DoW: Aftermath and Lessons

Now that we've finished our play-through of Destroyer of Worlds, it's a good time to reflect on the experience. Overall we had a great time. The players and I all found it to be very rewarding and enjoyable. That's a credit to the adventure. It's a great set-up and setting and contains an over-abundance of fantastic ideas and scenes. But also I skipped about two-thirds of the adventure's content and added (or at least re-mixed) much of what occurred. 

Destroyer of Worlds is a strange beast of an adventure. (Which is why I'm still writing and thinking about it). 

Some changes and recommendations: 

Get rid of the other marines. Reducing the marines to a skeleton crew kept the PC at the center of the action. It also made it seem like the UPP war was largely unwinnable. This forced the PCs to pick their battles and priorities. 

Move Wojcik's death off-screen. The adventure pulls out all the stops on alien variants. I wanted some variations but also wanted to keep some of those toys in the toy box. Having the captured marine chest-burst off-screen left a bit of mystery, got the insurgents and UPP curious about what was going on, and gives us a change of pace instead of every session being a monster fight. 

Freeze out Mallory. Mallory Eckford is more interesting and useful if she doesn't have access to Project Life Force. She becomes an aggressive corp with resources at her disposal who is trying to get her hands on the project. This lets her be both an ally and adversary to the PCs as needed and injects additional tension and intrigue.

Replace dead PCs with whoever is around. One fun fascet of Aliens is that the PCs are nothing special and anyone can be a hero. When PCs die (and they should), pick any NPC who might plausibly involve themselves as the new character. This is a fun way to introduce variety and characters with different motivations to the group. For each session, keep a list of who's around and might make a good replacement character.

Skip the big oil drop. I feel like an event that big really needs to be it's own story. And this story really doesn't need more big events. I liked replacing it with xeno-tainted water from Project Life Force. This created something the PCs could discover and (in theory) try to stop or use to their advantage. 

Offer the Mallory Escape Plan. With Mallory on the outside of Life Force, she can offer the PCs a means of escape with multiple strings attached. This can be done covertly with one of them, or directly to the whole group. But the escape-for-black-oil bargain gets the PCs onto that elevator and makes a nice dramatic ending. 

Play with competing agendas. Once things get rolling, there are a number of different motivations that might guide the PCs. What's their priority and primary motivation? Follow orders? Save the colony? Fight the UPP? Kill the xenos? Get rich? Survive? Escape? Rescue their fellow marines? Learn about the project? Destroy it? Get revenge? Create custom agendas that point characters in directions that are somewhat aligned but also conflict. Give them the hint of options in any of these directions. Then let them play out conflicts and come up with their own plans. There's so much going on in the adventure. Wherever they go, the story can follow. 

An infected character is more interesting than a dead one. Going into our final session, three of the five characters were infected with chestbursters or black oil. They had various levels of awareness and denial of this fact. And we had seen enough alien variation that there was some uncertainty about their fate. This created nice drama in the struggle for survival and the final realization that survival might not be such a great idea.

Plan your session count and let that guide you. I wanted to limit it to 6 sessions. That meant two sessions per act. This forced me to streamline appropriately. I still had to skip things, let critical events happen off-screen, and have a plan to keep the players moving toward's the story's conclusion. Good stories don't outstay their welcome and have a satisfying ending. Sometimes less is more.

Make it your own. Destroyer of Worlds is a great and glorious sandbox. But there's just too much there to really engage with all of it. Pick the scenes and characters that inspire you. Give the players options and be ready to adapt. Work with your group to create something that is uniquely your own.