Game Over

The Lost City of Atlanta has ended. The game ran for just over 2 years. I'm not happy with how it ended, or how the last several months of it went. I wouldn't consider the game a success because after it ended, there wasn't a sense of regret, or triumph or sadness or happiness. Just a sense that it was finally over and everyone could move on to better, more interesting things. 

That isn't how a long game should end. All the effort poured into characters, stories, settings and plots should pay back more. The emotional investment and time investment of the Storyteller and the Players should be rewarded at the end of a game. It should be something looked back on fondly.

Lost City of Atlanta doesn't have that. The story was wrapped up, the end of the game reached, but not in a good way. There's a lot of reasons why the game ended the way it did, but most of them just come down to disagreements and divergent points of view and failure to accomodate them. I wish it had ended months ago, when the Band reached Godhood because after that, everything got worse.

I'll remember Lost City of Atlanta for a long time. It was the first Scion game I ever ran, and it was only the second RPG Chronicle I've run that ended instead of just falling apart in mid-stride. It held together through players leaving, characters changing (not always for the better), schedule conflicts and its own slowly decaying interest. When it finally couldn't limp along any further without causing more harm than good, it was put to sleep in a peaceful way. It had good moments, it had some amazing characters and great players. There were some stories I'm sure everyone enjoyed. It explored a lot of themes, a lot of personalities.

It wasn't all bad, but it ended poorly and I regret that. I feel that the bad parts outweighed the good, and there was more stress than there was fun. So in the end, I'm glad the game is over, but not for the reasons I want to be glad.

Maybe I'll come back to Scion. I have a lot of ideas. I don't think I'll run Scion again for the same players. I'm not sure they would want me to. They're great folks, but I've come to believe that we wanted different things from the game and viewed things in different ways. For now, I'm taking a break from Scion. I'm trying to put together a Vampire: the Masquerade game. I might even try tracking down a game of D&D which I've always meant to play.

But, that's all for the Lost City of Atlanta. It's been with us a long time, and no matter my feelings on its ending, I think it was better to have the experience that it provided than not to.