The Campaign: The Multi-Referee Campaign

You love that classic Hyborean Age aesthetic. Bob's enamored of medieval knightly romance. Dick's hip-deep in the weeb, prefering samurai-themed manga and anything else adjacent to it. Dan's so enamored of Chinese martial arts dramas that he wrote a PHD about it. Greg alternates between reading the Eddas and binging Vinland Saga.

All of them play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.

All of them run their own sessions in the same campaign. They even have players and characters floating between their tables.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

This Is Not Rocket Science

There are two reasons for why this group of gamers can collaborate effectively to run a single campaign between them.

1. They play the game exactly as-written, including 1:1 Timekeeping.
2. They keep on the same page by regular communication.

It's that simple.

The process, simply put, is easy to do on a bottom-up emergent basis. Someone starts running a game, and they use the asethetic that they like. Someone else comes along, and they want to run stuff too, but with a different aesthetic; the new guy--the second one to be Referee--makes his setting connected to the existing one somehow (that is agreed upon) and away they go.

Want to have 31 Flavors of Weebshit? Find enough dudes to do it, each one has their own Oriental Adventures take, and have at it. Reggie wants to tack on a Persian-themed area between Weebtopia and The Mudlands? Let him. Bobby comes back from a holiday in Mexico and wants to do an Aztec-themed area? Sure.

It becomes the responsibility of each region's Referee to make adventuring there appealing, both for the player and for the characters; no one wants to go to the Badlands of Boredom.

Lettings Specialists Shine

Tim over there is all about the megadungeons. That's what he runs. So, taking a page from Krull, his thing is a wandering megadungeon controlled by a powerful NPC. Everyone running things in the campaign agreed on a schedule whereby the megadungeon arrives and departs, in addition to any particular triggers, and now Tim's having regular fun times running players' delves into his traveling megadungeon.

Frank loves him some war. When he's not teaching at the War College in his day job, he writes for Osprey Publishing and takes trips around the world to tour battlefields and museums- he even does some movie and TV work now and again. Guess who runs all the wargame scenarios? Yep, Frank, and his Braunstein events get everyone's attention. He also runs one of the most successful Fighters in the campaign.

Letting players who specialize in a particular aspect because that is what most appeals to them works out in a proper campaign environment, and a good Referee ensures that such folks get their seat at the table.

Creating A Club Out Of The Campaign

Because the organic career path of adventuring characters is to become an authority figure in a region, borders expand as a natural consequence of successful play, and in time not only can successful characters become Patrons and Faction leaders, but players can carve out entire regions for them to run adventures in as a direct reward for successful play all the way to the taming of a monster-infested wilderness and establishing Civilization there.

That's the surest proof that the bottom-up approach can and does work; it is all but presumed to arise as a consequence of play.

Thus what the #BROSR has created, starting with Jeffro running Trolloupolous, is (again) AD&D1e Working As Intended.

That's how campaigns become the basis for gaming as a private club.