Sojenka Exit Thoughts

The Sons of Mithra have retired after completing our objective within the Shadows over Sojenka Campaign and have been tasked by the DM with providing some parting thoughts about our time there. These are my feelings on the game as a founding player of the Tuesday group. I played Cassander the Fighter and Castile the Paladin and was the primary Caller during sessions. I also developed our tracking system for our economic and military assets.

I will begin with opportunities for improvement and obstacles to gameplay. This is intended purely as constructive criticism as requested by the DM and in no way should impugn any member of the campaign’s playstyle or reputation as fine men and accomplished gamers.

The economics of the game struggled to adequately support and balance the efforts taken by different members of the campaign. The DM used several different sources and game rules to put together a system for play, often caught off guard by the specific needs of the session or downtime requests at hand, which created gaps that could be exploited. This issue was almost solved by the DM asking if a swap to ACKS was the right choice earlier in the campaign. It was the right choice in hindsight but at the time we had begun to exploit the gaps and were unwilling to lose the effort that had been spent by both DM and players to cobble something workable together. We voted against it. I do not recall the other members’ of the campaign votes.

The aforementioned Frankensystem, as we so lovingly called it, ended up being quite a point of friction. It’s unreasonable to expect a DM and party of players to create a game system by cobbling pieces together from all over on the fly. We are not game designers. The Blueholme ruleset that the game started with was simply insufficient to the task that we ended up putting it to, which was beyond the scope of the original stated purpose of the campaign.

Originally, players were solicited to join a campaign to explore the megadungeon of Tonisborg and all the faction play that that would entail. Events during the game led us to press into the domain and military side of campaigning early on and the DM graciously obliged. We also perceived, fairly or not, that there was a competitive aspect to the game due to a separate group of players in the same campaign and the presence of Patrons. In retrospect, I believe we took that competition more seriously than some others.

A more dynamic environment could have been achieved with more freedom allowed between Patrons and players. Instead communication with and even the identity of Patrons was carefully monitored and restricted until very late in the game. I’m sure this was part of the experimental nature of the campaign. Everyone involved has to get comfortable with the flow of things.

We learned early on that our contemporaries in the Thursday group were playing many PCs per player during a single session. I felt then as I do now that this is an exploit. Rather than hiring henchmen for specific tasks/roles/abilities and managing a team, you can simply create the needed roles without all the headache of managing their loyalty. With very small groups of two to four members each, the DM was probably lenient about this in order to improve survivability but Tuesday only fell to this dark path in the final sessions. Even then it wasn’t necessary and I regret that we did.

Now on to things that were successful and well-done with the campaign. We played for a year in an exciting, growing, living world with an experienced and thoughtful DM. We set objectives and achieved them in a satisfying enough way that we could, as much as you ever can, call it a victory. The reality is that barring disaster, this style of game rarely “ends”. It’s a series of ever-developing scenarios. We set a win condition for ourselves but could easily have kept playing into the evolving landscape.

The DM set forth a scenario involving a megadungeon that we almost immediately flipped the table over on. He graciously endured our shenanigans and leaned into the direction of the game that we were most interested in, despite not being prepared for it. This is the correct tack to take and proper DMing. The game is only as successful as the group as a whole makes it through their excitement and engagement.

The world-building was on point, with a rich and varied set of cultures, monsters, and a general vibe that was definitely not the standard western European medieval fantasy setting. The DM clearly enjoys preparing setting details like that and for those desiring deep immersion this guy’s got you covered. I only regret that some of it was wasted on our sloped-browed wargaming antics.

The adventure locations and magic items that we experienced during the game were some of the most interesting that I’ve had the pleasure to come across and I’ve been playing D&D and the like for 30 years. The Sons of Mithra faction is still in play with many of these items so I won’t go into detail but if you’re into content inspired by classic pulp fiction then again, this guy’s got you covered.

One of the most positive experiences of this campaign was the cohesion shown by the members of our party. Generally, adventuring parties are a loose gathering of independent actors who seem to rarely show any concern for overall objectives beyond their own petty goals. Not so this time. We started the game with a fixed objective as a win condition and sought to achieve it with every action taken. It was truly satisfying to play the game as a team.

In general, training times and other “time jail” mechanics are designed to encourage multiple PCs played by the same player. These separate parties are traditionally at odds with one another and are in fact encouraged by Gygax in AD&D to explicitly avoid cooperation. This separation of interests is key to avoiding the development of an overwhelming power base and stagnant game world. While I agree with this approach, it was interesting for the DM to allow each PC to be part of the same party and pursue a collective goal. One of our teammates became our utility player, generating a different useful utility class when one was in time jail. This allowed our mercenary company to have a toolbox to choose from when approaching challenges that normally would not be available. It was fun but ultimately I think tradition should win out in this regard.

The DM and players in our group had varying but solid experience with wargames. It was exhilarating to be able to apply those concepts to an RPG campaign even if it felt like sometimes we were the only ones playing that game style. This is another spot where the Frankensystem hurt a little in that generating an army is generally a very specific thing based on system. Combining systems gets a little messy but we learned a lot from how to do it procedurally and had a lot of fun marching around stomping out enemies.

There were many Patrons involved with this campaign at varying levels of complexity. One thing that stood out early on was that the DM ran on monthly and weekly turns for Patron level actions. This seemed to allow him to keep organized and throttle the demand on his time. I liked it so much that I’ve applied something similar in my own campaign with a “State of the Faction” kind of update weekly to keep up with what’s going on.

Ultimately, this campaign was a success and a lot of fun for our group. We set and achieved our goals as a team, experienced a rich and unique setting, and got to experiment with a lot of different aspects of RPGs. I don’t know what the future holds for the Sons of Mithra or the Shadows over Sojenka campaign, but I know that they’re in good hands. I will continue to game with these gents into the future and look forward to the next table.