Last week, we concluded a campaign of 3+ years. I was the GM, and in the interests of improving my craft, I wrote up the following postmortem on our experiences. Hopefully it’s valuable to you. It’s definitely helped me organize my thoughts on this particular game and group.

An auburn sun glitters off the canals. Lamplighters fill the lanterns over the strada with oil. A boisterous laugh, an overturned jug in a pool of wine. A man bolts across a bridge wearing a devil’s mask. A woman reclines at the fore of a gondola, fanning herself in the humid night air. A scent of gunsmoke and basil. The sound of a harmonium. Lewd graffiti on a fresco above the heads of ruddy-faced, mustachioed paisan, idling away the night with cards and catcalls. A cloaked figure, moving in the shadows of the stuccoed walls. The glint of dying sunlight off a knife’s blade.

Belluna Serenissima! Its tastes and smells inflame the imagination, from the salt tang of the waterway-streets to the rich scent of the grilled polpo to the delicate bouquet of its finest wines. Skilled craftsmen of all trades display their handmade wares in stalls passed down family lines for centuries. Great artists, scientists, and philosophers flock to its wealthy patrons. The al fresco public houses seem forever open. The ports teem with goods and visitors from all across the world.

But Belluna is also a city of contrasts. Its churches give succor to the devout while the palatial estate of its Doge erupts into the all-night revelry of the carnevale. Its Palazzo Ducale stands testament to the might of the city, even as its underprivileged wonder when their next meal will be.It has inherited a tradition of law from its classical forerunners, yet its ill-lit alleyways harbor a motley array of gangsters and racketeers who are invisible to — or above — that selfsame law.

A subalpine port city, Belluna lies at the foot of the mountain passes that travel beneath Monte Bianco to the northwest and the Piave Sea to the east. It is a city of canals, fed by the River Amaro, most of which bustle during the day with commerce and private travel. Many of the city’s roads are earthen, but much travel happens by canali and ponti, particularly near the trade district, where a great deal of the city’s inbound commerce occurs. Many other waterways, though, meander through the city proper, creating a poetic spirit and giving Belluna its unique personality.

This, then, is a chronicle of those who would taste the fruits Belluna has to offer. From the sparkling blue-green waterways to the solemn granite of its cathedrals, from the heights of Monte Bianco’s crags to the depths of the Piave Bay, from the secret tryst offered by a masked temptress to the proclamation of war shouted by the capitan di ventura, from the neutral grounds observed by the warring assassins’ guilds to the lairs of the monstrosities lurking in the city’s long shadows, Belluna is a city of unrelenting adventure!

We played Pathfinder, starting from 2nd level PCs advancing to 8th, using the slow progression scheme.

You can read some of the details here, if that’s your cup of tea.

Pros: What Went Right

We used roll20.net, which offered a number of positives. The virtual tabletop allowed us to overcome the geographical space between all of us (a few Raleigh-Durham locals, a Pennsylvanian, and a Californian). I purchased a number of maps that lent a far greater degree of high-quality art than I would have been able to build or scrawl in black marker on a battlemat, so the environments were very satisfying to look at for hours on end. Macros, hidden rolls, shareable handouts, and the rest of the suite of roll20 features were all golden, and I can’t recommend it enough.

I was fairly stingy with treasure, but this resulted in most characters gaining “signature” magic items that affected how they played. This was a positive result, and not one that would have improved had I simply added more money to the rewards. Characters developed in unique ways built around the magical items they accumulated, making for a high degree of personality.

Player dependency and interrelationship was good, even though most players chose classes outside the trinity. Some weird stuff developed, which was cool. For example, the tank had a pair of boots of striding and springing, and one of the other heavy hitters was a monk, so the group’s front line was very mobile. Lacking a traditional healer in the latter third of the campaign, the party alchemist ended up developing healing bombs, and the paladin, the only other healer, was decidedly less mobile than everyone else (heavy armor!), which made the party cultivate some non-traditional stay-alive tactics.

A few key NPCs emerged as story drivers. A much-hated antagonist caused much consternation as he became an ally. An information-handler found himself in danger, and the PCs rallied to protect him. A wealthy patron had to prove herself due to association with an antagonist. Once I saw players responding to these, I used them more frequently, and always to provide them with decisions (rather than make the decisions for them).

Character mortality was low, in accordance with the rules, and the deaths that did occur carried an emotional weight that reinforced the players’ engagement. I would have liked perhaps one more PC death, but they are tough buggers, and adaptable.

Room for Improvement

As it so often does, real life often intruded, and some sessions had to be rescheduled, canceled, or subbed out for one-shots. This is fine, of course, but playing via virtual tabletop made it very hard to pick up where we had left off. Sessions ran approximately monthly, and while everyone was excited to play, we definitely lost some brain cycles to “Okay, remind me what happened last time again?” or even “Who is this guy we supposedly met six sessions ago?” It’s unfair for a GM to expect players to spend as many mental cycles on the campaign as they do (since they’re doing much more of the organizational work), but this occasionally undermined some of the engagement/ investment in key scenes or even raised the question “Why are we doing this?” when the immediate answer should have been one of volition.

Infrequent game sessions made it particularly hard to enforce delayed effects and disease attacks (filth fever, lycanthropy, etc.). A general assumption that everyone “returned to town” between sessions generally had game time elapse between one session and the next, meaning that even if the effects took place, they would have abated by the time the next session convened. Players enjoyed the benefit of facing foes that had these attacks (increased XP rewards, etc.) while having to endure little of the drawbacks. Next time I want to plan better to incorporate the session downtimes and/ or construct plot events so that these become more of a factor, as opposed to handwaving them away. Construction of sessions to more serial than episodic would bring these lingering effect more into the spotlight.

Infrequent sessions saw us handwaving away much of the travel as PC levels increased. This very much disappoints me, as the interstitial journeys that take place in an RPG are where so many of the world details emerge and where the players test out tactics (or decide that avoiding a challenge is better than facing it). We lost out on a lot of roleplay by skipping the getting-there.

“Main events” consumed more and more time in tandem with the players’ and antagonists’ special ability portfolios. The “connective tissue” of the campaign scaled back and back because the focal conflicts of the evening session became more and more demanding, in terms of construction and game mastering.

I would have preferred more substantial journaling and quest logging, but the players mostly weren’t into it. Every now and then, the logging effort surged, but most players non-participation in it — and my frequent lack of input — I think resulted in the players who were keeping up with it losing interest. I’m not normally one to offer extrinsic rewards or bribes for keeping up with this stuff, since that often turns the results into something perfunctory, but I do have some sense of loss over a more consistent chronicle of the campaign. This is something I should make time for in the future, and encourage more in the players. I don’t want to do it myself because a) that offers too much of a “peek behind the curtain” that’s supposed to emerge at the table, and b) it’s a way for players to remain engaged and “play when they’re not playing” if they’re so inclined. But they weren’t, so I’m other looking for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, or I need to demonstrate more of a value to it.