My Life As A Gamer: If TORG Were Run By The True Campaign Model

TORG was ambitious in its business model. The entire Infiniverse campaign was what is now returned to as a "Living Campaign", an always-on wargame campaign run by the publisher West End Games with regular updates published in a newsletter and annual supplements would update the setting. Years before Legend of the Five Rings, TORG promised player-led setting development through actual play.

That didn't quite work out, but that's neither here nor there. I mention this because TORG demonstrates one example of the acknowledgement that tabletop RPGs are rooted in wargaming. (Shadowforce Archer is another example.) This means that it's not a hard sell to recreate these campaigns using those games if you use the True Campaign Model to do so.

Going back to TORG, this is what you do to get started:

• Get a map of Earth and a clear overlay for it, physical or digital, that you can put the triangle-based territorial borders that TORG uses on it akin to a hex grid.
• Recruit your initial players. These are Patrons. They play the Possibility Raiders ruling the invading cosms and the Core Earth figures that will lead the defense. Tell the former set what stelae are and how they work; their characters would know this information, so the players have to have it to act accordingly. Defenders get to figure it out the hard way.
• Play out the initial invasion. Given how playable characters go from Ordinary to Possibility-Rated, you can get playable scenarios at this point and so the Game Master should prepare for table sessions to begin here after the Patrons make their initial sets of moves. The Game Master, at this time, ought to know how to run the game and teach it to new players.
• Open recruitment to players wanting to participate in table sessions. Given the initial situation, the Game Master is within the rules to restrict player-character choices to Core Earth options; access to player-characters from other cosms is not guaranteed at this point in a campaign.
• Shuffle the Drama Deck and get on with it.

You'll note that my take on things differ from both published editions in that I start the campaign at the initial point of invasion and not three or so months later. This is to account for Patron-Level Play, because that strategic level of play is the driver of the scenarios addressed in table sessions.

This style of campaign allows for the full potential of the setting to come forth; this week you've got American and Canadian Storm Knights dealing with Living Land issues on Tuesday, then by Thursday the guy playing 3327 puts in a move that opens a scenario for Saturday so folks there play Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Storm Knights dealing with some corporate-based bioweapon in Kawana territory, the results of which inform the guy running The Gaunt Man whose plan gets a setback and activates a contingency that opens another scenario window for next week in the Solomon Islands.

You see where I'm going with this? It feels a lot like watching Time Ghost's series on World War 2, where actions in one theater can--and will, inevitably--influence actions in others, prompting tabletop and Patron players to interact in ways that (a) a Game Master cannot predict and (b) will be far more meaningful for all concerned because player agency is not only respected but fundamental to making the fun happen.

And today, despite everything going on, it's easier than ever to make this style of campaign easy to erect, launch, and run. I'll get into the hows tomorrow.