Same with that DC bulls$&% about how the multiverse got broken and eventually Superboy had to punch reality in the face to fix it. Like, for example, when that Civil War thing broke out and the government started cracking down on supers, it affected everyone in the Marvel universe, even when they weren’t sharing adventures together. Every comic is about different characters or groups of characters in the same setting, but the stories all connect together in various ways. Now, imagine we add story continuity into the mix. And THAT is why I separated out settings as their own thing.
Game of thrones rpg campaigns series#
The thing is, it’s actually kind of hard to even see a game with setting continuity as a campaign rather than just a series of one-shots. A single city could provide setting continuity, allowing a criminal gang adventure one week and then a murder investigation adventure the next and so on.Īnd yes, I know technically, the Discworld novels did have story and character continuities because it was actually a collection of different series’ like the Night Watch stories, the Wizard stories, and the unreadable ones about those witches which sucked. Hell, it doesn’t even need to be that spread out. And the following week, rebels are fighting imperial forces in Greater North Insurgencia. Next week, diplomats are uncovering courtly intrigue in the City-States of Aristojerkwadia. One week, a group of swashbuckling pirates fight slave lords in the Archipelago of Piroslavia.
At an RPG game, that’d be like running a series of adventures in isolated corners of the same world for different characters every week. Every novel took place in the same world, but each was about different characters having different sorts of adventures in different parts of the world. That’d be like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Now, imagine a game with only setting continuity. Yeah, by the way, system continuity is also technically a thing. We don’t call it anything because if we called it anything we’d have to call every game in the entire f$&%ing world part of that campaign. For obvious reasons, we don’t call that a CAMPAIGN. And every week, the games would take place in an entirely different world. Every week, the GM would set up an entirely new adventure. Every week, the players would have a new group of characters. Imagine, for example, an ongoing game that doesn’t have a continuity. But that’s a separate discussion.Įvery campaign NEEDS continuity. It’s just a CONTINUITY OF ADVENTURES.Īnd, to be honest, there is one more aspect of the campaign that is also about establishing CONTINUITY: the setting. To put it in a more pompous narrative bulls$&% sort of way, it is all about establishing the CONTINUITY of the game. The Glue is about how the CHARACTERS stick together. The Shape of the campaign is about how the ADVENTURES stick together. Now, the Shape and the Glue both basically do the same thing: they are about bondage. The Glue is the thing we’re talking about today. That s$&% is just slightly less enjoyable than dental surgery. They weren’t just “dick around the world” campaigns. You know, with motivations, resolutions, and structure. Some of the best campaigns I’ve ever run have been nothing more than just “the ongoing adventures of that particular group of idiots blundering around the world doing stuff.” To be clear, though, the stuff they did was ADVENTURES. Like I said, LOTS of campaigns start with one adventure and everyone decides “that was fun, let’s keep playing – can we keep our characters?” That’s cool. And, the thing is, the Shape can be entirely accidental. They might not connect at all, like random dungeon-of-the-week adventures with no real forethought other than “hey, that was fun, let’s keep playing with the same characters.” Or, they might connect up into a complex web of storylines. Now, the Shape of the campaign describes how the adventures connect together. It needs a Shape – Spaghetti or Noodles or Meatballs or whatever the f$&% dumba$& analogy I used, I don’t know, I make this s$%&^ up as I go – and it needs Glue. The Most Important Thing Every Campaign NeedsĮvery ongoing role-playing game – that is, every campaign – needs TWO things. Yeah, f$&%, I should have held that Long, Rambling Introduction™ for THIS article. And how miserable it was to hang out with all of those people. And their circle of friends who pretty much didn’t belong together either. In that “ The Italian Campaign” article, I talked about my friends who got married despite very clearly and obviously being a terrible couple who hated each other. Let me tell you something that happened a few years ago.
0 kommentar(er)
