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NichG
2013-03-31, 04:41 PM
I was thinking about various commonalities in my campaigns after my players requested a campaign that didn't involve large amounts of 'fixing world politics/situations' and I realized that basically its a natural extent of growth in power plus a game that focuses around a sort of home improvement premise.

That is to say, the PCs are from somewhere, and there are either threats to that somewhere (so they must act to preserve the status quo) or there are things wrong with that somewhere that they dislike (so when they get powerful enough to try to change them the natural inclination is to do so). So even if there are plotlines that have nothing to do with, e.g., overthrowing the evil empire and replacing it with a good one, the combination of a game that focuses on the PCs caring about their home/world/etc and the eventual growth of power means that the existence of such setting elements may 'demand' player attention, even if there are things they'd rather be exploring.

On the other hand, one can imagine a game where the status quo of the world is irrelevant to the PCs. That is to say, one that never actually lets them set down roots anywhere or become attached to a place. If the PCs are constantly on the move, they're less likely to feel like its their responsibility to fix everything wrong about a place and they may be content with dealing with the bad things that put themselves right in their path, rather than feeling they have to hang up their swords and become kings because somewhere there's misrule.

So for the second kind of game, what I'm mostly working on right now is, how to retain a degree of player-driven plotlines and player agency while having something that forcibly disconnects players from feeling like the thing they should be doing is trying to fix the world.

tensai_oni
2013-03-31, 04:46 PM
Give player characters strong personal motivations? Vengeance, finding a lost relative, hoping to become the greatest mage. People have goals they aspire to meet, rather than being 100% reactive to bad things happening and trying to fix them.

NichG
2013-03-31, 05:02 PM
I like that idea. I think it has to be something self-renewing to really work though, or once someone has become the greatest mage or whatever they're going to start looking outwards in most cases. I guess I should also say, my campaigns are usually about a year to a year and a half long, so 50-80 game sessions. That means that concrete things like finding a lost relative or attaining vengeance are likely to be resolved quickly compared to the length of the campaign.

Zahhak
2013-03-31, 06:37 PM
Vengeance and finding a lost relative are also incredibly hackneyed plot lines. Yes, players should have goals, and yes, they can have active or reactive, but unless you're going to reinvent the whole plot line "vengeance" is so overdone that some players will probably be bored in the first session. Something new for the group (active, non-political campaigns) is good, but cliches is not a good start. Becoming the greatest mage isn't terrible, but you would need motivation for the rest of the party, and a reason for that as a motivation for the players.

Something I think could be a good idea that could try out is that the party are basically big game hunters. Go out to the wilds, kill something dangerous, sell its hide and whatnot. You could mix it up by having the party get hired to take someone out as a gillie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie), or to clean up sewers of aberrations, make maps, escort people through dangerous woods, be a sherpa to mountain climbers, etc, etc. And it does seem like big game hunting is among the most realistic adventurer type job.

NichG
2013-03-31, 11:08 PM
Again, I think that makes for a very short campaign. Going on 'another hunt' is going to get boring too even with the variations, perhaps 12 games in. The other problem with that is the plotlines come entirely from the DM - its whatever they get hired to do next. They're not going to be player-driven.

I think the key things though are:

- There must be a constant push of some sort to move, so that things remain about the players and not the place.
- Changing the world must be pointless to the progression of the campaign, even if its possible or even easy. This can be part and parcel of the 'constant push to move' element - yes you can fix a place but you're going to leave it anyways.
- The characters must have something about them that is more pressing to resolve than those things around them. The vengeance/lost relative/etc lines are examples; curing a growing insanity or a progressive disease would do it too. This is the element that makes it player-driven.

So it comes down to the kind of PC problems that can last for a large number of sessions rather than being solved immediately (and which also don't suffer from creating frustration when they aren't solved each game - e.g. it should be possible to make incremental progress rather than a binary thing).

Rhynn
2013-04-01, 12:02 AM
I think you've got almost a false dilemma here, since you seem to be comparing extremes, and bundling independent issues into them.

First, did your players mean "world politics" as in the whole world, or otherwise on a larger scale - as in opposed to "local" - or just "politics in the game world/setting" ?

And do you know why the players feel like they need to get involved? How do you present these events? Do you expect them to get involved? Because that may be enough.

