Musings from Fanterland

Instead of continuing my theoretical rant on distributed campaigns, I want to just show you my current game as an example. If you're new to this blog series; a distributed campaign style lets a large group of players adventure across multiple GMs without any coordination between GMs needed. Part I  goes into the agenda and principles that led to this campaign style. Part II goes into the first steps of setting up a distributed campaign for yourself. At the start of this summer I began a new distributed campaign at the RPG Night Utrecht for Cloud Empress in the Land of Cicadas. Currently we have two GMs actively running weekly games with room to grow. We wrote the campaign setting truths in a Discord post, restricting it to the Discord character limit of a single post to force brevity. It goes into how to deal with published materials and how to split that amongst GMs, which is something I already planned to address in this series. In the discussion at the end I also talk about a s...

You might find yourself in the same fortunate situation I found myself in, perhaps without even realizing it, where more players want to explore your setting than you can comfortably fit around a single table. And where some of those players would actually make for great GMs themselves. This post describes a way for multiple players and GMs to mix up who plays with whom for each session, without the need to syncronize notes. It follows my principles for a distributed campaign style .The GMs each control their own region within a shared setting, and information only travels between those regions through the player characters. Once someone starts GMing, they are free to do their own thing without needing to worry about what’s happening in the other regions. But at its best, a distributed campaign makes the GMs eager to affect other regions through the player characters, and delighted by what the players bring into theirs, for better or worse. Perhaps another region has been plagued by a ...

 Last week I ran the Wildsea. Next week I'll run Mythic Bastionland. The week after I'll run The Electrum Archive. A week ago I hadn't read any of the games' books, and some weeks I only have an hour's worth of reading time. Here's how to get a game to the table quickly, with a twist at the end. Illustration by Hairic under CC4.0 1. Don't read the book cover-to-cover. Go straight to the index, glossary and play sheets (such as character sheets, GM sheets and a quick rules reference). The more RPGs you've played, the more you'll already be familiar with the concepts of a new one. Ignore sections you're already familiar with, and ignore sections that you can avoid during your first session. 2. Ignore sections that you can avoid during your first session. D&D5e has separate 'play modes': exploration, travel, downtime and combat. If you're in a pinch, you could skip the sections on travel and downtime and start your session by locking...

Illustration by Emiel Boven under  CC BY 4.0 After playing Exquisite Biome by Caro Asercion , I had the feeling its overall approach to worldbuilding would work very well for all sorts of situations. So I jotted down a more generalised game on the back of an envelope. Soon, I got the chance to apply it. My Mothership players brought back new genetic materials, and they wanted to bioengineer them into solutions for their luxury ship. At the moment, it was being forced to survive indefinitely in deep space, which it wasn't built to do at all. I thought it would be fun to just do a worldbuilding game for a session, in which the players think of how the ship changes over a span of decades, as its crew uses their available means to adapt to deep space survival. It was a great session, so I've written the steps down, with some wording adapted from  Microscope by Ben Robbins . We'll set up a big picture , the type of things we will  focus on, lenses  through which to insp...

For the last year-and-a-half my campaign style across various games has converged to something I've started to call a 'distributed campaign style'. It's an open table, episodic sandbox where multiple GMs can run adventures in the same living world without anyone needing to manage its cohesion, allowing GMs to focus their energy on the adventure at hand. It assumes OSR principles of play and takes inspiration from other sandbox campaign styles such as West Marches.  Agenda behind a distributed campaign Here's why I've been growing towards a rather specific campaign style: for a while now I've been a regular GM at a local public RPG night and have fallen in love with that format. In this context, there is an agenda that I hold in high regard. Always open to newcomers. Anyone can wander in and join to find new games and people to play them with. Standalone sessions.  Looking for something fun to do just for the night is a valid reason to join. So each session ...

I played Incarnis as a 2-player game. Turns out, that's a very quick way for myth creation, also known as mythopoeia. Mythopoeia is the act of making a myth. It was my core principle behind designing Incarnis: playing the game should empower to be a myth maker. With the truest artisanship, from nothing, Brahlyt made itself. A being and a place at once, Brahlyt basked in the glow of its own being in a state of blissful wholeness. Then, one day, Brahlyt spoke to itself. It presented itself with a beautiful, simian creature, formed from its own essence. 'Look what I made us,' Brahlyt said. And Brahlyt answered, 'We do not need anything other than ourselves.'   The simian crumpled up into a malformed little monkey, stooped and bow-legged. Heart-broken at the dismissal of this love letter to itself, Brahlyt sliced a stone tablet from its centre, and the god split into two; Brahl, god of senses, and Yt, god of craft. Yt clutched the stone tablet to himself as Brahl shriek...