setting because there were no secrets left?
If I rerun a game setting, I like to change things up, as well, and go a different direction. Most recently, I’ve been running a Battlestar Galactica campaign. The first time was the “second fleet” idea — a smaller fleet that was not headed for Earth. We never qut finished due to a group split up, but they got the basics for the end: they would find a system of twelve worlds earily like back home.
The current one had Colonies that looked a lot like the last game (and reimaginged show), but with more sci-fi tech to it. (They’ve got artificial gravity and FTL, fer Gods’ sake!) I started tweaking immediately: they discover Cuylon infiltrators, but it’s people who have been altered. There are humanoid Cylons, as well, but they look to be some kind of command & control element. I confused them by keeping characters from the show, but changing faces, and possibly if they were Cylons. There’s no Final Five, and the Cylons seem analogues of the Lords of Kobol.
As the game has progressed, they are getting revelations through one of the characters that point to deeper religious reasons for the apocalypse. They keep finding evidence of much, much older civilizations — all seemingly human, scattered on the way to Earth…one of the religious tracts may predate Kobol and uses the name of a character that was an oracle from the first campaign.
The first game was a run for our lives post-apocalyptic game tied tightly to the hidden enemy feel of the show; this one is more archeological-religious sci-fi with killer robots chasing us. The players that were in both are loving it.
I’m with your players–both campaigns sound like fun.
Witchcraft sounds very versatile.
Most of the campaigns I’ve run have been d20-based, so there’s a lot of ‘Oh, an x? Well I kill it with y’, as many roleplayers have been around the d20 block a time or three. So, for my last campaign, I decided to (for the most part) do away with ‘monsters’ altogether, and the campaign focused on orc/dwarf/human interactions, with a twinge of ‘That Which Man was not Meant to Know’. Sure, there were ‘Orcs’ whose statistics matched ‘Ogres’, but were skinned as a particularly surly Orc (if you questioned him, he’d call himself a Fighting Urk [bad artists copy, good artists steal]). This gave both a sense of continuity and mystery, as this guy was clearly aligned with the Orc Cause, but was also clearly more trouble than a bog-standard Orc. Once the players figured out what his stats were, it was time to move on to other creatures, re-imagined as Orcs [luckily it’s amazing what an Ancient Eldritch Power can do to an orc’s physical shell].
I’ve done something similar. I took ogres, called them orcs and gave them acid blood. Anything that dealt piercing or slashing damage to them needed to make a reflex save or take 1d4 acid damage. These orcs were monsters. They raised villages for blood sacrifices and food. Everyone knew where they lived, and no one would venture there to fight them. Even the players were worried when I described how a handful orcs could take down scores of soldiers.
I made the mistake of actually calculating “accurate” class and leveled foes. Reskinning is so much less time consuming–my “evil dwarf empire” prep really discouraged me, and took time away from dramatic planning and locked me into “spreadsheet mode” prep.