Postmortem

I come to bury my Flashing Blades campaign, not to praise it.

It's been over a month since the last in-character post and while one of the players disappeared from the site altogether back in mid-October, three of four remain active on other forums at RPG Pub, so it's safe to say this campaign has fallen and it can't get up.

It stings, not gonna lie. I started prepping this setting when I ran FB more than a dozen years ago and I put a lot of work into it, and therein may lie the problem. I asked for feedback when things slowed down and only one of the players responded, so I'm left to conjecture, but I strongly suspect I simply bored them to the point of losing interest.

One of my goals when I run a historical tabletop roleplaying game is to capture the feel of the period and I think I just overwhelmed them with exposition, such as lengthy conversations between non-player characters explaining, frex, court jurisdiction in the setting.

This is the sort of stuff the players in my last campaign enjoyed, so it may just be a mismatch between styles; I'm not sure if play-by-post made this more or less problematic. It feels to me that pbp makes this easier because the pace is by necessity more desultory but perhaps not.

I would've appreciated more feedback, to be sure. This is an exception for me, and I hoped to learn from my mistakes, but c'est la vie.

So, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, Sainte-Argène-sur-Barmie. You remain one of my favorite settings, and hopefully your promise may yet be realized at some later date. My blogging pace slowed as the campaign wound down, but I still have a list of topics and some half-written posts to finish, so please continue to check in for more swashbucklery content in the new year.