On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 7:24 AM, John Geoffrey <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:
What part did you add? What was it that your player liked so much?

On 20 May 2014 07:33, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:
However, in the aftermath of the group collapse, one of the players downloaded the campaign for himself and then contacted me to say that the bit which had been the most fun for him and the others had been stuff I added. Frankly, I'm not exactly sure what (if anything) that fact says about the product itself. Maybe I just play out stuff I create on the fly better than I play out pre-made-by-others stuff.
 



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I altered some of the combat encounters and also added additional ones. The player particularly mentioned the initial scene I created, wherein the party's failure to beat off an attack in time results in a low-yield nuke detonating and killing McGuffin Man (the mysterious uncle whose death sets off the campaign and who originally dies off-screen prior to campaign start). He felt this gave them all a much stronger reason for taking on the adventure, as each PC felt at least some degree of guilt for his death.

Given this Pull, I was able to tone down the original Push: instead of the Empire chasing them loudly and openly, it became the other heirs chasing them carefully and quietly. 

(And - yes - I am aware that in the original adventure McGuffin Man doesn't really die. I planned to handle that with a computer simulation of him at the relevant point. But it never became necessary, due to the group's break-up.)

But what made the strongest impression was my roleplaying of various NPCs, both important and not so important. IIRC, the original initial encounter of the campaign is a congregation of the various heirs (licit and illicit) of McGuffin Man. I went all out in that scene, playing the (male) cult leader as Tammy Faye Bakker (complete with hideous make-up) and the maybe-girlfriend as Lady Macbeth. Later on, they had occasion to encounter the Imperial Legate of a low-pop mining world and given that this was a backwater uninhabitable world, I played him as Londo Mollari from the first season of Babylon 5, posted there as punishment and therefore spending most of his conscious hours drunk.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein
"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby
"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester