Asymmetry: Role-Playing: Villains and Vigilantes: The Host: GM's Introduction

GM's Introduction

GM's Introduction

This was the game I ran in the year before I moved to Boston, which was a rather turbulent period in my life. A long romantic relationship had broken up leaving me with a lot of pent up energy, which translated into The Host. The break-up had shattered my standard player group, but put me in touch with several friends and players with whom I had lost contact.
    I decided to try something big, perhaps bigger than I ever had before—an international team of renegades, operating on social, physical and political levels. I wanted a pro-active team who would take action against without concerns for national politics, but instead following their own moral compass; I placed the game early in the campaign history, with the Plovian Invasion looming—since the players knew this, the characters would quickly learn of the threat. Stack onto this secret identities, careers, love lives and backgrounds, and things started to get a touch complicated.
    The final ingredient in this mess: I wanted a braided plot structure: not the semi-episodic plots that I ended up using with the Revolution, but a different plot for each character, along with two or three other plots. I meant to advance and integrate them session after session, closing some and opening others over the course of the three year plotted game arc.
    This was a mammoth task. I'm sure that I could have done all of it if I had been aware of what I was getting into. And if my mind hadn't been fried in the beginning. And if I hadn't decided to move to Boston (the last few episodes were done commuting). And if I hadn't met my now-wife just before the move.
    All told I'm happy with the way the first year's arc came out, but doing any more was a laughable concept. The Host was too complicated to maintain on a once a month/limited preparation schedule. I'm glad I had the self-knowledge to end it when I did (actually, there were two episodes after what you see here, but they've been removed through retroactive continuity) rather than poison the beginning with a poor continuation. There is plenty still for the Host to do, and I intend to continue someday.
    Because of its strange braided structure, I'm opting to describe all the major plots and player sub plots in the order they happened. There should be enough references are made between them so to make the timing clear, but I am including an Issue List developed years after the fact. This order is slightly different from what actually occurred in the game, but it is clearer and more logical. There are only sub plot listings for the four original players (Apollyon, ENOCH, Rashiel and Uriel), since the other three players were part time or later joiners late, and were therefore cut out of the subplot kudzu.

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