The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.2)

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In my last post I described how I created a tool that let me create a series of magical maladies, their cures, and adventure locations where the important ingredients to those cures would be found.

(I decided to skip the poisons in the end, because the material I already had was more than enough for what I needed.)

The next step was to put it all together! I envisioned a campaign where a few strangers to the Dommar valley would be stopping as their caravan waits for a rock-slide to be cleared from one of the passes through the mountains, and find themselves suddenly called to action to help on the basis that they are bored strangers, intelligent, and literate. The local witch, a she-gnome named Agatha is missing, and one of the villagers has come down with a perilous case of Frostbite Fever. They can't wait for Agatha any longer, so they beg the PCs to read Agatha's book and help them make the cure.

And this would be the core basis for the campaign. The PCs encounter some peril in the village that one of Agatha's cures or potions could resolve, and so the PCs find themselves replacing Agatha as the village herbalist, alchemist, and witch... at least until they can learn of her fate.

Making the Book

 Of course, what would be the best way to give the campaign some extra life? Why, actually having the book!

I wrote down down descriptions of the places, diseases, and ingredients in a tone inspired by a mix of Mercedes Lackey's more modern fantasy and Tanya' Huff's odd humor, mixed with a touch of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. I laced in local gossip, mentions of NPCs, discussions of local mysteries, usually as asides or background on the various items. Wherever there was a common theme between cures and potions that an ingredient had, I made up some magical properties of it that the PCs might be able to use creatively.

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Then I ran it through ChatGPT to enhance and exaggerate the style a few steps and bulk up the entries a little (without naming those specific authors) and proofread it for me. I created some diagrams in NightCafe using the faster, low-energy, ethically sourced models available there and slapped them into the book.

By the end, I had a fairly detailed campaign setting, complete with about twenty adventure hooks, a cast of a dozen NPCs, clues about at least four dungeons, and some mysteries all casually woven into what is essentially a fantasy version of Culpepper's Herbal.

In order to minimize device use at the table and give immersion a little extra kick, I decided to make an actual, physical copy of the book.

If you create a PDF in "statement" size, you can use Adobe Acrobat Reader's "print as booklet" function to print it out in a stack that just has to be folded over and stabled to get the pages in the right order, and so I did just that. One day I need to learn how to make stitched booklets in the Japanese fashion for an even better effect. 

Once I had the hard-copy, I sat down with a pencil and I went to town adding marginalia. Some of it was extra humour, a handful of extra hooks, and some notes on additional reagents whose properties had not been discovered. In fact, I have at least two notes on every page with additional setting information, bits of vandalism in the character of a major NPC, and extra doodles to make the book lived in.

 I feel like the final creation is possibly one of the coolest Campaign resources I have ever put together.

While I can't give you my marginalia, I can give you the PDF to print and, if you want, annotate it yourself:

Download it Here! 

Running the Game

Now, this is a pretty intensive piece of experience design. The next step was choosing what kind of game to run it in. This is meant to be a cozy game, so ideally a game that is not overly crunchy, that moves fast, and plays simply. 

Magic in this game is mostly going to be achieved by creating items then using them, and so a system in which gear tracking is part of the structure of the game seemed like a good idea. Inventory slots could serve as a major limiter on how much of an ingredient a PC can collect on a foray and keep the cycle of "take on a patient, identify disease, learn the cure, go adventuring get the ingredients, race against the clock to make the cure, repeat..."

I also wanted a game that didn't make use of the Class paradigm, because part of the point of the campaign is that the PCs are thrown in the deep end and forced to become alchemists and magicians, rather than being them already.

I went through a few possibilities in my head. Initially I considered Grok?! and  Tiny Dungeon 2e, but Grok?!has a specific flavour of weird science fantasy baked in, and Tiny Dungeon hand-waves equipment. ICRPG seemed like a pretty solid choice - I love the game-  but it is built to support to a very action-oriented style of play. Ultimately I decided to play using Knave 2e... it is OSR compatible, has a baked-in alchemy system I could play with, is classless, and relies heavily on gear.

I could also easily overlay a Pacts & Blades style pact magic system on it to make the magic feel even more "witchy".

This let me do some fine-tuning on the hooks and stat out some important NPCs.

Postscript 

Overall I am quite happy with how the project turned out. Unfortunately, my kids rejected the campaign, deciding that what they really wanted was a campaign where they could do a lot of "awesome stuff" without much definition of what "awesome" might look like. Go figure... I will hang on to it for some future time.