I like PCs to be "from somewhere" and have family, etc., in many games, because I think it grounds them and invests them in the setting. But I only do this if play actually starts "at home." I prefer show over tell - rather than have even a paragraph of pre-written background, I'd rather create and play the PCs' backgrounds at the table. Such campaigns tend to focus on a local area, which gets bigger as the PCs get more powerful. (But basically never encompasses the entire world; although short episodes can take place anywhere in it.)

So this dimension is "groundedness" or "locationality" or whatever.

Then there's the politics. Maybe your players just aren't interested in the wars, intrigues, politics, and problems of nations and states. They can make a great backdrop even if the PCs are never expected to get involved. Maybe don't plan them expecting your players to get involved, or to specifically fix them - maybe they want to take advantage of them. If they prefer, let them just adventure around, doing their own thing. Old-school D&D games took a long time to get to the stage where PCs were expected to get involved in politics (and often this was when they were expected to retire).

So this is "politics" or "large scale."

How to carry it off is to leave all the political stuff, world events, etc., in the background (on the news, heard in tavern-talk). Don't throw hooks at the players. (This includes not having these things specifically affect their homes, families, interests, etc.) Keep them busy with their personal, small-scale things. If they get interested in something else going on, develop it then. If they don't seem interested but look into it anyway, make it something they'd have to work for - nobody here knows anything more about it, if you wanted to learn more, you'd need to go way over there...

The game system you use probably affects things a lot. Level advancement is fast in D&D 3E, so players soon become able to affect great things, and they may feel they have a responsibility to do so. In AD&D, PCs aren't going to be easily able to, say, defeat an orc horde, or oppose an evil king. It is hard to affect large-scale things and big politics.

NichG
2013-04-01, 01:12 AM
I think you've got almost a false dilemma here, since you seem to be comparing extremes, and bundling independent issues into them.

First, did your players mean "world politics" as in the whole world, or otherwise on a larger scale - as in opposed to "local" - or just "politics in the game world/setting" ?


Well basically that the last two campaigns I've run for them have had a point where the PCs have some knowledge or powers the rest of the world lacks, and they've decided to use them to advance the world as a whole.

In one case, they were initially spies for an England-analogue and discovered magic in a non-magical setting. After that they decided to found a nation to try to get the world in order and inspire a bunch of monarchies and theocracies to become something more like a U.N. organization crossed with local democracies. This was in part inspired by the fact that one PC was part of the royal family of a country and had investment in how that country did, in other parts inspired by the existence of secret societies that had their own plans for the world that they wanted to modify (not stop, mind you - they just decided 'lets guide this'), etc. But there was nothing about the overarching structure of the campaign that demanded this - it was something the PCs decided to pursue given their situation.

In the current campaign, the PCs were part of a continent-wide Guild that basically acted as the military-for-hire for local citystate governments. Then they discovered spacetravel technology and found evidence that there were external forces descending on the world. Also they located another spacefaring society that had just sort of come out of cryostasis on the same world, and was waging economic warfare against their Guild (basically saying 'here, have free food, have free gold!'). As far as party options go, there's plenty of plot 'out there' they can pursue with their spacecrafts but from talking with my players they feel its sort of their responsibility IC to fix the economic conflict, and also to 'fix' the Guild and make it a world government, which OOC they're kind of tired of after the last campaign, and certainly don't want to do it a third time when this one is over!

So I'm trying to figure out how to set things up so that the players' free rein won't lead them to messing with world politics again, while still having aspects of discovery and invention to the campaign (things that they've said they really like)



And do you know why the players feel like they need to get involved? How do you present these events? Do you expect them to get involved? Because that may be enough.


At least three of my players tend to play fairly moral characters, which may have something to do with it. Beyond that, some of them have said that the reason involves various countries and leadership not being competent, so they feel the need to replace the people or the system with better people and better systems. For the Guild, they didn't like that the people at the head of the Guild were basically only interested in the Guild members prospering, and wanted people that would protect non-affiliated people in the cities. Again, I think this relates to them tending to play very moral characters, and why I think the characters having personal issues that are bad enough they don't have time to worry about the world might help.

