Dream Campaigns

#21

I’ve always dreamed of running a massive, interlinked “Eternal Champion” game, where the players make versions of the same character in multiple eras, in multiple game systems, each running thier own contained adventure. You’d switch off the different games at dramatic points, and run a metaplot that spans them all.

E.g…

A standard fantasy-horror game using D&D or Shadow of the Demon Lord or Dungeon World.
A 1920s investigative horror game using Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu or Tremulus.
A modern-day conspiracy/investigation game using GURPS or Modern AGE or Shadow of the Century.
A futuristic space opera/horror game using Traveller or Star Trek Adventures or Uncharted Worlds.

So, maybe your PC would be a rogue in the fantasy game, a private investigator in the 1920s game, an FBI agent in the modern-day game, and a spy in the scifi game. All of the investigations are linked to the same time- and/or dimension-spanning cosmic threat, and events in one of the settings either parallel or directly tie to events in another setting. You could get really meta if there were ways to communicate to parallel versions of yourself across the dimensions

Such a game would be epic, cosmically weird, require a HUGE commitment from your players, and would be EXTREMELY difficult to pull off…

…but if you could pull it off, it would be GLOIRIOUS!

7 Likes
#22

I would really like to play a long-running Good Society game. Just to see where that might take us.

In this one game we played - just one session - we created a trailer for the series the game was clearly a pilot for, and there was so much content, with sudden duels and sea battles and grand dances and melodrama teasered … well. Something like that.

12 Likes
#23

Oh man.

There’s one particular monster I’m really excited about from Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess’s “artpunk” monster manual, Fire on The Velvet Horizon: The Navarch of Aa))t

The Navarch is a demon who steals a city from the world and then steers it like a ship through mind-bending interplanar space on a voyage to hell. The city’s inhabitants all become cargo, food, and fuel for the journey, overseen by the Navarch’s bickering demon crew arrayed in a Byzantine hierarchy.

The Navarch’s description ends with “The four eyes of the Navarch, if torn from its head and used as oracular stones, can glean a path through chaos. But even someone with the eyes and with the wheel of bone would find incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible, to steer Aa))st anywhere other than to its destruction”

That part sounds like an amazing finale, and the whole thing seems like a setup for a fun campaign! But in what system? Plausibly Dungeon World, but I thought weirder options could work. What about Urban Shadows set in highjacked city on a one-way voyage to hell?

How would you play a Navarch of Aa))t campaign?

9 Likes
#24

I have so many. A few:

  • An mission driven existential horror campaign about Antifa activists uncovering a Nazi occult conspiracy. It would take a lot of lifting to do, though, not least because of the need to not make light of either radical activism or white nationalism. It might be better to just scrap this and play Sigmata or Spire instead.

  • A Tekumel campaign. The setting is intimidating, not just because it’s so detailed, but also because it’s influenced by various real-world cultures that I’d want to treat respectfully.

  • The Straits of Anian is a setting based on Pacific Northwestern indigenous mythology. I’d love to run something based on what’s been published thus far but it feels like another thing that would take a lot of work on my part to fill in the gaps successfully.

9 Likes
#25

  • Scum And Villainy, in a universe generated by Stars Without Number

  • The D&D Starter Adventure, Lost Mines of Phandelver, but set in the world of Dark Sun and with some robust-but-simple survival moves and a good way of doing defiling.

  • Red Markets UK

4 Likes
#26

Other than Mission Driven, the Antifa-fights-the-SuperNazis sounds like a good fit for Unknown Armies

1 Like
#27

Yeah, that was my first thought for a system.

#28

Switch to a neutral 3rd system :wink:

Reading the newest VtM book, when I got to the bit about the second inquisition being led by CIA/MI5/etc I instantly thought “Oh Night’s Black Agents stumbled into the Masquerade!”.

1 Like
#29

My three biggest white whales to chase

  • a time travel game where the players get stuck back in WWII England or France and have to not break things but ultimately will want to make things better. Getting the history to feel right is hard.
  • a full run of the Savage Worlds setting/adventure path book “50 Fathoms” because I have always loved that setting
  • any Deliria game that would 1) go more than 3 sessions and 2) get that neo-mythic feel that stuff like Gaiman’s American Gods or Charles De Lint right
6 Likes
#30

A proper series of Dogs in the Vineyard towns. I managed to miss out when it first arrived at the club, but I’d really like to play through enough towns to take the PCs through their development arcs from idealistic neophytes to old and jaded Dogs.

