The Campaign: Preparing For The Big One

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Let's continue this idea of cleaning up Palladium's fantasy setting for use in a proper Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition campaign. You will need some method of notetaking, a calendar, and as big a copy of the world map as you find practical to have on hand.

Sorting Raw Intelligence

Let's say that we have the full range of Palladium Fantasy products to date. That's a lot, and it's all written in that Palladium house style that still shows Kevin's roots in Silver Age comics.

That's fine for comics. It's terrible for technical manuals, which is what tabletop RPG manuals are. Taking one's time on this, chipping away at it an hour here and there, you go through the proces of sifting through the product line to get answers to the following questions:

• What year is it? Whatever the dating system, what matters for campaign play is separating Then from Now. RIFTS is actually (mostly) good at this, so it is within Palladium's capacity to have a consistent answer to this question. The last date is "Current Year" and thus defines "Now"; everything prior to that point is Backstory, and nothing happens after that point until play begins.
• Who and what are the factions? This is not just the political powers, but rather all viable factions that can operate on a global scope and scale. Religions, cosmic powers, heads of state, and others able to act at the top level of operation are identified here. Note the names and the total number for later; you will need them when it's time to recruit your first cohort of players and assistants.
• Who wants what? For each faction, identify their objectives by descending order of priority. This is going to define Win and Loss Conditions.
• Note if there are published adventures in a given region, and if a clear location or set thereof is named plot them on the world map. You will be using this later.

When you are done, you should have a list of global factions that you can plot on the world map and a Current Year to make a calendar around. You should also have a list of major characters that are the leaders of those factions, and where their specific presence varies from that of the faction they lead that too should be plotted on the world map.

The world map should have a scale noted on it where a user can clearly see it, and that scale should be noted in both Imperial and Metric units; this will help later on.

Onboarding The Staff

Once you have this done, you will want to find people who want to do one of two things. Either they want to help you run this campaign by taking over direct administration of a specific region, or they want to run one of the factions in the persona of that leader. You do not, at any time, allow anyone to do both roles by being both the deputy Referee for a region and run one of the global factions therein; this creates perverse incentives that can--and inevitably will--undermine the integrity of the campaign and destroy the experience that players seek from it.

Recruit the assistants first. With each one, brief them on the region under their perview and repeat the above step on a regional level with them. The two of you will map out how that global faction's economics, politics, culture, etc. works. This will also involve identifying key figures in these relationships, who will have their own interests and objectives, and see how the faction leader relates (or doesn't) to them. At this time, non-global major figures (powerful monsters, spell-casters, etc.) who are significant at this scale are to be identified.

You and your assistant in question should have a plotted-out regional map when you two are done. These location plots should include Points Of Interest (cities, towns, fortifications, food or other material resources, monster lairs, dungeons, etc.) and notes on the current state therein (occupied or not, dangers lurking therein and awareness thereof, etc.). Players who prefer to play faction leaders or similar figures, but don't want the long-term commitment of the major roles, should be cultivated at this point to run these lesser figures as required.

Once you and your assistants are done, recruit those faction players and brief them on who their persona is and what they are to do. At this point, you should also have your Discord server or email list or whatever you're using to faciliate communications up and running.

With the aid of your assistants, you are ready to start the next step.

Setting The Table

With your team, and keeping your major faction players in the loop, you will set the game table into its launch state.

There will be a Start Date on the calendar, from which you will strictly track and account for time spent in play in the 1:1 ratio measured in days. The core point of contention will be decided upon and placed on the map. Each faction leader will then determine, using the briefing previously provided, what their faction's objectives are and thus their Win and Loss Conditions.

Once that is set up, players willing to play lesser factions are brought on board and briefed. They determine what their faction's objectives are.

At this point, you should have your gameplay procedure for Faction Play decided and distributed to those players, and your team should have identified places where brand new adventuring characters can start from.

Now What?

This is imagined as returning Palladium's fantasy world back to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.

As anyone with Palladium experience can tell you, this is going to take some work in itself due to what Kevin did to differentiate his fantasy RPG from D&D and AD&D. This is a lengthy subject, so I'm saving it for tomorrow's post.

(Note: Tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day landings in World War 2. Time Ghost will have an all-day livestream going all about this world-changing event. If you (a) want to see what your top-level faction players will be doing that's a good place to see it go down hour by hour, and (b) you will also see how the deeds of individual men made or broke much bigger operational intentions. I point this out because a proper RPG campaign has this feedback loop; Big affects Small, Small affects Big. I will put out a Bonus Post all about it.)