In the current campaign one thing I did that encouraged this is that I gave them the ability and Guild support to build 'planetary facilities' which would basically be large-scale things they could use for benefits (like, if you use this building you can Craft items in 1/10th the time; or if you use this building you can decrease the cost of materials world-wide by 50%), so they're in part just protecting their investments.



I like PCs to be "from somewhere" and have family, etc., in many games, because I think it grounds them and invests them in the setting. But I only do this if play actually starts "at home." I prefer show over tell - rather than have even a paragraph of pre-written background, I'd rather create and play the PCs' backgrounds at the table. Such campaigns tend to focus on a local area, which gets bigger as the PCs get more powerful. (But basically never encompasses the entire world; although short episodes can take place anywhere in it.)

So this dimension is "groundedness" or "locationality" or whatever.


Yeah I think this is orthogonal to my players' requests. However, if it helps the game as a whole, I'm willing to deplete this element of the game. E.g. I could make it so the game isn't actually taking place 'where the PCs are from'. I'm also intending to make a game that doesn't expand in scope as much as my previous campaigns, since I think that also has a tendency to signal 'okay, its the world-building phase'. I was playing around with the idea that the campaign could start large in scope and narrow down, but thats still very ill-formed and theoretical. Constant scale is probably an easier design.



Then there's the politics. Maybe your players just aren't interested in the wars, intrigues, politics, and problems of nations and states. They can make a great backdrop even if the PCs are never expected to get involved. Maybe don't plan them expecting your players to get involved, or to specifically fix them - maybe they want to take advantage of them. If they prefer, let them just adventure around, doing their own thing. Old-school D&D games took a long time to get to the stage where PCs were expected to get involved in politics (and often this was when they were expected to retire).


Its a matter of scale. The campaign is designed for the PCs increasing in power drastically, and thus also to be dealing with problems of bigger and bigger scale. At the start they were students at an academy, sort of a Mana Khemia style thing. As they grew they entered a journeyman workshop phase where they went around doing jobs and discovering things. Then they basically uncovered and ended a large threat against the world, and as part of that gained spacetravel. Currently this is leading into a sort of wild west in space thing that will transition into the PCs dealing with cosmic-scale forces (tearing down the gods themselves, that kind of thing). Somewhere along the way, personally ending a war is just something that they have the power to do, even if its not necessarily what is intended for them to deal with.



How to carry it off is to leave all the political stuff, world events, etc., in the background (on the news, heard in tavern-talk). Don't throw hooks at the players. (This includes not having these things specifically affect their homes, families, interests, etc.) Keep them busy with their personal, small-scale things. If they get interested in something else going on, develop it then. If they don't seem interested but look into it anyway, make it something they'd have to work for - nobody here knows anything more about it, if you wanted to learn more, you'd need to go way over there...


I agree that keeping a focus on personal things is important. What I'm really trying to get to though is to create a situation where they will, of their own accord, keep focusing on personal things. Part of that is the 'always on the move' thing, which has a tendency to make the larger scale things around the players relevant only as backdrop (why bother overthrowing a government if you're leaving before next week's game?).



The game system you use probably affects things a lot. Level advancement is fast in D&D 3E, so players soon become able to affect great things, and they may feel they have a responsibility to do so. In AD&D, PCs aren't going to be easily able to, say, defeat an orc horde, or oppose an evil king. It is hard to affect large-scale things and big politics.

At this stage nearly everything I run is heavily homebrewed from the original system anyhow, so I can adjust the mechanics to help with the goal. My players do tend to prefer a system where characters grow significantly week to week though, so just slowing down advancement won't be satisfying.

The other problem with just making it difficult to do large-scale stuff is that it can be very frustrating for players if I somehow accidentally communicate that they're expected to deal with it anyhow.

Rhynn
2013-04-01, 05:21 AM
Well basically that the last two campaigns I've run for them have had a point where the PCs have some knowledge or powers the rest of the world lacks, and they've decided to use them to advance the world as a whole.

...

So I'm trying to figure out how to set things up so that the players' free rein won't lead them to messing with world politics again, while still having aspects of discovery and invention to the campaign (things that they've said they really like)

Well, that one's dead easy. Don't make them so special. Don't put them in situations that are completely unique. Just like every fantasy movie these days having to have a world-saving plot (why is Conan saving the world?! GAH!) gets boring, that sort of campaign over and over may wear on players.

