Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Campaign Design in Two Days

 

Sometimes the best laid plans fall to ruin.  Sometimes the best campaigns fall short.  Sometimes you end up behind the screen under less than ideal circumstances.  But if RPGs teaches us anything it is that the old saying is true, "You roll the dice and take what you get." All you can do under tough circumstances is your best.  Sometimes it isn't as good as you want it to be, but you live with it.

The Professor's Call of Cthulhu game has fallen by the wayside, at least temporarily, and I'm taking up the reigns in the meantime.  This won't be a long campaign, just long enough to take us to Gen Con, so eight weeks exactly.  I have no plan, no plot, not even a rules system I plan on using.  I've been thinking about it since last night when I found out that this might be a possibility, but so far... nothing.  I keep pretty organized notes on games that I'm working on.  I have no fewer than eight in my "Under Construction" folder, but none seem like a good fit.  The problem is that two months is longer than most of my mini-campaign ideas, and shorter than any of my full campaign ideas.  

So it looks like I'm going to be starting from scratch.  No sudden inspiration has hit me as of yet.  Hell I don't even know what system I'm going to use.  Hackmaster and Pathfinder seem like front runners.  Fantasy gaming is our thing and we've been away from it for a while, after-all.  Hackmaster is my preference, the initiative system alone is hard to step away from, but there are at least two members of the group who prefer Pathfinder so it is an option as well.

Since I have a decent idea of genre and system I guess I'll go work on ironing out a plot.  Wish me luck.  

3 comments:

Simon Forster said...

How about designing a simple dungeon, where the PCs just wake up in, and the basis of the mini-campaign is finding their way out, maybe even why and how they got there.

Short runs allow for a lot of variety I think.

Labyrinthian said...

I did that plot exactly. The last time I was faced with just such a situation, in fact. It did go over really well though... maybe I should consider a followup.

Unknown said...

For the record, that game that he's talking about is one of my two favorite campaigns we've ever played in the almost ten year history of our group.