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So again we went completely off the rails and broke the campaign. The DM
had planned out a number of hooks for the party to investigate, but
never expected the party to split and follow different hooks, succeed at
them on their own, and thereby create competing empires. Part of why
this happened is because Sherlock was not at this session but a few days
before the session they had gotten together and decided Moriarty's
actions. Specifically the DM (as Moriarty's agents) gave him information
on some of the hooks and Moriarty gave his agents (the DM) instructions
on what they should do to help the party and also to restart the Last
War (which is Moriarty's goal). Conan decided to have Zergiot leave the
party since he had long served his purpose of having a character to
break out of the cells with while Dave was chained up and separated from
the party. We decided to roleplay Zergiot getting scared, traveling to
the Brelish army and reporting on the party to them to see if he
actually made it or not. If he died on the journey then nothing would
happen but if he lived then the Brelish army would arrive a little
sooner then the DM originally planned, be a little bit better prepared
for the party, and Zergiot might come back as a reoccuring enemy.
However we forgot (until it was too late to retcon) that Zergiot still
had the short range palantir taken from the lookout on top of the tower
which is what Moriarty's agents were told to follow and send orders
through. This resulted in Zergiot getting caught up in the DM's Darguun
Rebellion plothook while the "real" party went to the lightning rail and
Vathirond. As the situation continued to play out it became more
interesting to all of us. When Zergiot managed to actually complete the
plothook on his own we all agreed that this was such an interesting turn
of events that Conan should continue to play Zergiot and make him his
primary character.
We also decided that with Blade in charge of The Lurching Tower, Zergiot
in charge of Starilaskur, that if we expand Moriarty's agents into a
massive shadow organization (which it practically already was) it would
be the start of a 3rd empire, one for each player who showed up
consistently. These characters were declared primary characters and
decided that as the campaign progressed the focus would shift between
them to allow the "party" to stay split. We then also decided the
players of primary characters would get secondary characters to follow
the other players primary characters so that when the action was focused
far enough away people could still participate. We then decided the
rules on the secondary characters to help keep the campaign from
becoming too chaotic. It was at this point that we all (including the
DM) agreed that while none of our characters knew it, they were all on a
collision course with each other that would undoubtedly result in a
massive PvP battle for the finale and the "final boss" was going to be
each other.
The DM also said he didn't plan for the spy that stabbed Buddy to have
any antidote on him. The only reason he did is because he didn't want
Ski to lose his character on what was basically his very first turn.
Something came up though and he had to leave early though which is why
his character was sent back to the tower to recuperate.
Rather then actually play out the battles where Zergiot wasn't
physically present during the revolt of Starilaskur the DM decided to
simply roll a D20 with some circumstance modifiers to determine what
happened in Little Darguun and at the lightning rail station. As the
scope of the campaign progressed to a more strategic rather then
tactical level this is something the DM continued to do in order to
figure out the results of large scale battles where there were no
characters present.
This was also the first time we ran into time desyncs. Although the end
of the session ended about the same time for both Zergiot and Blade, for
most of the session Zergiot was a few days in the future to account for
the time it took him to travel to Starilaskur. As the campaign continued
this frequently happened as sometimes a character would in-universe take
a few weeks to do something, while in real life that would take less
then a minute to describe. On the other hand some massive battles that
in-universe only took a few minutes, would take hours to play out. The
DM would try to let us know roughly where in the timeline a specific
character was when we started and limit the time difference to avoid
problems where one character does something that affects another
characters 'past' too much.