Depending on the genre, let them just be regular dungeon-crawling, wizard-tower-toppling adventurers, grubby mercenaries, street punks, city watchmen, or whatever. Give them a setting that you flesh out as you go along, with as much freedom to go where they want and do what they want as you can manage. Maybe try a sandbox wilderness campaign (West Marches (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) -style) or a sandbox city-and-dungeon (and-maybe-wilderness-around-the-dungeon) campaign (Dwimmermount (http://grognardia.blogspot.fi/search/label/dwimmermount)-style, minus the part that got into world-saving territory).


My current campaign-in-the-works is my Waterdeep & Undermountain game. The PCs are probably not from Waterdeep, and possibly not from the North - I don't care where they're from. They don't have any strong social ties in the beginning, unless they ask for them. They are in a tavern, decide to go down into the Undermountain dungeon on a lark or for profit, and form a proper adventuring company for it. I intend a rotating ensemble cast (even with just 3 players; each will have multiple PCs with multiple henchmen to choose from).

The PCs' Undermountain adventures will have a lot of hooks back to the city (some factions and villains have activities in the dungeon but are based in the city, or vice versa), but I don't have any plans for a grand plot, or even for the villains to have any particularly drastic intrigues going on - just the usual kidnapping, slavery, assassination, and power-peddling.

The PCs will also be free to explore the North (I've got a 6-mile-hex hexmap of the entire Savage North, from the Icepeak in the northwest to the Hill of Lost Suls in the southeast), which will be full of dungeons, lairs, monsters, and settlements, many with small adventure hooks, but again, nothing drastic.

There may be big events, probably taking place on a calendar (rather than as "adventures"), but the players will decide what they involve themselves with. They won't really have the ability to be power players before 9th level or so, but this being AD&D 2E, that's going to take ages to achieve - and most of them will become too busy to adventure when they set up their own fiefs, wizard's towers, temples, or thieves' guilds, semi-retiring in favor of less experienced PCs. If the players want, they can play at politics and war, but my default assumption is traditional dungeon-crawling and hex-crawling adventure, with no DM-imposed storylines.

I think this sort of campaign structure might achieve what you're looking for.

Blightedmarsh
2013-04-01, 02:17 PM
One piece:

A series of linked adventures that are meant to progress to an ultimate over riding goal.

Luffy can't really settle down because:

a) The marines are on his tail.
b) Doing so would mean abandoning his goal.
c) Then the adventure would end.

Crazy thought;

The A-team does one piece in a fireflyesque setting. A ship of renegades are on the fringes of a vastly powerful empire. To beat it they need to find and steal The Maguffin. Its going to be a long time and many adventures to find it. As they grow more powerful the empire is going to pay them far more attention (than they can survive getting caught by). Between their escapades and the heavy handed empire on their tail they should leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake. By the time they actually acquire it they should loath and detest the empire, have a few rivals and a slack handful of sworn foes.

The maguffin is your game changer; it gives them the power to utterly crush opponents that before would send them running on first sight (its the players crossing the godzilla threshold). At this point the empire should pull out all the stops to destroy them and they must judiciously use the maguffin to annihilate their way to their hard earned and satisfying victory.

NichG
2013-04-01, 05:54 PM
Well, that one's dead easy. Don't make them so special. Don't put them in situations that are completely unique. Just like every fantasy movie these days having to have a world-saving plot (why is Conan saving the world?! GAH!) gets boring, that sort of campaign over and over may wear on players.


Note that the thing in particular that is bothering them is the politics side of things. They're happy dealing with save the world, discover the secrets of the universe, etc kinds of things. They just don't want to have to fix governments and change leaders and build civilizations as part of it.



Depending on the genre, let them just be regular dungeon-crawling, wizard-tower-toppling adventurers, grubby mercenaries, street punks, city watchmen, or whatever. Give them a setting that you flesh out as you go along, with as much freedom to go where they want and do what they want as you can manage. Maybe try a sandbox wilderness campaign (West Marches (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/) -style) or a sandbox city-and-dungeon (and-maybe-wilderness-around-the-dungeon) campaign (Dwimmermount (http://grognardia.blogspot.fi/search/label/dwimmermount)-style, minus the part that got into world-saving territory).


