Esoteric Enterprises Campaign Retrospective
We've finished up our Esoteric Enterprises campaign recently, and as always I think that a retrospective is in order. It span ~12 sessions, including a session 0 for collaborative worldbuilding/gamebuilding. I don't think I ever wrote a blogpost on that session 0, so I'll go over my thoughts on collaborative gamebuilding here. The game had 8 players not including myself , averaging about 6 per session, and got to around level 6 or 7 by the end.
TLDR: A party of silly-billies attempt to create a new faction with the purpose of uplifting the underground. They eventually wind up waking up Lucifer and almost destroy the world, and all but two of them survived the final session.
Session 0/collaborative game building thoughts
I wanted to run this semester's campaign a little differently. All I really knew coming into it that it was going to be Esoteric Enterprises, without a whole lot of a world or campaign ideas. I decided that for this campaign, we'd try and come up with as much of it together as possible. We used the worldbuilding game I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic?, which functions a lot like a spatial microscope, where you build up Neighborhoods, Landmarks, and Residents. With 8 people, we built a large city with a ton of little moving parts. One of the challenges with 8 separate people building onto the same world at the same time is tone, though we did pretty well keeping the pure memes to a minimum. The other big problem was that we simply made too much, too wide. There was no way that we were getting to mess with even half of the created world. Though you give up a lot of control doing this, you still maintain a lot of power as the player at the table whose responsible for setting up hooks and playing the world.
After that, we figured out what we wanted the campaign to be. We settled on the party being members of a new political faction within the underside of the city, attempting to gain power on both sides until they became a major player in the game. I don't think we quite got this far, but it was a good premise that opened up a lot of space for gameplay.
System Thoughts
Esoteric Enterprises was... fine. As a collection of tools and vibes, it's great! I pulled so much from the monsters and underground sections, even though I rarely built a full on complex. The classes feel unique and absolutely make the game feel different than whatever retro clone I could pull off the shelf. I enjoy how simple the basic combat maneuvers were and how they privileged martial classes, while still being useful to everyone else with additional risk. 'Covering Fire' as a maneuver to represent automatic weapons is fantastic without feeling like the game became oriented around having the best modern weaponry. The injury tables were great and we got a ridiculous amount of use out of the magic tables, especially those used in experimental magic. By the end of the session, one of our occultists was a semi-snakeman with flammable blood and no less than 3 clones out in the wild. Also, the entire party with exception to I believe one character became immune to aging by the 2nd session. It's a blast. Along all of these positives, I can happily recommend EE as a base for any of your urban fantasy OSR needs.
I say as a base, though, because there are some things that just don't really work for me. The Flesh and Grit health system seems like a good idea, but in practices I ran into some issues. Running two health pools for every monster is extra work that becomes even more extra work the moment players get access to flesh damage. At some point I stopped calculating flesh and made it up whenever a player did flesh damage, usually giving them between 6-10 flesh; the exception being bigger monsters/bosses, who I needed to have a larger flesh pool prepared. The other issue came down to Grit, which is just way too easy to access after a few levels by the system's rules. You can spend a turn and regain all your Grit, which gives players access to so much healing. For most dungeons, I used the Underclock, which should have mitigated this problem at least a little bit with its increased die sizes for each rest. Even with that, Grit is barely a resource that you have to manage outside of combat.
This issue was compounded by the strength of certain characters over others. I'll start with one caveat: we allowed max flesh at level 1. This was always going to make combat oriented characters a little bit stronger, but the difference became unwieldy pretty quickly. We also had a different experience system, so we went through levels probably a bit quicker than intended. By the end of the campaign, our Bodyguard and Spook were immensely powerful. For the Bodyguard, it came down to just having really good health HP rolls. He had more Grit + Flesh than almost everything in the game by level 4. The Spook just had a lot of combat oriented powers and decent hp rolls. Most conventional encounters were not challenging these two. Nobody else was even close, between the two Occultists, 1 Doctor, 1 Criminal, and 1 Explorer. While I'm not in the business of writing 'fair' combat encounters, it's hard to plan around a party where a quarter of the members aren't threatened anything short of a missile and the rest die to a particularly strong gust of wind.
My overall thoughts on Esoteric Enterprises are that it has a lot of interesting details that hide some of the more unwieldly mechanical blemishes. I'd recommend it as a source of inspiration for anyone looking to run an OSR urban fantasy campaign, but I would personally have to do a lot of fiddling with it before running it again for anything longer than a few sessions.
Campaign Thoughts
This was a busier semester, so I didn't have as much time to prep as I've had in the past. We had a good table, though, which helped smooth that over. It wasn't a very serious game, but I think we had a good amount of interesting hooks to follow. In the first session of the campaign, I gave a quick linear hook like I normally do, to start the campaign up with a good introduction and some time spent learning the game for any newbies. This session basically lead to the prime focus of the rest of the campaign, which got resolved about halfway through in a way that gave the party enough to do until the very end. I slightly regret that we weren't able to tackle more of the world that we built together. I tried to weave some stuff in throughout, but we settled into a fairly linear game pretty early. We also had quite a few late starts and time spent not actually focusing on the game, which limited the amount we could really get done. I don't know if this is something that necessarily required fixing for our table, but it's something to mention.
One of the disadvantages of building everything after session 0 is that I really never got all of the tools I wanted to get ready done. I was planning on having random encounter tables and progressing rumors in every area, but it just didn't work out. Usually, I do most of that kind of prep in spurts before the group is even formed, so that it's ready by the time I hit the table. I also wish I pulled the game more towards the party's main goal, building a faction within the world, since we got off that track.
One of the best things I think that I did was use a version of Monster of the Week's experience system, where we answer questions about what we did that session as a group and get XP for each yes. I also gave some extra XP, based on one's class, if the group told me what we'd do next session. It worked well as a way to bring everyone together at the end of a session and talk about what's going on, and it rewarded players for things that they were already doing.
What's Next
I think that's about it for this campaign. For my next game, I'm gonna work on simplifying my processes and keeping a tighter structure around the game. The idea floating around in my head right now is a Whitehack game that spans over years, with each session being another year in the story of the members of a settlement or clan. I'm taking a lot of inspiration from Six Ages and King of Dragon Pass for this. Some friends and I are also planning on sharing the GM roll for an open table Whitehack. I might do play reports for it on the blog, just as a way to keep things organized. I'm also doing more solo games lately, so I'll be posting stuff on that.
Until next time!