This has been baffling me for awhile, so if someone could offer some input it would be great.

In a recent story I told (online for anyone interested), I made the Night of Fire an insignificant event, a mere accident in what was a somewhat mundane assassination attempt. I actually did this to drive home a lessen, that the cause of the Night is far less important and unchangeable than the effects and the future itself. I revealed what actually occurred without hiding the truth at all, laying the information bear for all to see. Has anyone else tried this or do they think I should have made it a complete mystery, never letting the character learn the truth?

Also, what are some causes that other people have come up with?

I was chatting about this with someone who's gearing up to run a game (I'll not name names so as not to spoil things) and one of the ideas we were tossing about was using the NoF as a McGuffin to drive the characters into uncovering a conspiracy that had been growing in the Before and is now using the catastrophe as a way to cement their dominion. Whether they're truly responsible for the cataclysm is something that can be left as a question, a final loose thread that may never be resolved.

Personally, I'm not that concerned about coming up with a backstory for it. The theme of the game, for me, is survival and the tough choices one has to make to do so, not mystery and detective work. But to each their own.

I'm planning to develop the game I'm starting soon (The City, After) into one covering the Before as well. I may have been watching too much Flashforward recently. I remember reading Stephen King's "It", paying special attention to the chapter headings to work out what was happening in the past and what in the present. I can see that working really, really well with Desolation.

@Arsenal - I really like the idea of the cause being something trivial, some minor act, almost the Butterfly Effect if you like. A magical experiment goes wrong in a wizard's lab somewhere across the world, nothing significant happens there, but the ripples in the weave amplify and distort the side-effects as they get further and further from the lab until you get the NoF in Ascondea - and worse stuff further away!

Yes, the basic name of the game is survival. But once you've got survival sorted, people being people are going to want to pin the blame on someone, so there the investigation is going to start...

And Nestor? I'll announce the cast on Monday, alright?

Glad to hear it.

Not that I was jonesing for a game or anything.

*twitch*

During the games I've run in the past, I've found the players have a propensity to blame the NoF on whatever race/nationality someone they dislike belongs to. For example:

- Elves: they destroyed the world (nature) out of spite
- Dwarves: they messed up something trying to kill the deep horrors
- Gnomes: how did they know about it ahead of time - because they planned it?
- Orcs: attack to invade the empire
- Empire: magical experiment gone awry
- Kar'Danan: foul necromatic plan for world domination
- Island Fold: creepy voodoo midgets
- etc...

Ha!

That is soooo now going to be my mental image for Loranthians.

"Creepy voodoo midgets..." BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Hullo, Arsenal,

Welcome to the GMD forums! Lots of good folks here, and lots of good info and all that.



Frankly, I've always considered the reasons for the Night of Fire to be...not relevant to play. The game is about survival in the post-apocalyptic world of the After, not to dwell on the reason for the NoF. If that reason were to surface as an afterthought in my campaign, all well and good, but there is so much to do and see in the world of the After that the reasons for the NoF don't really concern me or the players at this point.

That said, while I hope at some point that the truth behind the Night of Fire will be revealed in the game, I'm not holding my breath waiting for that event to happen.

Hullo, Nestor,



This is one of the plots and elements that I have running through my campaign, too. While I won't detail stuff here, as I know that several of my players read these threads, I will say that I don't consider the conspiracy to have necessarily have engineered the Night of Fire, so much as they took advantage of it, planning based on the warnings of the Gnomes.




My sentiments exactly, mate.

I plan to not answer the question of what caused the Night of Fire at all. It is a mystery and will remain so. Should the PCs go looking for the reason, they'll find all sorts of hints and suggestions, but nothing concrete. Various NPCs will have theories, some will have "evidence' of conspiracies or negligence, or whatever. But all of this will be based on beliefs of the NPCs. As the GM, I plan to leave the mystery of the NoF open.

The Night of Fire is over and done and is NOT important, ultimately, so I don't plan to give information on how it happened. Because as soon as there is something concrete from the GM, the impluse from players is to act upon it somehow. I don't really want that. Setting it up as "an assassination attempt gone awry" raises more questions than it answers, and thus will spur the PCs to explore every nook and cranny about that assassination attempt as they'll be sure it's what they're supposed to do.

Also, by making the NoF mysterious it makes it a bit more scary (as it should). As in, could it happen again? If we know it wasn't caused by Ascondian mages overusing the weave, for example, then the prejudice against mages is canonically wrong. I prefer to keep the question open: what IF existing mages COULD cause another cataclysm? Taking a stand on that question makes the "how do you feel about magic" question so much more important, because the PCs do not know what role, if any, magic played in the cataclysm or might play in the future.

By keeping it something beyond the concrete game world, it fades into the background as part of the past, but the menace continues to loom (or the PCs will latch onto whatever theory fits their paradigm and accept that as truth). \

Why the NoF happened isn't important, so it doesn't need an explanation. What the PCs do now that is HAS, well that's what matters. And part of that, to me, is what conclusions they draw about how and why it happened, as PCs. Answering the question so definitively really removes one of the most vital RP aspects of the game for me, since so many groups in the world are pointing fingers at each other in blame. If you already know that all those groups are blameless, it flattens the dynamic of the world.

All you guys make me smile... it's so nice to see people "get" the game.

Thanks.