Gentlemen, I had an idea..

I remember that game!! Had a demo for it on Xbox.

Finding the right type of webspace would be tantamount, for sure. The character database would have to be viewable by all refs, and players would probably want to be able to view their own characters. Being able to assign locations, expeditions and timestamps to a character might be useful. The game world could be viewable as an online map with keyed notes, but referees will need to be able to edit and update this information without stepping on each others toes. For efficiency's sake there should be official methods of communication between referees, like forums, shared calendars, or whatever. Basically, the more automation and web-based workspaces that can be used, probably should be used.

I do really like the idea of having organized tiers of referees. A campaign level ref might not actually need to run actual games, but would be involved on the grand scale, processing reports from individual refs and spinning those into global campaign turns. In a way, the Campaign Level refs would be running a larger, conceptual roleplaying wargame for the Ground Level refs, who in turn would be running adventure-level games for individual players.

Having tiered referees also opens the door for many other ways to play, since it divides the campaign into several levels of scale. A game of Chainmail might decide the outcome of a battle. Political negotiations between several rival states might be settled through a game of Diplomacy on the campaign map.

-_- Indeed-y.

M-maybe we should do some overworking with the label and the setting... I am glad I am not the only one who remembers that game, though...

ODD Men and Monsters

OD&D = Odand, Odampersand
D&D + OS = Dandos, Odandos
Planet Whitebox
Planet DD-74
Arnegax

Other possible locations within:
Grainwood, Venaligni
Capsula Alba (or Capsulalba), The White Box of Set
El Greymoor Loch

So there's an initiative to do something a bit like this on Unseen Servant, using Labyrinth Lord.


I think the overall setup is something that can work very well: the original DM ran a sandbox PBP, 'West Marches' style game for a while, with a fairly large number of active players; now that he is stepping back a bit, he will be continuing to DM the original town and kingdom level stuff, but hopes to divvy off the various small regions to different players to act as sub-DMs. The only rule is that none of your PCs can adventure in your own refereed domain.


I'd still like to see a shared world like this crop up for OD&D. I like the idea of having a hierarchy of referees, with one overlord DM who only job is to coordinate between sub-refs and handle the kingdom-level, wargamey stuff, while the sub-DMs are each given more or less free reign to run their own regions as long as they don't conflict with the strategic campaign.

Has anyone had any more thoughts on this idea?

One of the issues that may come into play would be agreeing on a base campaign setting, and building one as a community might take a long time. It might be possible to start with some shared world already posted online, such as using Arneson's Blackmoor map (which I'm pretty sure is freely posted on a hex paper map). It's a really Old School setting and would provide a nice common ground where some details are already in place.

A Master DM could decide which elements of the campaign are true and which aren't, then individual parts could be developed by individual players, much the way Dave did it back in the day. A player could have a certain GP value to use to build a stronghold plus dungeon using rules from U&WA, then post maps of what they built so that others could adventure there. A player could also have a certain number of points to buy troops and specialists. Seems like a tough thing to coordinate, but could be a lot of fun.

Just thinking out loud.

That's a fantastic idea. Where do we sign up? I get the area of hills and valleys in the upper right corner, between the desert and the marsh.

I would love to help out in such an endeavor as this.

I like the idea of a shared set of OD&D campaigns!

From my own experience, running a large-scale multi-DM campaign simply requires a lot of preparation: Not so much in terms of "preparing a story"; but in terms of "creating a narrative frame" (shape of the world, lay of the land, laws of magic, religion, etc) that everybody agrees with. The easiest way to create that frame in a way that is indisputable by anyone is to use one that already exists, say, through basing a setting on one already established. Back in my Blackmoor days, we did exercises like that, creating the lands surrounding the Great Kingdom based on the lore info we had on actual BM, much in the same way that Rob Conley did it, around the same time.

Now, we were less focused, and went more into specifics. Here are a few examples:

If the Afridhi (Blackmoor Barbarians) worship a fire deity, are they the only ones to do so? How does that cult perhaps look in other places of the world?

