ZEITGEIST Worldres' Zeitgeist Campaign

Worldres

Explorer
Aw shucks, my playerbase bought me an "Obscurati" ring as a campaign and writeup completion gift. It's a tungsten ring with a stripe of sparkling star-like glitter all the way around, with an Ob Code inside.

While I had mentioned that my character's inscription would have been "Our Beloved Home" (after Flint/Risur) if he had been an Ob member, the group decided to pick a sassier inscription for me, based on a phrase I said once when I was completely exasperated - "Obtain Better Players." I didn't mean it, but I love the ring!
 

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While I had mentioned that my character's inscription would have been "Our Beloved Home" (after Flint/Risur) if he had been an Ob member, the group decided to pick a sassier inscription for me, based on a phrase I said once when I was completely exasperated - "Obtain Better Players." I didn't mean it, but I love the ring!
the best part of that inscription is that it isn't even a valid one - "players" has too many characters to fit anywhere in the ob.

that's super sweet, though!
 

Worldres

Explorer
the best part of that inscription is that it isn't even a valid one - "players" has too many characters to fit anywhere in the ob.

that's super sweet, though!
Of course you're right (and at the time, I even said "don't try to codebreak that, it's not a valid ob code"), but I was very surprised to see that the inscription Oathkeeper Bree's Sword got changed to Oathkeeper Bree's Shield in the 5e reprint. I guess it was decided that Bree was too low to be tier 5, and so tier 6 has rings, now. Hm. So anyway, in some versions, lower tiers are technically valid! Or at least Player would be - or Players if you grouped all letters >5 into one "lowest" tier. Whatever. :p

That reminds me that I have a trove of random campaign materials to share, including a bunch of Ob inscriptions I made up. No tier 6/7 rings in my game, though!!
 
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Of course you're right (and at the time, I even said "don't try to codebreak that, it's not a valid ob code"), but I was very surprised to see that the inscription Oathkeeper Bree's Sword got changed to Oathkeeper Bree's Shield in the 5e reprint. I guess it was decided that Bree was too low to be tier 5, and so tier 6 has rings, now. Hm. So anyway, in some versions, lower tiers are technically valid! Or at least Player would be - or Players if you grouped all letters >5 into one "lowest" tier. Whatever. :p
i think that's just a mistake, because it then immediately says bree is still tier 5. weird that they'd change it to shield at all, though.

EDIT: yeah, i'm fairly certain it's a mistake - the 5e campaign guide still lists her inscription as sword, not shield.
 

seventhdoctor

Villager
Cleone's player here, maker of Onion spoofs and maintainer of wikis! Well, one wiki. World's finally given the go-ahead for us to look in here, and to start off thanks to Ryan Nock and the rest of the Zeitgeist writers to providing the base for this amazing experience! Our weekly sessions were the highlight of my week for nearly three full years, and provided a steady bright spot amid some pretty rough times.

Having read through this thread, I'm going to once again plug the wiki I made to track our campaign - particularly the session recaps, which are a bit more fine-grained than World's per-adventure summaries and include some peak dialogue where our record-keeping allows. World generalized/slightly misrepresented some stuff and skipped over some personal character arcs to keep his writeups condensed, so if you're interested in learning more about the characters I fully recommend checking out the recap and character pages! (Also, I shamelessly want a little bit of validation because I've definitely poured a triple-digit amount of hours into this over the past few years.)

The wiki, admittedly, has not yet been updated for the campaign's end beyond the recaps because I was waiting on the epilogue for that and (I say lovingly) World has yet to finish it. That'll come eventually, though.

Anyway, just to talk about the character I played here: I knew when World shared information about the game that I wanted to play a deva, because I love reincarnation tropes and exploring ideas with them. Cleone's initial concept was a deva who drew on experience from past lives but was aware their most recent past life was a jerk (influences including Iria Animi from the game Tales of Innocence and a bit of Dax from Star Trek: Deep Space 9), and I left most of the details to World figuring he had the context to come up with something better than I could in my plot ignorance. It paid off big time: I blindly walked right into the reveal of Cleone's relationship to Nicodemus during Adventure 5, and it gave me physical chills! Her difficult-to-name but close relationship with Kasavarina was also a highlight, and their interactions in Adventure 8 remain some of my favorite moments in the campaign.

ripalastor_v2.png

World didn't post this one, so I will.

Her coming from Danor was also a bit of a happy accident, as 1) I nearly considered a spirit medium (and played one later, as Zo) and 2) it was related to a backstory idea that didn't work out. I decided to keep the idea that she was a Danoran technologist on exchange, and made her an older and more experienced character career-wise to match the position. And since then, for most of the game's lifespan I've been saying I don't know how other campaigns work without a Danoran PC. Cleone's ongoing investment in Danor even as she learned her country was inseparable from the Obscurati felt integral to letting certain parts of the story have proper weight, and I'm extremely glad I did it. (Gatria's player has also said similar things about having a Beran PC, and they're also right!)

It also led to a few, uh, weird juxtapositions with real life. In particular I remember having a moment when we started Adventure 5 in 2021 during pandemic lockdown and World mentioned anti-Danoran protests in Flint the same night I listened to reports on pandemic violence against Asian Americans on the news (me being Asian American myself). Then we got to 10-11 a year later and, in a very different and more unsettling vein, at one point I realized Cleone was calling for revolution after Gatria spread rumors about Danor's falsified elections. Bad. I realize that Zeitgeist started in 2011 (judging by forum timestamps) but WHEW. Resonance, or lack thereof.

