Types of campaigns

[tsofian]

I'm just trying to sort through this for my own information.

There seem to be a number of large scale ways to divide campaigns:

Player problem resolution
Shooting vs Thinking

Geographical scope
Local vs regional or larger
Stay in one place vs wide ranging

Resources
The team only-Other teams and other technological groups


I think the St Louis group may be an outlier compared with other groups.

[.45cultist]

I want to do a generations campaign with both survivors and MP personnel, or non Team Morrows initially. With 30-50 years between campaign chapters, perhaps the 5, 50, 150 year marks. Each building upon the previous contributions.

[tsofian]

Originally Posted by .45cultist

I want to do a generations campaign with both survivors and MP personnel, or non Team Morrows initially. With 30-50 years between campaign chapters, perhaps the 5, 50, 150 year marks. Each building upon the previous contributions.

That sounds interesting and can lead to some excellent storytelling!

[.45cultist]

Originally Posted by tsofian

That sounds interesting and can lead to some excellent storytelling!

Looks like I should break out my reference books and notebooks.
It's raining now any way, perfect time to start!

[Sprocketteer]

After Timelines tweet regarding steam trains tonight, I was reminded of my groups long term game in the 80's which involved several styles of game play.

We decided to play in the UK for this one.
I was partially inspired by Terry Nation's great post apocalypse show from the 70's called Survivors.
If you get the chance, check it out. (Ignore the crappy remake from 20000's though).

From IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072572/
"When a genetically engineered virus kills 99.99 percent of the world's population, the survivors must rebuild humanity in the face of overwhelming odds. "Survivors" is a study of man vs. nature and man vs. man in an attempt to reclaim an unrelenting world."

It is a very "British" show, and is set immediately after the global plague, but focuses on a small group of survivors, their journey to survive, and rebuild some sort of civilisation.
During the 4 seasons of the show, they encounter wild animals, roving gangs, disease, starvation, slavery,hot air balloon explorers etc. (total Project encounters.)
Eventually they try to reconnect a hydro electric dam/power plant to the national power grid to restore electricity, and they also encounter a group who have a working steam train, which the characters eventually use to connect several settlements and establish trade.

Inspired by this show, my players discovered an old steam train network, which was part of an open air/living museum. It had several engines, carriages, and maintenance workshops (as well as a purpose built 1900's village).

When the players decided to stay at this location and see if they could rebuild the train network, at least on a local level, I switched the sessions from "normal" rp sessions, to discussion and planning "turns", with each "turn" covering 1-4 weeks. Each turn comprised of several steps:

1 Characters receive the results of their previous "turn" and deal with any important/emergency issues that may have arisen as a result of their previous actions/decisions (or events that are planned or random encounters created by me). This may involve simple discussions, combat or rp, or indeed a mixture of all of them.

2 discuss any ongoing projects (research or manufacturing/digging/building etc that is ongoing from turn to turn or takes more than one turn to complete).

3 Allocate resources/personnel for this turns projects.
(They had several locals involved after a few weeks at the site).
People and resources could be applied to the following -
construction
maintenance
planting/harvesting etc
research
security/patrols
exploring
trade
(plus anything else the players thought of).
If resources are low, or need acquiring, they had the choice of allocating personnel to the problem , or rp-ing it with a higher chance of success.

5 I am sure there was another couple of steps, I can't remember, it was the 80's after all lol.

The group didn't mind the switching of styles from "real time rp" to "1 session = 1-4 weeks" resource management/planning/empire building. I think the change of pace caused them to think more, and they caught me off guard with some great ideas.
This worked quite well, and since we were working with a real location which we were partly familiar with (it is 20-ish miles away from where I lived), we used Ordnance Survey maps of the area. The players really got it into, I think in part because the location was real and they all possessed (as players) some knowledge of it.

In the end, after several game months, they got the train running, fixed enough track to reach the next settlement, and trade flourished. Indeed the feature buildings of the museum/village were repaired and people began to move in. There were period trade/craft buildings too - a blacksmith, a windmill, a kiln, all with the proper tools.
They helped two settlements grow, their own and the one at the other end of the railway line, and in time established first a telegraph then a vocie line connecting both places.

Indeed all went well, until the Great Train Robbery...

Whilst I had detailed the place just in case, the characters almost missed seeing the railway during the session they discovered it since there was bad weather and the tracks were largely overgrown. I'm glad they did find it, as we had a long and enjoyable game based there.

[ChalkLine]

Originally Posted by .45cultist

I want to do a generations campaign with both survivors and MP personnel, or non Team Morrows initially. With 30-50 years between campaign chapters, perhaps the 5, 50, 150 year marks. Each building upon the previous contributions.

From RPG.net

I've always liked Morrow Project a lot. I was discussing it with a friend the other day and they had a pretty good idea for a twist on it:

Everything happens like usual, except... there is no apocalypse. Society doesn't fall. So the PCs wake up to Civilization+150 years and need to decide what to do.