Tower of the Compass Rose - A Convention Campaign

#1

Next March my buddy/coworker and I are hosting ShushCon, a convention at my library. To help advertise our event we are going to another convention (SCARAB) to run some games. We’ve decide to set all of our scenarios in the same setting, one we created using Microscope. Normally I’d have a loose outline and really let the players shape everything about the game but because I’m collaborating with another GM that won’t work. (A previous year I chained together four sessions based on home-made dungeon starters and it went very well.)

Working with another GM really makes this is a much more stressful experience, and I can only imagine how the on-site event will wind-up my co-GM, he’s a bit more tightly strung than I am.

We are currently planning 8 sessions, alternating GMs, to run in sequential time-blocks. There are two time blocks on the last day of the con that we aren’t running anything, but who knows we may add some in. The premise of this campaign is that it covers the life of an artifact the Compass Rose, which changed the world on which it was created, both by it’s coming into being and by it’s destruction at the end.

Some of the scenarios are close together in time, but others have huge jumps in time in between them. Players can play in all of them, or drop/out between sessions without messing with the story. In the campaign the players place and activate the compass rose, an artifact that prevents demons from entering this sphere of reality. (Lots of demons come here because the world is the body of a dead god.) Things happen, a tower gets built, the power of the Compass Rose expands as it is enshrined. Bad guy takes over the tower, players stop his plot then recapture the tower. Eventually even the benevolent spirits who have come to this world start to go crazy. At the end, the players get to play a strike force from an alliance of elves and serpent men who are tasked with breaking the Compass Rose before it destroys the world.

After the first session, we will build up a town and huge tower on the table, using both handcrafted and 3d printed buildings. Each session will see the town grown and the environs will change. (We are about to start building a modular tower that is about a foot and a half across).

I had some questions when I started typing this, but now I just wonder if we aren’t a bit crazy to do this.

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#2

That sounds super cool in a number of ways, and I know of at least one other GM duo that successfully ran a long term campaign.

The notes on “this will happen, and the players will then do that…” make me a little wary, though. Is there no room to deviate from the planned storyline?

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#3

Great question Paul!

Our goal is to give them as much agency as possible without having them wander around aimlessly.

The story-lines will be loose enough, both in time separating the scenarios and in structure, that the players should have huge impact on what’s occurring. We know a few things that have to happen, but theoretically they shouldn’t restrict what the players do so much as provide them an opportunity to do some kind of glorious action.

For example - scenario 7 will take place decades, if not centuries after scenario 6, but what the players do in 6 will still influence 7. Legends created, parts of the town destroyed and not rebuilt, or even parts of the map completely swept bare.

We are trying to come up with a few “keystone questions” the story or players will answer at the end of each scenario. These should provide enduring elements that influence the rest of the campaign.

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#4

On a scenario by scenario basis? Yes!

There is even a chance they will do something unexpectedly world altering that could seriously change the story over the course of the campaign. That said, there are significant elements in a couple of episodes that are unavoidable because of outside influences. If the Compass Rose does not get destroyed in the last scenario the world effectively ends. (But in that once scenario, instead of defending the artifact they are trying to destroy it.)

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