The Campaign: Transforming Canon Into Campaign Fodder

Let's put this past week's posts together in a related context: campaiging in an established IP.

Let's say that you've got a club full of devotees to Uncle George's Space Fantasy, and they want to do this as a tabletop RPG campaign. Let's go a step further and say that they're willing to play a proper campaign. How can you handle the long-running complaint of (a) delivering on both the promise of a satisfying RPG campaign and (b) delivering on the promise of a satisfying fantasy adventure experience in Uncle George's Space Fantasy?

Go back earlier this week, and you'll see what the answer is going to be.

Open Up That Notepad App

You're going to pick a date. You'll get out the timeline and the campaign map and plot who did what where up to that date, focusing on prior events of immediate relevance to the campaign's launch date.

After that date, things are not written in stone. Rather they acquire the same conditionality that using all those White Elephants on your shelf does; it is presumed that, barring intervention by player actions, what is recorded goes down as recorded. You'll want to keep notes on post-launch date events like this for about five years out, adding more as necessary.

When this is complete, and you have the campaign map and calendar prepared, move on to the next step.

So You Want To Conquer The Galaxy...

By the time you have done this, you will also have all of the Factions mapped out and identified their leadership; you can recruit Faction players to run them at this time.

You should also, if necessary, have recruited your assistant Referees and got them working with you as a team to run this grand campaign. They will help you get all this put together for the players faster than you alone would do.

The Faction players should be briefed as soon as you and your team are ready. Let them play two or three rounds of action before you bring the adventurers into the fold to set the wheels in motion and give the ground level of the campaign some context and direction to work with.

I Am But A Humble Freighter Captain Plying My Trade

Faction action should have already pointed out early hotspots for action, attracting the hopeful, the ambitious, the concerned, and the desperate (i.e. typical characters in Uncle George's Space Fantasy). Let them go through Character Generation, sort into the starting areas, and get on with making fantasy space adventures happen while big galaxy-spanning wars go down all around them.

Mandatory downtime, uninterrupted events from the official (or "official") timeline going down disrupting things, players (at either level of play) forcing other players to cope with having to adapt their plans to account for changed situations, and hopefully some princesses get saved somewhere along the way while Evil Rebels get put to the sword by Heroic Action Men as the climax of a massive fleet battle where Dashing Space Aces and Brilliant Fleet Commanders pull off gambits every bit as clever and amazing as the sword duels.

Lather, rinse, repeat until someone wins or everyone loses some years down the road.

Hey, This Seems Familiar

Distinctions of "genre" are irrelevant in RPGs, because they are wargames at their root and thus all that changes are the trappings and the field of battle. Sometimes you have Space Knights and laser swords, sometimes you have giant robots and laser swords, sometimes you have just wizards and warriors. It's still the same fantastic adventure wargame, still filled with evil to smite, dragons to slay, and princesses to rescue. TORG made this explicit in 1990.

In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same.

Don't be surprised to find this pattern repeating regardless of what "genre" you're supposedly dealing it. Gaming is gaming. Genre is for storytelling.

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Geek Gab returns today at 1pm Central Time. Daddy Warpig and Dorrinal will be talking about the latest RPG gaming experiences that they've had, some superhero movie stuff, and more. I'll be in the chat. See you there and then.