This post is a proposed Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign TYpes (or RISCTY - yes, I went there) for D&D and other fantasy tabletop RPGs.
What is an incompletely systematised campaign type? In essence, it is a campaign type which OSR and wider nerd game blogosphere luminaries have not yet managed to exhaustively flesh-out through elucidating general principles, providing generalised or specific advice, coming up with iterative methods for generating content, producing substantive gameable material, and so on. In practice, it is probably best understood in opposition to the quintessential Completely Systematised Campaign Type - the megadungeon. Thanks to the hard work and applied wisdom of generations of deep and serious thinkers, nobody in 2024 who has access to the internet and knows what the acronym 'OSR' stands ought to have any difficulty setting up and running such a campaign, and will find a vast wealth of content that will help him to do so - indeed, scientists say that the number of blog entries dedicated to the matter of successful megadungeon campaigning would wrap around the Earth fifty-thousand times if printed out on postage stamps laid back to back.
Other more or less Completely Systematised Campaign Types would include the sandbox hexmap 'Western Marches' style campaign (even if I still think nobody has really come up with a way to make wilderness travel evocative and interesting) and perhaps the urban, city-based type.
Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types that I think any sane person will at some point have entertained will include:
- The Lord of the Flies/Lost/Robinson Crusoe style campaign, in which the PCs are washed up ashore in some improbable spot without possessions of any kind.
- The underwater campaign, in which the PCs are inhabitants of an actual below-the-surface hexmapped region, or where most of the play takes place in such a setting.
- The saltbox campaign, in which sea travel, ship-to-ship combat, weather, trade, and so on are made the focus.
- The virtuous sandbox campaign, in which the PCs roam about doing good (although I have jotted down some ideas about this)
- The institutional campaign, in which the PCs have adventures in a narrowly-defined single location such as a monastery, university, cathedral, castle, etc.
- The murder-mystery investigation campaign, with bonus points if the mysteries involve the use of known D&D spells
Earlier today I was contemplating a campaign based around a medieval/Arthurian questing knight. There is overlap with virtuous sandbox but not completely, I think.
ReplyDeleteI would call that a subcategory of the virtuous sandbox. It's what I've been half-working on for some time.
DeleteNoisms, I mean this with the deepest level of respect and in the kindest way possible when I say...What the devil are you going on about? Can you translate for me please? I feel like you might be on to something here if only I spoke whatever strange dialect this is written in.
ReplyDeleteFor example, are you saying people haven't run a 'saltbox' campaign? I feel like that's a fairly common occurrance, no? A Traveller campaign is that in space.
Do people not run virtuous heroes going from place to place doing good?
I've been in a Hogwarts themed game for the past 7 years now, where 90-95% of the adventures take place in and around the school. Does that qualify for the 'institutional campaign'?
I mean...would a campaign about being marooned on an alien planet and having to survive based solely on what you could salvage from your wrecked starship or scrounge up from the local environment count as one of these Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types?
Intrigued but confused.
I'm saying that those types of campaigns obviously all exist but that there is almost no work being done on how to run them optimally in the manner in which has been done for dungeoneering. That's all.
DeleteI like your suggestion at the end!
Well this may be so on Dungeon focused websites purtaining to certain Draconically influenced games - I couldn't say as I only follow a handful of those - the rest of us are already talking about these kinds of games so...
DeletePerhaps it would behove the D&D-esque crowd to check out Heropress' Superhero ideas and my Smurfs and Ghostbusters notes - i.e.: look to gamers addressing other games to get new ideas for your OSR one - or they might try playing more of these other game themselves for a change of perspective.
A great many do. Noisms is correct that there's a dearth of analytical, systematic, principles-focussed discussion and supporting materials for many types of game. The OSR generates or used to generate, by volume, more of that type of discussion than any other space in the hobby. I'd be overjoyed to discover any deep wells of insight out there I've overlooked but I suspect he and I are perhaps more greedy for discussion than you and our standards are nerdier, for a certain value of nerd.
DeleteYes, exactly.
DeleteWhat about a campaign focused on merchants and trading? It could take the PCs across oceans and continents, or it could just be focused within a city. But the PCs are traders, not just caravan guards or hired agents. They need to deal with and influence customers, suppliers and employees. Also what is the wider market doing? Can the PC traders navigate the economic tides? And of course if rivals or bandits resort to more brutal tactics then the PCs need to defend themselves and their business interests.
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
DeleteAsking who the PCs are and what their function in the world is might provide key distinctions. What does being an adventurer mean? Are they merchants, explorers, mercenaries, bandits, heroes, wandering hedonists, broken souls, etc. My sense is some of the ways people describe their campaign are the "type" of game it is (e.g., West Marches), and then the function of the PCs - such as being merchants or agents or thralls.
DeleteThe underground resistance campaign, in which the PCs sneak about doing good through violence.
ReplyDeleteYes.
DeleteAre not the Robinson Crusoe, the virtuous sandbox and the institutional campaign nuances on well-established concepts? I wouldn't expect exhaustive advice on them specifically when they amount to taking the principles of your wilderness/urban/dungeon game and changing one or two things.
