The Campaign: Your Base Camp Is The Monster's Dungeon

(Following from yesterday's post.)

This Is A War Campaign

Consider what a campaign is going to entail.

Someone is going to have a big picture style perspective. They have a strategic objective. That objective is going to drive the campaign. Other parties, including adventurers, will aid, hinder, or exploit that campaign drive because doing so fits their ends.

In the typical dungeon delving game, the dungeons are sources of danger where Opposing Forces base their operations from. The dungeon is their base camp. This is in addition to any treasures--literal or otherwise (meaning lore, intelligence, or other information of value)--that may be present therein.

The campaign's base camp and the town(s) or city/cities that feeds into it are--for the monsters--the dungeons they seek to delve, raid, and conquer.

This means that any campaign involving action against a dungeon can, and often will, involve an active conflict--a military conflict--between the monsters and the men.

The Roles Of Factions

This also opens up possibilities for fantastic wargame play, and all the Referee needs to do is to recruit one or more players to run the monsters affected by the adventuring company campaigning against the dungeon.

In addition to the dungeon's denizens, there are also any significant settlements of monsters or men in the surrounding wilderness. Hand these off to other players also, and now you don't have Me And The Boys visiting DungeonTown for a fun time. Now it's the Roman campaign of vengeance against Vercigeterix in the wake of Teutonberg, which was a massive multi-year campaign that butchered some hostile tribes, cowed others, and destroyed the German threat against Rome by breaking apart the coalition formed against it.

And those hostile monsters? Some of them are organized (more or less) to actively oppose the campaigners, and they seek out necessary support to seek out the campaign's base camp--or even its place of origin if it's close enough--and do unto it what the dungeon sorties do to the dungeon and its denizens.

That's right, now you have a proper war campaign.

Ambitious adventurers, seeking gold and glory, can and will take advantage of this chaotic environment to pursue their own interests. Maybe they build a power base among the monsters, maybe they bring the monsters outside to heel and turn them against the dungeon's denizens, or maybe they play all sides against each other so that they come out on top and take over from the weakened survivor(s).

Now Scale This Up

If you can do this from the get-go (and you can), this is going to be part-and-parcel to high-level campaign play. The general in the field may be at odds with the sovereign back on the throne, or certain merchant lords want to keep a profitable trade to themselves so they cultivate monster tribes to be cutouts acting on the merchants' behalf, or a cult deals in trafficking of all sorts to satisfy ritual requirements so they keep a foot on both sides and thus need to manipulate conflicts to keep the sacrifices flowing while the attention drawn pointed elsewhere.

All of that, by the way, has real world examples as well as literary ones; hit the books.

Danger And Opportunity

This can be a pre-existing situation, which is the case for every character that comes into a campaign region that was not there at its launch. Therefore ambitious and enterprising adventurers at all levels can decide to intervene in order to wring out some benefit or reward should they succeed in their aims, be it as simple as getting paid in a fat sack of cash for services rendered to earning a boon from a major figure in return for rendering distinguished services that won the campaign for that figure- and then calling it in down the line.

As there are going to be multiple such figures dominating the situation in any given region, as well as in the overall milieu, there are going to be multiple dangers in attempting to earn boons from them and massive gains to be had by taking that risk and succeeding. Naysayers reveal by their objections that they either do not get this, or find it aborrent to leave this up for player-on-player interactions to decide.

This is part of learning how to win at RPGs.