Anyway, Cleone is a big blender of concepts I enjoy playing with! And our lovely GM threw even more things I enjoy playing with at me. I had a great time, and I feel a bit spoiled for tabletop experiences now haha.

I don't have much skill by way of drawn art so I can't contribute much there, but to cap off this post here's Cleone and her past life Alastor as made in Animal Crossing:
ac_cleone_1.jpg

ac_alastor.jpg
 

Aw shucks, my playerbase bought me an "Obscurati" ring as a campaign and writeup completion gift. It's a tungsten ring with a stripe of sparkling star-like glitter all the way around, with an Ob Code inside.

While I had mentioned that my character's inscription would have been "Our Beloved Home" (after Flint/Risur) if he had been an Ob member, the group decided to pick a sassier inscription for me, based on a phrase I said once when I was completely exasperated - "Obtain Better Players." I didn't mean it, but I love the ring!

Oh, I knew the inscription didn't fit the Ob rules! But by that point, it had been the name of our secret player-only discord thread for... I went and checked, and we made that group in APRIL OF 2021. (We didn't chat too often there. Mostly about the Ob ring!)

Hi, I'm Bizzy and I am Hoya's (and Alais', from B-Team) player! Thank you Ryan, first, for the campaign itself, and thank all of you for your interest in our little thread. Finally, a million thanks to World for the time and effort he put into the game.

We have finally been unleashed on the forum and I don't really know what to say. For now, I'll just say I'm delighted by everyone's interest and the (relativey) short summary of the entire campaign has been a fun read! At least half of the time we as a party got called gremlins/some degree of criminal/some measure of "really walking the line on being evil", Hoya was the holdout!

Except for that time she wished the Gidim out of existence. I'll own that.

This was my first tabletop campaign that actually survived beyond scattered sessions over a few months, and I know I've been spoiled by an excellent campaign, a dedicated DM, and talented players.

By the way, World didn't mention why ending the campaign with a photograph was a big deal. He told us ages ago that we couldn't invent cameras. Not allowed, not even with Tinker around creating his revolutionary nonsense. So we kept asking why, and speculated on when we'd see them show up, since this was obviously important for some reason. That's the reason for ending the entire game with a photo. Because he wanted to give us the camera we'd been asking about for almost three years!!
 

Oh, I love the photo capstone.

Seventhdoctor, I'll dig into the wiki tonight.

For me, it's always an honor to hear players enjoyed the campaign, and I suppose it's a good problem to have that it's starting to get hard to keep straight all the different casts of PCs from the various campaigns. I feel sort of like a time traveler who keeps changing history so the basic events are similar, but details keep changing.

Am . . . am I in the timeline where the king has a romance with Ashima Shimtu, or the one where one of the PCs tries to take over the eschatologists and betrays the party because he figures if he can end the world that means his was the correct philosophy, or the one where a PC is Kasvarina with amnesia, or the one where a PC marries into Morgan's family and like genuinely helps reform the Clergy (I bet Nicodemus never thought of trying THAT)?

What's next for the group?
 

WHEW. Resonance, or lack thereof.
The weirdest real world resonance for me is that when we had finished the Act Three hardcover compilation, the last thing for me to do was write the Foreword: a sort of capstone commentary, so I opined a bit on the ways the world can change, and our influence on it.

I wrote it November 5, 2016, which was 3 days before the US election. Looking back, I certainly hadn't expected the following four years to be such a win for a philosophy I was so personally opposed to.
 


unwoundghost

Villager
shows up to forums 15 minutes late with a starbucks

Oh geez, where to even begin? I'm Becky, Mona's player, and resident artist and meme maker!

As World mentioned, we originally started Zeitgeist with another group and were so sad when it disbanded after adventure two. After that World mentioned off an on about reading through all the books and maybe one day he would DM it. I still remember it SO clearly when he finally came to me and was like "I'm gonna do it." I did not believe him, I was like "sure sure, yeah whatever" and he informed me he was dead serious. I LITERALLY leapt out of my chair I was so excited! Now that I'm on the other side of the campaign, I am simultaneously speechless and bursting at the seams to scream about this game! It's VERY weird not having the game on Tuesday nights anymore, haha.

To keep my first post on the shorter side, one of my favorite recurring moments was when one of us players realized we accidentally wrote ourselves into the plot (again, and again. ... and again). It happened so often that I hunted down the script for a horror movie so I could find an exact quote, fast forwarded the movie to the scene in question, screenshot it, and turn it into a meme for us:

sinister - you put yourself in it.png


All our characters came from such different backgrounds and countries that it just colored the world and plot of Zeitgeist so, so beautiful. It made for such a powerful connection to the plots of each book. I do not think we could have planned it better, haha. (I'm screaming, I'm crying, I'm laughing...)

These are still works in progress, but here are the other two companion (lol) pieces of the party members and their significant other.
(Get it... companion piece, because it's about their lover?)

the Meeting on the Turret Stairs vr WIP.png
a couple WIP.png


They're all based on historical paintings (and one book cover)! I hadn't been drawing much or as often since graduating from a fine arts program in 2017, but then we started Zeitgeist... I- I feel like its better to let this image speak for itself than to try and explain.

1707843271796.png


Thank you everyone who went on this wild ride with us, reading and commenting along the way! And thank you Ryan for ruining my life and also making it the best years yet.
 

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