My Life As A Gamer: Patrons And The Campaign (Part Five): A Particular Patron Presentation

(This is a series. Part One is here, Part Two is here, Part Three is here, and Part Four is here.)

Advisory Notice

Below is an example taken from a campaign that I have in the works. This is not everything that there is; information irrelvant to Patron play is omitted. It is not final. It is here for you to see how a Referee may choose to approach the use of Patrons in a tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) campaign, as it reflects how I wish to use Patrons for this campaign.

Patron employment can, and will, vary.

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The Campaign

This is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition (AD&D1e) campaign. Players will need their own copies of the three rulebooks.

The campaign concerns itself with a handful of parties from Elsewhere coming to this land where, in the center, lies the Tower. The Tower can be seen from the shore, over the canopy of the forest and the peaks of the mountains, and it is both distant (as it is on the horizon) and yet implausibly large (because it can be seen from hundreds of miles away).

Each party seeks the Tower because it holds the key to solving an existential crisis that afflicts them.

Each party comes to this land knowing nothing but myths, legends, and rumors about this place- having only recently had its existence confirmed. Therefore players should wipe preconceived notions from other campaign settings from their minds; they will not need to go outside the rulebooks.

A player, running each party's Patron, shall administer the party and its Domain in the campaign. This player cannot also play an adventuring character in the same Domain or run more than one Patron.

Strict timekeeping and 1:1 rations of Real Time to Campaign Time (in days) shall be used.

Patrons are player-characters for administrative purposes. They will earn Experience Points and gain Class Levels normally; performance grading will be applied for purposes of adjudicating leveling costs on a monthly basis.

Patrons

Patrons shall be recruited separately from those playing at the table. Patron players shall participate in a correspondance-style, focusing more on strategic level play, and rarely shall they appear at the table.

Recruited players will join the campaign Discord server at their earliest convenience. They shall have Role tags for Patrons generally and one specific to their Patron. The protocol for submitting Patron actions shall be detailed therein.

Patrons will not be generated by the players; they will be handed all relevant information by the Referee upon accepting that role. They will be briefed on their Patron's objectives, resources, and information at that time. Confidentiality of information will be observed.

Adventuring characters that become capable of acting as Patrons, and elect to do so, will be addressed when that happens.

A public weblog will be available for at-large reading; the site has not be determined at this time.

Gameplay Loop

Patrons will run on a weekly action loop by default. Orders will be required at the specified time; standing orders from previous weeks that are not yet complete shall be presumed to continue until complete or obstructed. Results will be reported in real time when the Patron would hear of them in campaign time; send your best tracker on a one-month expedition and you won't hear back about what he finds until the next month.

Launch Event

All Patrons will play an advanced launch event. This will occur no more than one month before the adventuring characters enter play, and it will be there to set events into motion- no more.

The campaign continues until one Patron wins or all Patrons lose.

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Conclusion

This is not difficult. It is a bit tedious, but that tedium can be eliminated by chipping away at the up-front work well before the fact; a little bit here, a little more there, spaced over over a month or a season will make it easy to handle. Do not be afraid to spread out the chores before playing the campaign; again, this is a hobby pursuit, done as a leisure activity, so there is no reason to get it all done at once.

As I said above, this omits adventuring characters which is why there is no talk about generating characters or allowed races or any of that. When the time comes, I will make all of that available for people to read.

A full and exhaustive version of this will be made available to Patrons once recruited and in the server- and when I want Patron players, I will let everyone know.

With this post, I have said all that I can think of that is useful to say about Patrons in tabletop RPGs at this time. I will pivot to another topic next week.