7 Likes
#31

I think my dream campaign is more about time and people than system and setting. I’ve had stunning gaming experiences across everything from ultra-trad games, to rubber sword LARPs, to the lightest of indie story games. The common denominator was finding people who I clicked with - not just people who I got on ok with, people who when I played with them it was like the universe audibly clicked into place.

I’m lucky in that over the years I’ve found a number of people who would be in my dream play group - but although I do a lot of online gaming we don’t have the luxury of time together in person. So my dream game would be a long week away in a rural cottage with my favourite gaming people (some of whom have never played together but I just know they’d get on amazingly) and no commitments. Just us and time. The system and setting itself wouldn’t matter so much - that would take care of itself.

Is that a cheat answer? Sorry.

17 Likes
#32

I’d like to do a full campaign of some of the PbtA games that have a specific campaign structure: The Watch or Night Witches.

I really want to play a long campaign of Legacy to really get a feel for how the world develops and changes.

I’d like to try out World of Dew, Ben Woerner’s urban demimonde expansion for John Wick’s Blood and Honor in a long, lazy campaign to see the players get up to hijinks rather than epic stories.

And I think there are just a load of games in general that work well in the month-long Gauntlet series style, but I’d just like to give them a bit of time to breathe and see how they work over a longer period of play. Masks in particular I think.

10 Likes
#33

The one campaign I’ve ever tried to run was a Tékumel game using the Heroquest system. The PCs wound up the Tékumel equivalent of moonshiners, so I was going to do a Lawless-style heavy Nick Cave rural gothic campaign, and then I had a nervous breakdown at trying to run the NPCs and keep the story going. That, by pride of place, remains my “dream campaign.”

I’ve also tried to get groups together for the Dracula Dossier at least twice before social situations blew up and prevented further action on that, so I’m rather cautious about trying to run things in general! :slight_smile:

3 Likes
#34

I’d love to run a proper campaign of Monster of the Week, which was the game that introduced me to PbtA-style play. I’ve run mostly one-shots of it, but never an ongoing campaign yet, so that’s definitely on my to-do list.

I also have an Earth-based Doctor Who campaign idea set in a town that is essentially on the Whoniverse equivalent of a hellmouth. I’ve tried to run it three different times now, but scheduling and other real life issues have killed each attempt.

I’ve also got a vague idea for a sci-fi setting that I used in a Traveller campaign which ended after a near TPK. I’d like to flesh it out in play a bit more.

I’d also like to complete a full run of both Misspent Youth and Primetime Adventures at some point, from either side of the table.

7 Likes
#35

I really loved the couple of sessions I was able to make of that run.

#36

So 28 Years Later?

My dream campaign would be one that started at the ground level, very character focused, and then blew up into a galaxy spanning plot.

I’m kind of trying to sew the roots for that with Moth-Light.

1 Like
#37

Of Wield?

I did a 3 player game that was consistent for a few months but one of the players’ schedules got kind of wrecked. The Gauntlet one was fun but not quite as cool as a consistent group one.

#38

Dracula Dossier is on my list.

I need to finish reading NBA, though.

#39

A multi-table shared universe using Marvel Heroic to redo the Marvel Universe in the modern era from the jump. One table plays FF, one Avengers, one the street, etc, but after a couple of games PCs could start guest-starring in other ‘books’. We’d do Annuals, crossovers, the whole deal.

Star Trek TNG in-canon where the players are the new flagship after the Enterprise is destroyed, all crew presumed dead. I’d set it right after ‘Best of Both Worlds’ except everyone from the show got killed and you’re the new main crew, so you could have a mix of in-series adventures and new plots, but all inside the timeline of TNG Seasons 4-7 and the start of DS9.

Finally, a loving but serious homage to 90s Vertigo supernatural hero comics using Urban Shadows OH WAIT I ALREADY DID THAT

9 Likes
#40

The Great Pendragon Campaign

An Umberto Eco-inspired tour of medieval cosmology with Ars Magica or my Fate hack thereof

A multi-system campaign that begins with Brendan Conway’s Primal World (from Magpie’s defunct Fate Codex zine–it’s a Fate hack for letting you play out the creation myth of one of the Chaos Worlds) for the age of the Old Gods, moving into Microscope to cover the transition from the age of creation to the age of the New Gods, then transitioning into Gods and Monsters (from Evil Hat’s Fate Worlds), then Godsend (variant of Legacy) or more Microscope to transition into the age of heroes, then whatever system I decide to use for the main fantasy campaign.

All of these would ideally be with my kids, when they get old enough.

5 Likes