Prelude to Arc 5

Welcome to our Fifth Arc. Though the stage has expanded greatly, with things like introducing Power Scale and the like as well as lots of extradimensional activity, the playability of the campaign against Really Awesome Foes has also expanded.
The campaign has taken on a combination of the following flavors gleaned from the following books:

• Rifts takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, deriving elements from cyberpunk, science fiction, fantasy, horror, western, mythology and many other genres. It serves as a cross-over environment for a variety of other Palladium games with different universes connected through "rifts" on Earth that lead to different spaces, times, and realities that Palladium calls the "Rifts Megaverse". Rifts describes itself as an advanced multi-genre role-playing game. I'm sure it was created by someone very much like myself who likes all their campaign worlds and ideas to have some neat little bow tie wrapped around a portable exploding sun.
• The Magitech Chronicles has an interesting take upon the blending of elements of both technology and magic in their universe system, as well as their interesting view of dragons. I really REALLY like those books.

Here are some more useful things to note

• The style of play that we’re currently focusing on is to Get to the Fighting. My narrative goal is to offer at least one clear opportunity for a conflict, whether we start out swinging or we have to find the clues that take us there.
• The secondary, but equally important, goal is Players, tell the story. I only have a broad overview of what I think might happen, so I am happy to let the players fill in the blanks by inserting narrative details (via Create Advantage or Declare a Detail via Spent Fate Point), or by simply suggesting things to me. However, because I know my players, I will gladly step in and simply paint on the canvas if they are unwilling to add anything - and that's fine: some players simply like to go along with a story without having to do a lot of thinking beyond what's immediately relevant for their character.

What's Going On this Side of the Fourth Wall

One of the players brought up a good point about holding to campaign goals and directions, so I just thought that I’d touch on that.

• My goal is to have a Session brief ready for each of the sessions that we start on.
• Big Issues will often take one or two arcs to see any reasonable impact or resolution though some may just naturally fade out rather quickly. Try to think of the whole TV Episode/Scenario (which is typically two or three episodes) / Season (Arc) set up and realize that the big issues are just backdrops for the smaller ones, so it may seem like a LOT of sessions have passed before we get back to resolving an issue. Also, though it may seem like a lot of real time is passing, an entire scenario is sometimes resolved within a few hours, maybe a couple of days. In fact Arc 4: Invasion Equation only took a couple of weeks campaign time to complete even though it was 12 sessions!
• A key tip to character consistency: Make your Definitive Aspects (Power Aspect and Hero Code) VERY CLEAR. If you don’t have a clear idea about any other aspect, these are the two that you need to live and breathe by: they make your character who or what he/she is. Check out the Aspects section in the Developing Characters in WtC: Aetheria Part 2 doc for a little more info, and if you need some help, drop a line in Slack or call me. Failure to have your Definitive Aspects clearly written by the start of Session 3 will cost your character one Fate Point. This is an action of last resort (I NEVER punitively take Fate Points away) but it’s THAT CRUCIAL to good play.
• Remember that your characters are HIGHLY experienced, very powerful and proactive. If things seem to be meandering to you as a player, understand that your characters, being many decades or even centuries old, realize that things have to be dealt with carefully and methodically before resolution occurs: they are very used to the meandering long game and each has abilities that allow them to stay the course (much like a deep cover or double agent). They also have access to significant resources but also realize that these resources take time and effort to mobilize and develop results. However, as players, you have the ability to pull the plug on a storyline or simply say that you want to go back to an old story line and I’m pretty flexible. Just remember to speak up.

An Extra-dimensional Invasion vs. Keeping the Campaign “Small”

At this stage of the story, The Blight is more of a Far Future Threat than an Active Menace, and I’d like to keep it there, much like the Dark Side of the Force in the Jedi sagas. Though they could fight against some of the power players of the Dark Side, they can’t totally destroy it. The players can seek to increase our side’s understanding of the Blight, it’s an incredibly massive and convoluted problem; the best that the powers that be can manage right now is fire-fighting activity: striking where they become aware of actual Blight activity and hoping to do something about it before another world is destroyed. But it’s painstaking work ferreting out what’s the work of The Blight and what happens to be a world’s own manifestations of evil or insanity, and this is on purpose.
So, there are manifestations of the Blight which can be acted against on a PC level scale and interacting with them is something that the players will do. It’s incredibly difficult to detect Blight activity before it becomes full blown with the extraordinarily rare exception of a world that has actively resisted the Blight’s onslaught once before: these worlds may actually detect Blight activity and move to do something about it, and this is what has happened to Freeport.
There will be Scenarios or even entire Arcs (such as this one) where the players are actively learning about and/or resisting some manifestation of The Blight. Some other celestial level agent may point out some Blight activity that the players can go and do something about rather than it being about them following things to an epic “let’s end this thing” conclusion.
The game effect is that we can turn The Blight storyline “on” or “off” as we desire. I’ve learned from experience that running at continual “war of the worlds” level brings a certain amount of campaign fatigue causing us to lose interest and pulling the plug on the campaign.

GM's Note

This arc is when the campaign became thematically and mechanically solid for me, and I think, for the players as well. All of the character and genre issues had been settled, rules had been refined and clarified, and we had an overarching picture of the direction of the campaign, with great latitude for player direction.

By the end of this arc, importantly, I realized that we had a definite end game which made me feel great because the incarnations of these characters had been through about 3 previously unfinished campaigns (all in the same game universe, but at different times and/or locations). It was with great satisfaction that I was able to show how thoroughly everything had been tied together over multiple campaigns and storylines. And now, we were about to bring it home.