Adventure Prep: My Rewind button

This week, my actual prepping work is rather light.

Since all 6 players are available (What are the odds?) we have to move the game out of my place. I can only accommodate 5 in my gaming den. That means I’ll have to pack my stuff to go to Math’s on Friday evening.

It also just happens that the prepping I did 2 weeks ago wasn’t all used up. To make thing easier still, a big part of the next 2 sessions will be exactly as written in the published adventure I use, i.e. Expedition to the Demonwebs pits.

Anecdotal Aside: Monte Cook was initially approached to tackle this product and he thought it was about mixing Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (a Sci-Fi themed AD&D adventure) with the classic Queen of the Demonweb pits. He envisioned having a party of adventurers taking the ship off Greyhawk and crashing it into the Demonweb… Now that I would have liked to see! When he actually learned what it was about he wasn’t as interested.

Since my prep is minimal, what I’d like to talk about is something that I did only sparingly in my quarter century as a DM. However, it was beneficial to the game whenever I did it.

I’m talking about Ret-Coning a campaign’s plot in order to salvage a session and/or campaing arc that took a wrong turn somewhere.

Ret Con stands for Retroactive Continuity. It means re-framing (or revising) past events to explain a new path a story is taking. When done inelegantly, a Ret Con can be defined as an Ass Pull. That last one means when a writer pulls something out of thin air (or somewhere else) to explain an event.

As you may remember, my last session ended somewhat badly when I used a single, rather minor NPC to expose way too many convoluted plot elements and forcing all my players on the rails of Chatty’s Approved Plotline ®.

When I saw the players taking out pickaxes and dynamite to blow those rails… I had to do something.

So what I did was let a few days pass after the game so that we would all move on to other things. As time heals all wounds, so does it dull the memory of a less than stellar game. We all ended up filing the last game as ‘a heck of a great start and a so so ending, no biggie’.

Then, earlier this week, I announced by email to the whole group that I would perform a Ret Con and present this at the start of the next game.

A player asked that I share what I had in mind beforehand so they could wrap their minds around it before the game and I agreed.

I re-framed the events of the last game as such:

• While the PCs were hunting down demon-slaying weapons according to their prophecy, the city of Ptolus was under the assault of 2 gangs.

• One gang, bearing the markings of the ‘Spider’ is made of Drow and demons are based underneath Ptolus and conducts various raids on the surface, targeting Elven settlements.

• The other gangs, marked with a Skull, performs much more precise, much more damaging ‘seek and destroy’ missions on key forces of Good in Ptolus.

• Originally there was just one gang, the Skulls, who were responsible for everything

• Rule of Three (The Adventure’s main patron) points the players toward the Demonweb to sniff out Lolth’s plan for this world and the Outer planes.

• This is the published adventure’s actual next step. I had Cixi (Franky’s Iron Hero) old patron do that in my broken version

• Cixi’s old patron summoned only Cixi (instead of her whole crew) and gives Cixi a mission to sniff out the Demonweb for proof that the pact that imprisoned Cixi’s people has been violated by Lolth and therefore is no longer valid.

• Instead of the patron revealing herself as the true villain/Magnificent Bastard of the campaign and forcing Cixi to fetch her the proof she needs to free her own people, the wardens of that prison.

• Now, the only hint that something is not right is that Cixi’s old patron wears a Necklace bearing the Skull insignia.

(I don’t expect you to all catch what this means, suffice to say that it’s Franky’s character’s campaign goal to find Cixi’s original Homeworld and free her people from the prison world and I was trying to give Franky a path to full closure with the end of this campaign)

The players really liked it… it was simpler, more elegant, hinted at what was wrong and made it more ‘acceptable’ for the heroes to continue on to the Demonwebs.

In order to salvage what we played out in the last game, I told them that all the plot elements that hadn’t been contradicted in this re-telling was actually the stuff of rumors and conjecture in Ptolus.

What I’m driving at is that I think it’s okay to tweak, or even downright change past event of a campaign (recent or not). You can do so if it serves your game better and if the players are willing to suspend their disbelief enough to bring back the story within their comfort zone.

At the very least, doing this type of game rewind can allow to bring a game back into the ‘potentially fun’ zone.

Heck, I remember a few years ago, in one game where I sprang an unannounced Alien Invasion of a Fantasy world, my players were so shocked and unprepared that they decided to ignore that part of the story and went to explore another region of the world where no Bug Eyed Monsters had landed… I had to scrap a few weeks of prep readjust to the player’s reaction.

I don’t know if a Ret Con is a common thing in other playing groups. I wonder if playing style can influence the possibility of a DM doing this.

Let’s make this open questions:

• Have you as a DM used ret-con to adjust aspects of your game? If so, how?
• Do you as a player, agree to such a technique? If so, how involved do you want to be?
• What is an acceptable Ret Con, what is too much?
• Are there DM/players that believe you shouldn’t do it? If so, why?

The comments are open, let’s discuss this!