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• Fletch (played by Nick): a human fighter; the strong silent type.

• Gareth (played by Mary): a bard with an intelligent viola who replaced Maureen as Mary’s character.

The sample adventure in which the party encountered the orcs at Blaze Arrow was one of the first for this group of party members, whereas the transcripts from the adventure at the Foppish Wererat come later in the campaign. Often the entrance or exit of characters can be seen as beginnings or endings to narratives within the overarching narrative of the campaign. David, Cuthalion, and Fletch were all new characters at the time of the Blaze Arrow adventure, and Maureen had only been adventuring with Whisper for a few weeks. By the time of the Foppish Wererat adventure, the players had been together for approximately 9 months, and Mary’s character of Maureen had met a tragic end and been replaced with Gareth, who is featured prominently in this second story. I also analyze other shorter narratives from the Sorpraedor game, including the story of the confrontation between Whisper and David, and individual stories about Maureen.

In order to show how the Blaze Arrow story fit within the larger Sorpraedor narrative I recount it briefly here, but a full version can be found in the appendix. At the point of this adventure, Whisper and Maureen had been working to uncover a subversive agency that had infiltrated the hierarchy of the town of Gateway. They had established themselves as heroes in the town and were working closely with the town’s magistrate to assist in any difficulties. When this group of players came together, the new characters were immediately associated with Whisper and the reputation she had created for herself. This story begins after the magistrate has asked the group to go to the outpost, Blaze Arrow, that has not reported in with the main city of Gateway as scheduled. Maureen, a character who often likes to go off on her own, joins the group later in the journey, while they are camped for the night. Immediately, chaos ensues as a threat and two severed heads are thrown into the camp. A mysterious tattoo makes the party wonder if Maureen is being watched, and she is sent back to town. In reality Maureen’s player, Mary, was not able to attend a gaming session. Therefore, the narrative was altered to reflect this choice.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party continues on to Blaze Arrow where they find the scene as conveyed in the epigraph of this chapter. Orcs have attacked the tower. However, the party manages to capture some of the orcs and finds out that their real target was the Skullbash, another orcish tribe. Cuthalion gives a rousing speech to the leader of the orc tribe, Grumbach, who agrees to leave the human town out of his conquest. This story ends when the party returns to Gateway and a new story picks up from there.

An overarching narrative spans across individual stories like this one, just as the world of Sorpraedor exists outside of any particular tale. The party has larger quests that continue from session to session and each smaller story adds to the larger narrative. If you read the story of Blaze Arrow carefully, you will see references to these larger quests. For example, Whisper asks the prisoner if he was sent by Thaddeus, who was a recurring villain in the campaign. In addition, individual characters have their own overarching narratives and as we will see in chapter 8; the beginning of the Blaze Arrow story takes on new meaning when we know Maureen’s history. In each session some plot points in the larger story are resolved, but they are intertwined with new ones; much the way chapters of a novel consist of individual threads that make up a whole work.

Unlike the examples from the Sorpraedor campaign, my other examples are more self-contained. In addition to home campaigns such as Sorpraedor, gamers often meet up at conventions or gaming stores for one-time sessions (sometimes called one-shots). The Role-Playing Game Association (RPGA) is a worldwide organization