Long-term Campaign Settings

[Finarvyn]

I was just re-reading Crimhthan_The_Great's recap of his world in the "Tarrozian Campaign World" thread and I was reminded of the Pendragon campaign.

Not because of the content. Because of the scale.

I have a copy of Chaosium's Pendragon RPG, which is based on the story of King Arthur and uses the BRP rules system. I don't play it because I'm not really "into" those rules, but I like to use Pendragon as a sourcebook and mine it for ideas.

More to the point, there is a product called the Great Pendragon Campaign which gives "year-by-year details from 485 to 566" which means around 80 years of campaign. Time enough for characters to age and retire, and their children to adventure and age and retire, and perhaps even grand-children get into the mix. It's a very different outlook than the one found in the typical one-shot dungeon crawl adventure.

Crimhthan's game seems similar to this, with hundreds of years of game time played through. Has anyone else run a game that took place over decades or centuries of game time, and how did things work out?

[calithena]

My main D&D world has been running since 1979 or 1980 and has spanned about three or four decades of game time (so approximately similar to real world). It's had five DMs in five states (California, Michigan, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky).

I've also run a few adventures set in the distant past (on these boards, frex) and far future (tabletop game a couple years ago) of the same world, so there's been that extra dimension to it.

It's still going fine.

[robertsconley]

My AD&D/Fantasy Hero/GURPS campaign originated in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy/City-State of the Invincible Overlord in 1982. My timeline has progressed from 4433 BCCC to 4453 BCCC through a dozen player groups over 25 years.

The main effect are

a) in the main campaign area around City-State I would say half of the 4453 background is the direct or indirect result of PC actions. Many of the 4453 NPCs are former PCs.

b) Several of the campaign I ran were focused on a single topic. The first was "everyone is a magic-user". The background and used for that campaign became the "offical" background of magic for my version of the Wilderlands. I did this for Clerics, City Guards, Thieves and Evil (players played unequivocal bad guys) Each was not only fun but developed an aspect of my game far beyond my own efforts could.

A side benefit that groups that were mocked or ignored in earlier campaigns (particularly magic users and city guards) now became respected or even feared.)

The best example is the City Guard Sticks and the knight killer crossbows. Basically City Guard Sticks are made in pairs and are just a thin dowel rod of wood about 8" long. They are enchanted so that if one breaks the other one breaks as well. Anytime a patrol gets into trouble they break a stick. The other stick breaks at the barracks alerting the guards that there is trouble.

The knight killer crossbow is a high tension heavier variant of the heavy crossbow that does a lot more damage. It takes a man about 5 minute to use a winch to re tension it after it fires. The idea is that they take one shot with these crossbow before closing. I have to look up their AD&D stats but I believe they do something like 5d6 damage.

The City Guard campaign has made the City Guards of CSIO a force to be reckoned with. High level PCs still can take them on but it is a lot harder. The nice thing most of this was developed without changing the average level of the guard. Just better tactics and a better selection of equipment.

[serendipity]

robertsconley said:

The best example is the City Guard Sticks and the knight killer crossbows. Basically City Guard Sticks are made in pairs and are just a thin dowel rod of wood about 8" long. They are enchanted so that if one breaks the other one breaks as well. Anytime a patrol gets into trouble they break a stick. The other stick breaks at the barracks alerting the guards that there is trouble.

And with the addition of the concept of pair production/pair annihilation, we have successfully brought quantum mechanical physics into our D&D discussions. Who knew?

[Deleted]

D**n...my pencil just broke...

[Finarvyn]

oltekos said:

D**n...my pencil just broke...

And mine just broke too. Are you in trouble?

[Finarvyn]

admin said:

I have a copy of Chaosium's Pendragon RPG, which is based on the story of King Arthur and uses the BRP rules system. I don't play it because I'm not really "into" those rules, but I like to use Pendragon as a sourcebook and mine it for ideas.

More to the point, there is a product called the Great Pendragon Campaign which gives "year-by-year details from 485 to 566" which means around 80 years of campaign. Time enough for characters to age and retire, and their children to adventure and age and retire, and perhaps even grand-children get into the mix. It's a very different outlook than the one found in the typical one-shot dungeon crawl adventure.

