Picking a New Campaign: Part II- What's Important

As covered in my last blog, we were picking from a number of possible campaign settings:

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)

To end things before it begin we attempt to find out if we had any real consensus on what it should be. No such luck of course. After spinning our wheels a bit, we took a slightly different tack- define what was important to see in the next campaign and narrow things down to match.

It turned out to be a somewhat interesting list, both in what it was and in if actually influenced what we chose.

An overarching storyline like we had in the Morrow Project campaign, i.e. a planned end.

This was rather easy in any of the settings truth be told. It's really little more than defining a goal and the basic idea of what would be in the way. So, really no impact.

More niche for the characters.

This one took me a little by surprise. One of the players wanted a change from Morrow Project which featured an all military group using national weapons to a group of PCs with radically different backgrounds and 'weapons'. Now the Morrow Project campaign did have solid niches and roles for the characters (I doubt I could enjoy a game without them), so this call for even more niche, more to have those niches be more front and center.

This removed a number of possibilities. Outreach, Federation, and Tri-Galaxy were all intended to focus primarily on what were in effect military characters, armed with military arms. Something we just did.

Sure we could focus on a different aspect of the setting, but at this time there was little appeal to that. Do these were removed.

The more we consider this, it seem that in general it was the concept of production firearms and their like that was really the core of the objection. Colonel Colt made all men equal it seems :)

This dropped us back to the two fantasy periods where sword and sorcery were the rule of the day. Ages of Middle Earth or Nephilim.

A player's background will have influence

One of players has a degree in theology. The concept of linking pre-flood Biblical accounts to Middle Earth was something of draw. Roughly on par with my interesting in modern military history and weapons causing me to often be drawn to more modern settings.

This perhaps was the turning point that removed the Ages of Middle Earth from the running.

In the end, campaign choices are made by a small subset of the players

In over thirty years of gaming, I don't think I've ever seen a group where a majority of the players felt strongly about what they're playing. I don't mean they're uninterested, just that they are open to a wide range of options.

That was the case here. Everyone was involved in making the decision, and everyone pointed out advantages and disadvantages. But nearly everyone would have been happy with any of the choices before us. So the final selection came down mostly to the just one of the players.

Next, I'll spend some time detailing the new setting.

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.

The Upcoming Captain America Movie

I use a lot of inspiration for my rpg campaigns. Books, Movies, TV shows. I use them all, if I'm rather picky about just what ones I use. And I tend to approach them with a "I like these ideas, but I want to do them myself without the mistakes and railroading".

This is the background for my Year 1 Superhero campaign which is based on Marvel Comics- but isn't Marvel Comics. We get to start over and do the characters right without the bad stories, worst writers, and consistent characters. What a thought.

With that in mind, I'm awaiting the upcoming Captain America movie. It may give me cool ideas that I can play off of.

A lot of people seem to be slamming the movie sight unseen.

I think some of it is driven by expectation (i.e. anything from Hollywood must hate America) instead of  any real facts on the ground. Yet another part is driven by how Marvel itself has treated the character in the comics- in a real way, he (with rare exception) hasn't been what Captain America should be since the 70s (if then).

Indeed, the closest they've come to the original is perhaps the version in the Ultimate run of books. I think Marvel viewed it as a chance to show how much of a dinosaur the character was- but it was a huge hit with the fans. When they went to do Ultimate Avengers- they split the difference and produced what I thought was perhaps the best version of Capt ever done up to this day.

I think (at this point) that some of the slams against the movie are unjustified.

The costume is very similar to the Ultimate series I referenced above. More practical with muted colors and web gear. They are however using the modern shield in its full bright red, white and blue. I don't understand any of the whining on this point. Complaining about the costume strikes me as someone looking for problems and then making them up when none jump right out at them.

The director comments referenced by Big Hollywood in the link above are more troubling. But again, not something I have a problem with by itself. Capt doesn’t' have to go around making speeches about how good America is- he just has to go around doing good and heroic things while wearing the colors of his country. Deeds, not words work fine.

Now they can do a bunch to make the movie horrid. Marvel itself has ruined the character, and it wouldn't be hard to see them doing that in the Movie. Just look at the first Hulk movie for an example.

But I'm still in the wait and see mode. Hoping for the best.