The Culture: The Grand Campaign

A Missed Opportunity

There are precious few tabletop role-playing games in the Pink Slime mold that can justify their existance. Palladium Fantasy is not one of them.

From the beginning, well before it was revised to conform mechanically with RIFTS, it was clear that this game was Kevin's homebrewed tinkering with D&D until it became barely recognizable as such.

That is not to say that your time is entirely wasted if you find copies of this game and its supplements lying around foryou to read. What Kevin and his collaborators over the decades did get right is the "fantastic" part of "fantastic adventure". The Palladium Fantasy setting is as straightforward as it gets, and if you're a Boomer like Kevin you may even get a lot of the proto-shitposting references.

As a Proof of Concept that Making Goofy Shit Up As You Go works, you can find no better evidence than this entire product line. All those Reddit-tier midwits crying about Muh Worldbuilding and Muh Coherency screech like they do over anyone else that (kind-of, sort-of, Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon style) threw things together like Howard did with the Hyborean Age.

What would be interesting to see done is to (a) strip out Kevin's houserules in favor of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, (b) collate the material published to set up a timeline with a definite terminal point (like Harn and Exalted does, past which nothing is set in stone specifically for gameplay reasons) so that (c) a proper RPG campaign spanning the entire world can go down.

A Second Chance

The idea here is to run The Grand Campaign.

I define this as World War Fantasy. The core structure--that there are Strategic and Tactical levels of play, corresponding to Faction/Patrons and Adventurers--remains, but now we go one step further: The General Staff.

Recall that I argue that the memetic and therefore ludological line of descent starts at Kriegspiel, which concerned itself with simulating the prosecution of not only individual battles but of entire campaigns- something that is still done, for real, in war colleges across the globe as part of military officer training.

Recall that this style of wargaming can be scaled up and down.

Recall that Diplomacy is also a significant influence on RPG development.

Now we can see that what I am aiming at is a long-running RPG campaign, where the Referee is not the only one running game sessions. For a campaign whose area of operation is this big, delegation is necessary and coordination between them is vital; this can be done--I was one of the Referees for a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP 15 years ago, so I've seen it work--and coordinating player actions across the entire campaign is where the concept of a General Staff becomes useful.

You still need a calendar. You will need a primary map that all campaign action is tracked upon, but each of the Referee's subdordinate Game Masters will need a regional map that is their responsibility to keep current. You will definitely need a communications channel to keep information flowing so everyone is on the same page; Bob doesn't need any surprises when people who ordinarily aren't in his region show up.

This sounds like a lot. I know that it's not. This is a challenge of administration; this isn't player-facing at all. Yet, because so few are familiar with this idea, I find that it should be built out into a series and that's what this week's posts will focus upon: running The Grand Campaign.