I've a sandbox campaign and a dungeoncrawl campaign with this group and they've both been generally unsuccessful. In some ways, the sandbox makes this problem worse because then its up to them to choose what things to try to change about the world, and that seems to be what keeps leading them towards the politics stuff.


I think this sort of campaign structure might achieve what you're looking for.

The slow character growth and high turnover of characters would both be problems with my current group. The sandbox campaign I ran was 1ed D&D and basically the players just lost interest with poking around the sandbox, so the campaign ended. The dungeoncrawl was a 3-shot of a module megadungeon in 2ed D&D and my players generally said 'well that was interesting, but lets not do it again'.

The one campaign I've run so far where I've gotten kind of close to what I'm aiming at was a Planescape campaign about a troupe of traveling performers on the Infinite Staircase. Their schedule meant each game was a new locale, and the scale of Planescape meant that no one tried to e.g. fix Baator.


One piece:

A series of linked adventures that are meant to progress to an ultimate over riding goal.

Luffy can't really settle down because:

a) The marines are on his tail.
b) Doing so would mean abandoning his goal.
c) Then the adventure would end.


Yeah, this is the kind of thing I think would work. Having enemies hound the party does run into the power scaling problem, at which point the party can take the fight back to their enemies (but thats okay as long as their enemies aren't a government I guess...). TV show structures don't make great games without adaptation, because on a TV show its fine if there's something completely episodic or a dead end or whatever such that the goals are slowed down. But in a tabletop game, the players get frustrated after a number of sessions where all the leads ended up being false.

The adaptation that can be used to resolve that is incremental progress. Instead of 'well what we're looking for wasn't here' its 'we found one of the pieces of what we're looking for!'. Its why 'find the 4 artifacts' kinds of plotlines are so heavily used - you can make progress while at the same time its not over in one session. Even better if each artifact grants some minor taste of the power of the set as you find them.



Crazy thought;

The A-team does one piece in a fireflyesque setting. A ship of renegades are on the fringes of a vastly powerful empire. To beat it they need to find and steal The Maguffin. Its going to be a long time and many adventures to find it. As they grow more powerful the empire is going to pay them far more attention (than they can survive getting caught by). Between their escapades and the heavy handed empire on their tail they should leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake. By the time they actually acquire it they should loath and detest the empire, have a few rivals and a slack handful of sworn foes.

The maguffin is your game changer; it gives them the power to utterly crush opponents that before would send them running on first sight (its the players crossing the godzilla threshold). At this point the empire should pull out all the stops to destroy them and they must judiciously use the maguffin to annihilate their way to their hard earned and satisfying victory.


This could work with a few changes. The only reason I'm dubious about this is that once again it ends up being 'we want to overthrow the empire', which is exactly what they don't want to revisit. However, this structure doesn't actually require an empire per se. Change it so its an individual or a warlord who is hounding them and I think it works a bit better. That way they're not trying to conquer and hold planets (thus having to install planetary governments, etc), but instead they're trying to 'take out this guy's fleet' or whatever.

Rhynn
2013-04-01, 09:59 PM
Man, I think your players are defective. They're complaining about the choices they freely make, in the type of campaign they prefer over others? :smallmad:

Slipperychicken
2013-04-01, 10:39 PM
Note that the thing in particular that is bothering them is the politics side of things. They're happy dealing with save the world, discover the secrets of the universe, etc kinds of things. They just don't want to have to fix governments and change leaders and build civilizations as part of it.

Doesn't sound too hard, I've played a number of games with almost none of that stuff. Just don't make the quests about politics. Let the political leaders stay in the background, or focus on fantastical elements and let governments be less influential on the story.

If there's something political which needs doing, just let King Gregory GoodGuy take care of/handwave it after the PCs kill whatever needed killing. The PCs don't have to build the civilization, someone else can step up to the task. Realistically, the status quo doesn't want the PCs to have any power, so they just won't hand it out.

NichG
2013-04-01, 10:40 PM
Man, I think your players are defective. They're complaining about the choices they freely make, in the type of campaign they prefer over others? :smallmad:

More that they're tired of campaigns that go this route and they're voicing that. Clearly there are elements in the campaign by which I've tacitly or implicitly encouraged going political and engaging in world-building/empire-building/etc. I can see why they'd feel pressed to do those, even if from the DM's chair I know that its not strictly necessary and that they could drop it all at any point. Its sort of like, if you have a paladin who is really interested in finding a famous lost sword but the DM puts a village suffering under the yoke of a tyrant, of course the paladin will feel obliged to fix it. The obvious IC choice and obvious OOC choice are at odds.

