Maintaining Continuity in Ongoing Campaigns (or: The Dishonor of In-Jokes)

#1

The September episode of The Gauntlet Podcast featured an amazing discussion between @edige23 @RichRogers and Luiz Paulo Ferraz about managing the narrative in open table ongoing campaigns.

I haven’t personally had any experience with open table play but the challenges overlap with groups that meet infrequently. (Or, in my case, even weekly.)

The podcast group mentioned some useful tools for this, like footnoting when an old NPC make an appearance. One thing they didn’t mention is relationship maps.

I was introduced to these when learning the Cortex Plus system, and I loved how they helped us visualize the network of relationships. My GM created one for our Coriolis campaign and it helped us keep our canon in mind and propel the narrative or inject an NPC. We even tried to keep it up to date as the campaign progressed. Our GM for Hearts of Wulin on The Gauntlet (@shane) did it as well.

I’ve started doing these for every game I play, and I wonder if such a tool would be useful for open table play, especially if it’s kept up-to-date. It’s a comprehensive visual history and perhaps an easy way for new players to see where NPCs fit when they get injected into the story.

Alt-text for Image below: relationship map from a Coriolis RPG campaign featuring PCs, NPCs, locations, and entities.

pathways-v02

7 Likes
#2

This a gorgeous layout, what application did you use to produce it?

1 Like
#3

I also request that you share the legend. I gather that circles are characters and diamonds are locations.

It truly is beautiful.

#4

@JimLikesGames I think our GM used Sketch, which is mostly a web design / digital product design tool, but since that’s our day job, it’s the app we’re most comfortable using. I’ve rendered these with Keynote or Google Drawing because it maintains the connection lines better.

This represents a snapshot at the very beginning of our game. Our campaign lasted ~10 sessions, and by the end there were a host of other NPCS and relationships not reflected here.

@AbacusMensch The colors represent different Coriolis factions. The dark squares are the PCs (with the player’s first initial inside, so I was Salah, the pilot). The gray rectangles below each are our icons, which if you haven’t played Coriolis can be crucial to the game.

The triangles represent space ships. The ship that we were all on was the Al Basti. One of our NPCs had served on many other ships. Not sure why the GM felt the need to put those in lol.

#5

I’ve used it before, inspired by a mix of TechNoir and Cortex Plus. I found it a really useful visual tool as the GM as in addition to the map that the players saw I had a parrallel copy that detailed connections they had yet to uncover (we were playing Dresden Files so lots of investigation).

dresden-adventure-1_3l47eubs

That’s the map from partway through our first arc, wish I’d kept the others. Thankfully there were only 3 players for this game, any more and I do wonder if the connections would have gotten too complicated.

1 Like