Questions and Answers

With the end of my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign in sight after nearly a decade of regular play, I've started thinking about not just its conclusion but what happens after the conclusion. Since nearly all of the players have agreed they'd like me to referee a new game, it's clear that our little circle of gamers will continue to meet each week after the final curtain falls on this particular campaign. And while the question of precisely what game we'll play next is an interesting one – I may post about that later – what I want to talk about now is something quite different.

House of Worms began in early March 2015. When I started it, I simply wanted to give Empire of the Petal Throne another whirl. I'd refereed the game a couple of time prior, but neither of those campaigns lasted very long. Considering how rich and compelling the world of Tékumel is, I felt I owed it to myself to give EPT another shot. I was quite fortunate that, this time, in the words of Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, it all came together and remarkably so. We're now just shy of the ten-year mark, which makes House of Worms the single longest continuous RPG campaign I've ever refereed by a wide margin.

At the start, though, I had no idea how long the campaign would last. Based on my past experiences with Tékumel, I had no expectation that House of Worms would last even a single year, let alone ten. As a result, I didn't plan too far ahead. I had some basic ideas of how to kick off the campaign and where it might go after that, but most of my ideas were pretty sketchy and that's being generous. I relied pretty heavily on player decisions to guide where the campaign went and what I developed for it. I tried to stay a few steps ahead of the players at all times, but, even then, I regularly created and discarded ideas at a fairly quick pace, responding in equal parts to what the players did and my own changing interests.

In my campaigns, I try to give the impression that the end results are what I'd had in mind all along. Of course, it's a parlor trick, misdirection in which I get the players to focus on what worked rather than what didn't. In the past, I've described my campaigns as being a lot like that scene in the movie Ghostbusters, where Bill Murray's Peter Venkman attempts to pull the tablecloth out from under the place settings on a table in the dining room. He fails utterly but is undeterred, boasting, "And the flowers are still standing!" even as everything else falls to the floor. That's what I do much of the time.

Despite that, I still do have ideas I purposefully introduce into the campaign and that prove important. It's not entirely an illusion. Some of these ideas bear fruit and some do not, while others morph into something I'd not originally intended. I imagine that's not a phenomenon unique to me. Any long running campaign is likely to include plenty examples of all of the above. In fact, I have a hard time imagining how a roleplaying campaign could go for more than a few weeks before it starts to diverge from what any of its participants consciously had in mind. That's one of the main joys of this form of entertainment: you never know where's going to wind up.

So, when House of Worms finally does end, I'm going to devote the next session to a wrap-up in which I'll encourage the players to ask my anything about the campaign and how it developed. What ideas did I originally have and how did they change? What was going on with some character or plot that was left dangling at the end? How much did their choices to zig when I expected them to zag derail what I might have had in mind? And so on. I greatly value transparency in most things, including RPGs. Letting the players see "behind the curtain," so to speak, is important, especially in a campaign as long-running as House of Worms. 

Needless to say, I'll do a post or two about the players' questions and my answers to them. I feel the process of refereeing is often too opaque and writing about what I did and why over the course of the last decade will undoubtedly be useful to other referees (and probably players as well). The end of House of Worms is a major event for all involved. Expect to see quite a few posts devoted to it in the weeks and months to come.