As I said in the original post, there's a broad class of campaign that encourages this kind of behavior: campaigns in which there's a 'home' threatened by or containing 'bad things'. Thats what made me think of the structure of a campaign that doesn't have that element and how to do that well.

Friv
2013-04-02, 08:50 AM
Run a campaign that takes place in the aftermath of a world-threatening war.

The war is over, the Dark One has been overthrown, most of the heroes of the world are dead, and the few that remain are reassembling their homeland. Meanwhile, bandits, monsters, and remnants from both sides' armies are causing trouble across the land, not as a giant, unified enemy, but as a series of problems that are only loosely interconnected.

The players don't have the need to go into politics because politics isn't the problem. There is a more-or-less functional bureaucracy back home, the problem is that it lacks the resources that it needs to restore order. The players are thus those resources; they travel to towns where problems are developing, possibly with the leadership back home giving them a quick list of places where such problems exist or possibly on their own, and solve them.

JusticeZero
2013-04-02, 10:17 AM
There are problems that are best solved by sticking big pieces of metal into faces, and there are problems that are best solved by administrators. Pose the former kinds of problems, while portraying that there are competent NPC administrators already on the scene to do the latter just as soon as the thing in need of face perforation is out of the way.

Slipperychicken
2013-04-02, 10:22 AM
There are problems that are best solved by sticking big pieces of metal into faces, and there are problems that are best solved by administrators. Pose the former kinds of problems, while portraying that there are competent NPC administrators already on the scene to do the latter just as soon as the thing in need of face perforation is out of the way.

And the moment the face-stabbery is dealt with, the PCs immediately find themselves asked to embark on another violent adventure so they can move on and not have to worry about political stuff.

NichG
2013-04-02, 04:32 PM
Run a campaign that takes place in the aftermath of a world-threatening war.

The war is over, the Dark One has been overthrown, most of the heroes of the world are dead, and the few that remain are reassembling their homeland. Meanwhile, bandits, monsters, and remnants from both sides' armies are causing trouble across the land, not as a giant, unified enemy, but as a series of problems that are only loosely interconnected.

The players don't have the need to go into politics because politics isn't the problem. There is a more-or-less functional bureaucracy back home, the problem is that it lacks the resources that it needs to restore order. The players are thus those resources; they travel to towns where problems are developing, possibly with the leadership back home giving them a quick list of places where such problems exist or possibly on their own, and solve them.

What I'm converging on is something vaguely like this, except a bit more post-apocalyptic. There's no bureaucracy back home, because there's no home anymore. Restoring order isn't an issue because there's nowhere to put it. Think an inverse version of Sluggy Freelance's Oceans Unmoving plotline - too many people in one place and something horrible happens, so people have to remain spread out. You can't respond to the post-apocalyptic landscape by trying to gather people and rebuild civilization, because that dooms them to suffer from the effects of the Resonance, a doomsday weapon that was deployed that causes mental static between nearby people to build until it kills them or drives them mad.

If you want to fix the world, you have to solve the underlying problem of the Resonance first.

Geordnet
2013-04-02, 07:57 PM
If you want to fix the world, you have to solve the underlying problem of the Resonance first.
Sounds like a good idea. Make sure you include a few NPCs whom are local leaders of sorts despite this hurdle, and would be willing, able, and eager to get society constructive again once the Resonance is phased out. Maybe imply that they don't what any interference from the PCs in this. :smalltongue:

Another idea would be the "restore the rightful ruler to the throne" quest. Or, maybe the PC's "hometown" is actually a caravan, and they have to stick with it when it moves on. (Heh, maybe even make it a world-hopping caravan...)

NichG
2013-04-02, 09:52 PM
Restore the rightful ruler could easily fall into politics if the PCs find they don't like the rightful ruler, or that the wrongful ruler is actually doing some things right.

I've done the caravan campaign actually (it wasn't world-hopping, it was plane-hopping and journeyed through the afterlife) - my players generally liked that campaign, so its a good model.