The South Wing - A Novice Campaign

Here it is. My first campaign. My first, badly written, inconsistent, power creeped and experimental campaign.

The South Wing

It's an episodic crawl through a mega-dungeon. It even has two preceding episodes from one shots that gave me the basis for the campaign. Each week I would write a new episode, trying to break up the format I used the previous week. Then the next week I would go, "fuck it - let's just do this as a dungeon", and it would go down better than the experimental stuff.

Although the experimental episodes let me bridge some very interesting settings. When you give the players an astral starship and send them off into the void - anything you want can happen.

I'm very sorry for the lack of maps. Truth is, I sketch out a sensible bounding box for battles and just roleplay through the corridors. PHB:p182 describes marching order so you can get through skirmishes a lot quicker. For episode 7 there is a flow chart (there's portals involved - you'll need the diagram). And um, for XP I just gave out 300 every week. The sporadic attendance of many meant that shooting up through levels would leave a lot of part-timers behind. I just stalled on XP and bumped people halfway through the campaign to 4, leaving good old 5 for the grand finale. Oh, and I didn't get round to putting the Monster Manual pages in. Sorry. I did write a list of all spells in the PHB that require costly components though. I even put the materials and prices on.

I use Ideament to sketch out dungeon diagrams before writing them up in Editorial - this means my scenes play out more like a choose your own adventure novel than a hex crawl. It's a campaign designed around each episode taking exactly a session to play - which I needed because I always had new players at the table every week.

Now I'm off to try something different. A new day of the week to run the game and a new setting. A black market portal plane through which the players are drawn together as bounty hunters. Less of a continual story, more of a continual setting. Plus a ubiquitous magic item that will help shore up those weeks where only fighters turn up to play. If it isn't a disaster I'll post the material.

Next time I should post some adventure paths that were indeed disasters. I've learnt the hard way what makes a fun adventure. But after I started the South Wing I never had a bad week. Maybe there's something in there you can use.

Rifts

I've just finished my South Wing campaign. I'll post the paths for each episode once I've put in some page references for the Monster Manual. It was quite the learning experience, and now I'm wiser I'd like to design something better.

At an open table game you need a tool for bringing lots of random players in at any moment. So I want to run a world like Planescape or Rifts. Portals make bringing in new people (especially homebrew weirdos) very easy.

So I had a look at Rifts.

I've played Rifts. I've got the original book and a lot of splats. I got into Palladium games through buying TMNT & Other Strangeness, thinking it was going to be a graphic novel (shrink wrap's a bitch). I bought a lot of splats for that too. I think the main thing was that I liked the worlds, the system never really figured in. I barely asked for skill checks, skipped over fights, mostly roleplaying really. Not a big surprise that when Werewolf came out I jumped straight into White Wolf's system and never looked back.

Now that I played a designed game like 5th edition - I'm having a wholly new reaction to the Palladium system.

• How the hell am I supposed to ask for skill checks? There's so many of the buggers. And each new splat adds more. It completely breaks any use of skill checks to control the pace of the story or player's turns.
• Each paragraph is Sigmund-Freud-style long. To one extent you're getting rule clarifications. But on the other you're putting fatigue on the reader, so they skip stuff and get it wrong anyway.
• I'm wholly a convert to just having one damned experience table. Seeing so many again just made me wonder how I'd be able to get all players on an equal footing so no one at the table feels rubbish. I remember once rolling a character from the Rifts Atlantis splat and my mate rolled a gromek juicer and thought he'd hit the jackpot. Then I showed him that I had mega-damage skin and a truck load of magic and psychic powers. He was so salty.

The Palladium System isn't about balance. I get it. I think it's fine it spawns lots of books, because DMs and GMs need ideas. It's fun that you can roll a candle wizard.

But it really is The Hobbit, An Unexpected Threequel of roleplaying games. It desperately needs editing. I'm happy there's been news that someone's giving it a go.