Picking a New Campaign: Part I

The first order of business after completing a rpg campaign, is to pick the next campaign. And that's what we set out to do after the final game in our two year Morrow Project run. We spent a number of hours on it, and it will take more than one post to cover the process we ended up using.

First, a bit of background. Way back in the 80s right after we moved out of dungeon crawls for nothing more than dungeon crawls- we went straight to a concept of a meta-time line. A single time line that contained all the settings we wanted somewhere in it starting at the beginning of everything and end up with... well the end of everything.

It was a nice bit of luck that my first choice in a setting was Middle Earth, as it turned out J.R.R.T was fond of the same idea in a way. Middle Earth was *this* earth, but from a forgotten era. It made it very easy to build things out from there using J.R.R.T timeline for nearly all of the world's prehistory, only the extension into the fair future needed to be done. The basics of that was completed years ago as well (stealing inspiration from any number of sources along the way).

So it was to that meta-timeline that we turn our attention. We quickly identified a few broad areas and options. In order from earliest to latest:

1. Ages of Middle Earth
2. Nephilim (pre-flood earth)
3. Hidden World (19th century up to the modern era)
4. Shadowrun
5. Year 1 (our re-imagination of silver age Marvel)
6. Morrow Project (cross off list as we just did)
7. Outreach (early sci-fi interstellar expansion)
8. Federation (original show star trek like setting)
9. Tri-Galaxy (wild sci-fi)

Each of those cover huge ground, but they served as a guide to general concepts and feel. I think it's interesting that I left out most of human history (it's in the timeline, but not considered for campaigns). I just haven't found anything in there before the 19 century that sounds interesting to me. Odd, consider that includes the Age of Sail...

In any case, this was our starting point.

The Morrow Project Campaign is a Wrap

We finished the Morrow Project Campaign this weekend. It ran a month short of 2 years in real life and about half a year in game.

The world was saved, for the lost of one PC (Sgt Preston Walker). He died buying time for his teammates to escape, taking the master villain of the epic with him by setting off the mini-nuke self-destruct in an old project CDC/research base that had been taken off by said villain

Also missing in action was the team scientist NPC, Doctor Winston. He too may have been buying time for the team to escape an earlier event (a collapsing tower, who's fall was brought about by an overloaded dimensional portal). Or maybe he saw a technical pretty and just had to investigate it and lost track of the fact that everything was falling apart around him. Those left, will never know. But history will likely selected the heroic end.

The backup to Prime Base was located, and the Project is coming fully online. There are untold adventures left in that world. But the characters have done their primary job, and the players are moving on to a different setting in the meta-time that runs from Middle Earth of the past to the far future.

All in all, very successful and everyone had a great time.

This was the first campaign that I've done that had a planned end point. Previously I've always been more of a sandbox player and where there have certainly been arcs, the campaigns themselves were never planned to end. There is a certain joy in completing something. I see advantages to both approaches if done right.

As to what's up next? We spent a couple of hours determining just that last night. I'll be talking about it some here as I iron out the details.

State of the Game

It's been a while since the last blog post. Lots of things going in life both real and not. I still owe the last part of the Synapse review and I'll be getting to it. One of the problems there besides the time pressure is that I've already ready covered the 'special' parts of the design- all that is left is the boring stuff and the wrap up.

In RPG news, we're closing in on the end of our Morrow Project Campaign after about two years. This one had an actual envisioned end when it first started. Getting there took longer than expected, but it's been a fun trip. The ending will (unless the players screw up in the home stretch) be more of a beginning, with the world waking up from darkness and the start of the rebuilding. There are years of adventure yet in that campaign, but we've covered what we set out to to do and those stories will have to await a different day.

Mechanically HERO System performed wonderful in general. Why only in general? A bit in I converted everything to 6th edition to see if I could get used to it. The final answer is no. The core rulebook no longer supports hex maps and the overhead of using what is in effect now point-to-point yardstick mini rules (like the old micro armor games) is too high. Plus it's just a ugly over-colored book. In return, it basically gives us nothing good as an offset except a nice version of Power Pool that I can easily retrofit to older versions. I'll be going back to 5th edition after this.

Just starting to look at what campaign to launch into after this. So many options, we have decades of great times ahead for my group.


In the wider (i.e. Industry and online) RPG world, life is boring from where I sit.

The industry has settled on what has to be the most depressing possible outcome. Hacked together modifications of old boring rules tossed into a setting that has one or two books and then nothing. Looking here at stuff like Dresden Files, the various 40K RPGs, and basically everything outside of D&D. D&D meanwhile has... fragmented into old school versions, new school 4th Edition versions, 3.5 versions, and really who can make sense of what they are calling Essentials? The brand is nearly worthless as far as knowing what you're getting.

HERO System meanwhile is in a major rut. They've released their rules in 6th edition, which has to be the most pointless edition ever. Now they're off redoing all their setting books, which was always pointless. I suppose someone uses them, I never did.


For the first time ever, I'm starting to think the RPG industry as such is done for. At least until it's rediscovered. Not convinced mind you, but starting to be. Groups like my own will continue of course as well the small time companies who do it just because. But I don't know who much longer WotC and the handful of other major names will continue to plug along- and not sure there's any value in their doing so.