[After another inexcusably long absence - try t again! As this post will imply, I have not been completely idle in the interim - but I have not put anything up here. Well - keep trying; someday the habits may take.]
I am thinking about campaigns I want to run, and why.
I am currently n the middle of two campaigns, which have been making at least some progress:
1) The Dragon Turtle Island campaign - offshoot of last summer's enthusiasm for Tomb of Annihilation jungles, pirates and Chult - one group of adventurers, headed for Chult, got sidetracked into an archipelago where their leaders were shipwrecked and captured, so they had to find them. This is going al right, if slowly - landing on Dragon Turtle Island, working through kobold lirs, mountains and caves, jungles, etc. It is building to a fairly well defined adventure path - a point to return to.
2) Desert Campaign - started up recently. This is much looser, a group of characters, wandering through a desert, fighting bandits and thri-keen and the like. It has gone pretty well, I think - couple interesting set pieces, some environmental challenges. I foresee this one staying fairly loose - more like a series of smaller expeditions, that might have some overall arc, but are mostly just connected by the setting and whatever characters and situations come up in play.
3) Back when I was posting here, I put up a few notes about 2 big cities, Waynesburg nd Bayport. We even managed tp play a couple scenes in Bayport, as we as developing some ideas for Waynesburg - though without getting to the point of rolling any dice. I like these settings very much,and want to play them - but they are hard to get started with, and frankly, I doubt I'll pt too much effort into them, as long as I have the two campaigns above running. I like those adventures,like the characters involved - it's hard to move way from them.
4) But that doesn't stop me from thinking about it - I've got a town that is a promising setting. I call it Hegelburg, but you could probably call it Generic Fantasy Town Setting. Two things mark it - it is right in the middle of everything, and has no strong specific flavor (unlike some of the locations I've developed for inthe past: cities, the south seas, the deserts, Lenay, with its political background, and pirates lurking on the coasts, and so on); and it is a place that has been int he middle of every war fought in this area in the last 1000 years. So it is full of ruins, new and old - a classic D&D setting.... But the fact is: it's another place I am not likely to develop much for, as long as the desert ad south seas stuff is running. Those work - it's hard enough keeping two separate campaigns afloat; I don't know if I can do more.
Thinking about these campaigns, though, I notice things about myself. What draws me to them. Such as:
1) I like sandboxy places. I am more interested in the settings, usually, than the adventures, or the stories. I almost regret the way the Dragon Turtle campaign has gone - it has a clear mission, and though it has been slow in developing, there is a clear destination, a clear adventure path. Sooner or later, this is going to be a dungeon crawl - in a way it has been, with a crawl through level 1 - kobolds, giving way to a crawl through the jungle, leading to crawls through various lost cities and tombs and temples and shrines. But all this means that the idea of exploring this island, and the islands around it, is somewhat lost. The problem is, when I try to develop it, I am almost as fond of sand boing s when I am running it. I make up yet another band of goblins or pirates or something, with another strange relationship to the main plot, instad of populating the mai dungeon. A sad state of affairs.
The desert campaign, on the other hand, is not like that. Even as goals emerge, I see them as looser - sending characters off into the wilds, but in a way that lets them go lots of places. The characters contribute to this - they are more integral to the setting, backgrounds matched to the desert, races and such given as much flavor as I can find. It is set up to allow that open endedness.
2) I also like to find specific ways to play. In the Waynesburg adventure that has been developed at some length, if never played, the characters have been heavily thought through, looking for their place in the city. That is one way. One thing that would get me to play the Village setting might be to be able to start up a band of adventurers from scratch, with specific means of creating characters. Roll 4d6, write down the results in order, and decide on the characters to make with those numbers. At least if this can fit the setting (which they should: Generic Fantasy Setting!) I like to find characters - sometimes at least.
3) I should note this, too - that I lke t find an element about the setting that makes it unique. So - two urban campaigns, but they are in very different cities. Bayport is a boom town - grown three or four times in 20 years, center of trade, a port, packed and dangerous in the way new cities are. While Waynesburg is an old city - one that wa, in fact, devastated by war 20 or so years ago - whole sections of the city are empty, or as wild as any frontier; others, though, are prosperous and safe - it is all crammed together. Same with towns - we were playing in Lenay, and though those adventures shifted off to fairly straight dungeon crawling, the setting as a whole is marked by its politics - the missing king, the increasingly disunified and tyrannical barons and court, the breakdown of law and order, emerging as wide spread outlawry inland, and pirates trying to gain footholds on the coast. Hegelburg, meanwhile, I would imagine as a place that has been ruined by wars,a nd is in some stage of recovery. But the past ruination, the ongoing weak law and security (more than the battles among power factions) is what marks it. And so on.
4) There is another point I have to make: I would love to play in some of these settings - but it seems clear to me, that if you want to play a certain type of story, the best way to do it is to run it. There re characters and settings that are too closely associated - my Bayport campaign has suffered because the character who is most suited to it is mine,and I can't play her there.... But most fo the time, there are ways to make it work. If you find a style fascinating, a setting, a set of problems, you should run them. Most players will adapt; the easiest way to address their longings to play different styles is for them to run.
And so on. I do with that I could find more games to play in. Besides these, we have an online game going, and a game at a game store - these are fun, but the game store, especially, feels very much like what we have always done, or like the games I played in college. Murder hobos on parade! with occasional ill timed reminders that someone wrote "Lawful Good" on their alignment line. I would love to find a more intrigue based game - mysteries and puzzles, maybe; different settings. It would be good.
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