If Beastmen like the famous Blackmoor Froglings exist, have they perhaps evolved into a more civilized state in other parts of the world? (I was a big proponent of that theory. )

- Things like that. If people go on to create such a narrative framework by themselves, I'd wager that it would take a year, or so, of continued work, until one could think about starting this in earnest. Now, of course you can start it earlier, but narrative openness can easily be mistaken for a general lack of coherence. That's generally something I personally would try to avoid.

I was just having a conversation with one of my AD&D players about something similar (but very different). A campaign where everyone has their character as usual, but they also control one of the major political powers in the world. Every once in awhile (maybe every season, game time), there's a Ruler Round where they determine the actions of their state and play out the results. War, alliances, trade, marriage, etc.

This determines the world around the characters. It might affect them directly if they're currently in one of the regions, otherwise they hear about it in the form of rumors and hearsay. Thought that would be an incredibly interesting game...I'm all about player collaboration/authorship/participation in world-building, and that hits all those notes.

I'm in. What are our options?

We could put together a shared world setting guide; run a shared PbP like the North Marches on US; or we can keep it more loose, where participating DMs agree to run their games on- and offline within their corner of the shared world and keep the rest of us abreast of the continuity—sort of like a Living Greyhawk.

Either way, I like the idea of tying it together with a wargame. I've done a bit of scale hopping before, but almost always only from the other direction. A game of grand strategy like Axis & Allies or BattleMist, but fighting out the individual battles on the table with miniatures, and occasionally zooming into RPG mode for adventures with individual characters. Or a game of Catan which, when completed, becomes the layout and opening positions for a house-ruled game of Risk. I've always wanted to try an RPG campaign where the game world's events are dictated by a wargame that's being played on the side.

I'll get back to you tomorrow, I think I know how to structure and organize such an endeavor: Now, at the same time, you all need to be aware that this can be a lot of work, is only doable with a long-term committment - and it still might suck. I think I have a pretty gamified approach to this, though, that we might be able to use: Basically, instead of linear, top-down design, I'd suggest that we all start out as god-level PCs, sort of like the old Mentzerian D&D allowed level 100 PCs. ...And then, we start forging our world.

Thoughts:

That's a good option. Speaking of RPing the worldbuilding process, have you checked out Dawn of Worlds or Microscope? I've read through DoW, but a friend of mine has played both and recommends each for different scopes and/or playing groups. DoW is free and pretty freeform in how to interpret the stages and rules, whereas I get the impression that Microscope ($10 or somesuch) is quite a robust system for adding a worldbuilding element to a campaign.

I have my own thoughts on how I'd structure a game as well, and I agree that linear and top-down design is almost certainly not the way to go. Personally I think the most effective method would be to run a game traditionally, allowing individual players to build onto the world organically as they take on ownership of the game. If you want a needlessly erudite metaphor, you can think of it as a Marxist organic campaign, naturally going through the stages of development into the utopian collaborative campaign. The problem is that this would just take too long; we need to push through the stage of progress artificially, straight to the end utopia—and that probably means having to come up with something pretty gamified to help structure the process.

Regardless of Rafe or whoever managing to kickstart a game, I'd be interested in a hex map project. Basing it on the OS board is the obvious way to go, although one downside to using the map is that it has no sea or coastline.

Derv's idea is neat, especially in how it mirrors the use of the OS board as the generic landscape for all wilderness adventures in U&WA. It's main downside to that is that everyone then has an area of c. 1,397 hexes to design. The terrain layout itself might get monotonous, but we can allow for multiple creative interpretations of the OS landscape, such as treating the deserts as lakes, forests as urban ruins, hills as deep canyons, etc.

A more manageable project might be to make simply one OS board and divvy up the areas for design. Like many others here I'm a fan of dividing up hexes into divisions of 3 miles, and if we take a 6-mile hex then the board's area would be something roughly comparable to North Island, Java (i.e., slightly but noticeably larger than Ireland); a 3-mile hex would give us an area roughly the size of Timor, or slightly-but-noticeably larger than Sicily.

I'd also repeat my preference for kicking off the project with a single game, either a simple one-day wargame tournament played over Roll20, using some simple and quickplay rules like DBA or Dux Bellorum, or maybe a game of PBP Diplomacy played over a limited number of turns, that we can all use as a common background and history for the setting. In fact, we might even do the design in stages, with wargames in between to stack layers of history onto each other.