We're Thinking of Ending Things
Campaigns, that is.
On a recent episode of the Rascal Radio Hour podcast, Thomas and Chase stumbled upon a synchronicity to their respective tabletop RPG campaigns. Namely, that they were nearing the end. Well, an end.
Within a hobby where collaborative games so often fizzle out instead of reaching an agreed-upon conclusion, we found the beginning of a fertile discussion. How do we both decide upon an end for our characters? What kind of feelings are evoked from that decision, much less playing it out at the table?
Below is a little letter series—not the first hosted on Rascal—that is part celebration, part discussion. Endings are funny things, full of meaning and grief and the promise of something after.
Hi Chase,
So I’ve been playing Hearts of Wulin, a game of wuxia melodrama. We’ve completed two “seasons”, and we’re on break ‘til we come back for the third and final one in January. This is a weird moment. It’s not like the break between one session and the next—there’s a much bigger sense of possibility here. I could show up on the first day of the new season and say basically anything about what happened to my character in the intervening time, and it would become part of the story. And since we’ve decided this is the final season, I want to do my character justice. I’ve come to care about him, and I didn’t expect to!
When I made him up, I wanted to play a care-free, happy-go-lucky fuckboi. Surprise, surprise: that isn’t what happened. My character, Soup, is from a revered detective school. But he’s run away and basically spends his time in mild debauchery. I thought his story would be about growing up and taking responsibility. Instead, small decisions have taken over and snowballed into big character-defining struggles.
Hearts of Wulin asks you to make a “romantic entanglement”. It’s just a statement that mentions one PC and one NPC. My entanglement was that I was in love with an NPC who was engaged to another PC, Mu. But the engagement was just a sham so the NPC could easily turn me down. Haha, I thought, what a funny situation, what a source of amusement.