ReplyDeleteThe espionage campaign, in which players compete with rival agents to advance their faction's agenda. Or the closely related political/court campaign.
The suggestions in your second paragraph are good. I'm not sure I agree with the first. 'Just changing one or two things' from a megadungeon campaign would by no means in itself be sufficient for making any of those concepts work, in my view!
DeleteI'd consider an institutional campaign to operate basically similarly to an urban campaign, for example, or a virtuous sandbox to a regular sandbox, with the necessary changes not greatly affecting the overall principles or mechanics. But maybe you have goals in mind for those types of campaign that would clash with the regular way of doing things and that I'm not thinking about - it goes to your point of them not being clearly defined and elucidated.
DeleteYes, that's exactly right - we haven't even theorised what this type of game would really look like at the level of basic principles.
DeleteRather than individually pondering all the different types of campaigns that strike our fancy ad hoc, then, which seems never-ending, if you want to make a start at systematising them it might be better to drill down "from the top". We're probably all more or less familiar with the idea of a "directed" sandbox, for example, which I think it's fair to call a supercategory of the virtuous sandbox, questing sandbox, underground resistance and many others, but there's relatively little ink spilled over it. Relationship webs are important for both murder mysteries and espionage games. Et cetera. It's easier to identify more general principles first and then work down to the specifics.
DeleteI feel like separating settings from premises here.
ReplyDeleteSettings: natural caves; ruined castle with prisons and cellars; ruined temple; underwater, sea surface, astral place/spelljammin', desert, teleport pad hopping, time travel, real-world setting, necropolis, you got your scifi in my fantasy, ruined city, wizard tower...
Premises: lost (and ultimately not so dead) civilization; competitive treasure hunt; stop-the-cult; Yojimbo faction war; nega-dungeon with destructo-surprise; death gauntlet; puzzle chain; collect the pieces ...
Some settings match better with some premises but a full grid is beyond my interest horizon.
A full grid would be a very worthy endeavour.
Delete“The saltbox campaign, in which sea travel, ship-to-ship combat, weather, trade, and so on are made the focus.”
ReplyDeleteWhat about Wolves Upon the Coast?
https://lukegearing.blot.im/wolves-upon-the-coast
Is that what Wolves Upon the Coast is? I know of it.
DeleteIt might be a mid point of Saltbox/Crusoe ... but a "Journey to the west/Silk road" campaign - where the PCs are a group going on an epic journey through strange lands..
ReplyDeleteThey have stuff - horses, caravans etc - and there will be weather, trade etc.. but the reason is the destination (which may or may not be reached)
(Lord of the Rings would fall into this - they are not "roaming", but are on a trip to a specific place)
Good call.
DeleteIn this tin-copper alloy age of siloed association, the mere act of identifying such areas of study surely helps disseminate research otherwise doomed to die unremarked upon. Even the chestnut Megadungeon, its geography laid out in such thorough detail in message board and g+ past, is plenty mysterious to the lostling who fumbles about in the dark. Were that only that the following periodicals spontaneously appear to play lantern for discourse on the aforementioned matters:
ReplyDeleteTOPIC NAME MASCOT
Megadungeon OLIPHAUNT oliphaunt
Hexcrawl HONEYCOMB wasp (giant)
Western Marches S.L.U.D.G.E. mudman
Urbancrawl ASTIONYM rot grubs
Washed Up SINE SPE RECUPERANDI mimic
Undrwter/Undrgrnd PIQUIOS psychic shrimp
Saltbox/Wavecrawl TRANSVERSE slug
Virtuebox BONHOMME scarecrow
Institutional The ORANGERY cockerel
Murder Myster MOONSTONE monkeys (many multiple)
Your job is to publish them all.
DeleteHmmm. The campaign I kicked off a few months ago fits in some ways quite nicely into the first category (Lord of the Flies / Lost / Crusoe) in that the PCs start with no possessions, etc, but also involves both a kind of wilderness hexcrawl and megadungeon elements, being set in the Underdark. Essentially the PCs find themselves having recently (and improbably) escaped chattel slavery from one of the nasty Underdark monsters (take your pick, mine was the illithids) deep, deep underground and without shelter, food, water, gear, or light. The idea behind this campaign was to do my best to avoid narrative and let the PCs drive what happens, whether this be the death due to starvation and cannibalism of all of them or they set up a pocket empire in the Underdark or they journey to the surface. It has been interesting watching them try to figure out if different kinds of moss are edible and argue about how much damage a femur should do when wielded as a club!
ReplyDeleteNice. That kind of thing must be really tough to run - it would be worth you setting it out in detail.
DeleteThere was Weird on the Waves that tried to systemize the salt-box, I don't know if you can get it anymore.
ReplyDeleteThere was also a Travellor variant called Mercator that was set in the ancient Mediterranean.
Deleteone is like, in the trenches, where theres a larger war happening and youre just some dudes in it, and you keep getting sort of glimpses of big things going on elsewhere but youre just on your one small mission through the chaos of it
ReplyDeleteGood call.
DeleteMaybe a subgenre of saltbox, the Northwest Passage campaign, more wilderness exploration focused with an emphasis on sea travel and low amounts of resources.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely 'exploration' is one.
Delete