I was thinking more about this. (And cross-posted to DF, so don't get that "deja vu" thing if you read both.)

I'd be interested in getting general input as to whether or not this would work well, or are there some obvious problems which I haven't thought of yet.

My semi-random thoughts on such a campaign:

1. I'd probably do it as an e-mail game or on a message board.

2. I was thinking about the rules where you start with your grandfather 45 years ago and slowly work forward until you reach the start of the campaign. If I did this online, what I might do is to post updates for each character family all together a year at a time. One year per post. This way the players would see their families all rise and fall together and maybe develop group unity. (Of course, they may hate getting 45 posts before they actually get to play. Might bore them to tears.)

3. I could then allow game time to pass at a certain rate as per real time. For example, every week could represent a game year.

4. Participation in the campaign would be rewarded. If anyone posts a story about their character I could treat it as if they underwent a quest or something. If anyone plays a live game session they would get credit for it as well. If we were stuck in the middle of an adventure, I could "freeze time" if needed until we finished the quest. Otherwise, every weekend (or whatever) I could roll the results of the year as per the "winter season".

5. Players would have to think long-term about their characters, which is somewhat different from most RPG campaigns that they have experienced. They would have to plan for heirs so that they could stay in the game for the entire duration of the campaign.

6. The end result is that an (45+80=125) 125-year campaign would last roughly 80 weeks, or about a year and a half of real time.

[crimhthanthegreat]

I don't know if you would want time to move quite that fast, 1 year per week in the real world is pretty fast. IMC is works out pretty close to 10 game sessions equals a year + or - 5%. That is with the average game session being about 12 hours. So roughly 120 hours of gaming equals 1 year.

[Finarvyn]

The problem is that my current gaming group ends up playing 1-2 times per month (when we get that organized). At that rate I'm lookiing at about 3 game years per real year. We'd never get anything done.

Your numbers would have been fine in the old days when a couple of us got to play a couple games each weekend, but nowadays everyone has a job or kids or both.

[crimhthanthegreat]

Sorry, don't mean to rub it in that I am retired and in my second childhood. But don't worry you will be where I am soon enough, no need to rush it. ;D

[Mordorandor]

Once recently, when adjudicating a campaign online, a player asked me how long I had been running my campaign. I could honestly say that I had been running it since I was in middle school, since I had incorporated a few different things into all future D&D campaigns that were iteration off of musings and whimsy of my first sessions.

As years went on, and I'd spin up another campaign, and then another, it just so happened I cross pollinated, without having a cohesive world in mind. Generic fantasy - one sort of "setting." That Far East flavor - another "setting." And so on, until one day someone said how many campaigns do you have, and I said, one really, and explained that while I hadn't connected all these areas/maps together, in my mind, they all existed on the same planet. A sort of post-modern pastiche in my mind of worlds that were never explicitly connected in that "whole-coherent-world" kind of way.

I'm curious how many of you have approached this over the years.

Different campaign from the last ...

... and never the two shall meet, because they aren't even in the same world/dimension?
... and it's the same world, just 40,000 years in the past, after the great cataclysm?
... and yeah, this wholly new kind of campaign is just another place on the other side of the world; yeah, even if you're all sentient dinosaurs.

....

[rsdean]

Well, my original campaign (1976-1982) was at the northeastern corner of my large wilderness map, and my second was at the southwestern corner (1982-1985), so sort of the third … My 2015 revival went back to the north eastern corner, but ~30 years had passed since the first campaign.

[Mordorandor]

So the robot-infested, Gamma-World-inspired campaign didn't make it into that world?

I'm inclined to say I never plan farther ahead than the next session, so in my mind, all the permutations of my OD&D games, happen on the same planet.

Makes for a weird realization of the overarching milieu when I come to think about it.

[rsdean]

Oct 17, 2022 15:24:39 GMT -6 Mordorandor said:

So the robot-infested, Gamma-World-inspired campaign didn't make it into that world?

It certainly wasn’t on the map. This isn’t to say that something like that couldn’t have happened; one later dungeon in the first campaign involved the “Well of Worlds”, a cross-planar portal that could send them anywhere I felt like sending them, and I’m pretty sure we did a Metamorphosis Alpha cameo, if not a Gamma World one.