"The Star Heart Saga"

When Farscape was on TV, I watched a lot of it.  Not necessarily every episode, but I tried to keep up with what was happening to the best of my pre-DVR ability.  And so when I sat down to think about planning a new D&D campaign set in the Astral Plane, Farscape jumped to my mind.

The campaign would revolve around the same thing the show did; a living ship.  In Farscape, human astronaut John Crichton and his ragtag band of alien outlaws banded together to free a living ship named Moya, and then traveled throughout the Uncharted Territories battling evil forces and exploring that region of the galaxy.  So, the players needed a reason to wind up stuck in the Astral, a living ship they could use to sail it, and an enemy to eventually battle with it.

The Heroic Tier


Because the Astral is intended for paragon-tier characters, I decided to slow-play the introduction of the living ship by letting the players do some tomb raiding while I feed them info about the setting's history and their eventual foes.  They get a patron that has them find and assemble an artifact, the Star Heart, which he then uses inside a dungeon at the end of the tier to reveal that the entire place is one big, big ship.  The whole thing lifts into the sky and shifts to another plane, bringing the players along for the ride.

Red Dead AWESOME

During my "extended vacation" from work I sat down to finish Red Dead Redemption's main storyline.  I had actually expected one of two endings:


A) John Marston finds out his family, who were taken by US Marshals that want him to hunt down his former outlaw buddies, were killed by the people that took them.  Marston kills everyone he sees, and rides off into the sunset and/or a shallow grave.


B)  John returns home after the last outlaw is locked up, everyone on the homestead's alive and ornery, roll credits over some spaghetti western music.


Instead, you are given an entirely new chapter of the game, doing missions to help get the ranch back up on its feet and actually meet the people you and John have been fighting for this entire time.  It made me wish Rockstar had given the beginning of the game a similar treatment; during the long train ride to the middle of nowhere, Marston falls asleep and dreams of his family being taken away while the players go through a tutorial on movement and combat, and actually experience his loss.  It would have made the end of the game even that much more poignant and satisfying.


Two moments made the hair on my neck stand up:  the first was when Marston walked through the doors of his barn toward the firing squad, and you knew you were going to get a chance to go down shooting.  The second was the final duel, when the other Marston turns away from the body of his enemy floating face-down in a Mexican creek, and then the logo pops on-screen to the guitar's twang.

To quote another vengeance-seeker, "I got bloody satisfaction."