It’s easy to imagine this as the casting of a spell. It’s not; it’s burning steel wool being swung on a string of some kind. But it sure looks impressive.
Image by Faizal Sugi from Pixabay

I saw a question on Quora the other day asking how you could give an RPG a particular style. I thought about giving an answer, but the more I thought about it, the more complicated the question became.

No campaign is imbued with its own unique style right from the get-go. It takes time, and a continuous evolution, and consistency for that to develop. But you can give it a good starting point.

Because of where this question was asked, the foundation that the request was eliciting was D&D. I immediately thought of four different styles that any answer would have to accommodate in order to be generic.

Each of these further expanded the vague notions that came to mind in terms of an answer. It soon became clear that there were a wealth of considerations.

So those four styles became my test cases. The styles are High Fantasy, Science Fiction, Mystery, and Political.
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It soon became clear that any adequate answer to the question would take far more room, and be far longer than was reasonable in that forum and the time available. That meant that it was tailor-made for a venue in which I could be as expansive as necessary – like Campaign Mastery. My course was sealed when I realized that it would dovetail nicely with this month’s Blog Carnival, due to end in just a few days.

Before I get to how each of these can be implemented, let’s run through all the factors that have to come together to form a campaign style.

There’s a lot to get through, so let’s get to work…

What Is Style in an RPG?

‘Style’ is a focus or orientation within an adventure or a campaign. Encounters are too fleeting to have much of a style of their own, though they can make a contribution to the adventure or campaign style.

That’s a very practical definition; I don’t want to get caught up in theoretical discussions. Most people will know what is meant by the term (especially given the test cases described) without needing much explanation, if any.

Another way to answer the question would be to specify a sub-genre to which the campaign or adventure will (mostly) adhere. In a science-fiction campaign, that might be dystopia or cyberpunk or star trek or space fantasy or any of a number of others. In fantasy, we have swords-and-sorcery, high fantasy, the test cases listed earlier, and more.

Style is broader than a campaign theme – a theme is an idea or concept that will be explored in the course of the campaign, possibly from many different perspectives. Style provides a context and background to a theme, a space in which to explore that theme. For example, “Responsibility” is a perfectly valid theme, but it’s not a style. A “political campaign” is a style, indicating that the adventures and motivations will center around the politics of the game world – and “Responsibility” would be a completely acceptable theme within that style.

Most game settings come with ready-made styles that are inherent (if, perhaps, not obvious) to that setting – choices of adventure that explore something interesting about the setting. That’s how you can get styles that are defined as “John’s Dragonlance” or “Paul’s Eberron” or “Jimmy’s Star Wars” or whatever. That’s a succinct way of saying “X’s campaign definitely has its own style, but I don’t know how to sum it up in words, so I’ll just label it and move on.”

Make no mistake, even if you don’t expressly pursue a particular style, one will emerge naturally through the symbiosis of adventures, GM style and technique, and players. It will be a wild beast, unpredictable at times, uncertain all the time, but distinct to that particular campaign. It may even be able to trace its ancestry to antecedent campaigns. While it can be fun to let a campaign find its own voice in this way, it does mean more work for the GM as they have to remain open to greater flexibility in PC choices. What a calculated and deliberate style confers is focus and direction, which excludes a great many alternatives that the GM doesn’t have to consider in prep.

With a working understanding of what the topic of the day is all about, let’s plunge into the different elements that contribute to a campaign’s style, and that may have to be altered to infuse a campaign with a particular style. I’ve numbered these entries just to bind them together.

1. Game System

The game system has a big impact on the campaign styles to which the system lends itself. D&D, Rolemaster, Empire Of The Petal Throne, Tunnels and Trolls, and Elfquest are all fantasy game systems, but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. Each has its differences (and they can be profound) – and those distinctions both confer a certain stylistic envelope to all campaigns that run under that game system and comprise a stylistic fingerprint that ‘comes with the territory’.

To a certain extent, a directed style choice means one of two things: forcing a game system beyond its normal limits, or restricting attention to a limited portion of the natural envelope so as to focus on it.

An example of the first is attempting to run a science fiction -styled campaign using D&D. It certainly can be done, and it remains a fantasy campaign – it just has some odd undercurrents. To some extent, D&D is a ‘monster bash’ game system, so a Horror D&D pushes the boundaries – but Ravensloft is another of those very popular campaign settings because it does just that.

A political campaign, on the other hand, is completely within the natural envelope of the game system – in fact, of virtually every game system, simply because politics is such an inherent feature of human society. I can easily imagine a perfectly “Diplomacy” campaign set in the world of Star Trek, exploring the political structures of both members and non-members of the United Federation Of Planets, negotiating treaties, avoiding wars (or starting them), and so on. I can also imagine a “Diplomatic” campaign set in the Star Wars universe – the Empire trying to keep its subject worlds from revolting while they track down the rebels, or the Rebels trying to woo subject worlds into supporting their cause, openly if possible, covertly if not. Those two campaigns have superficial similarities in some respects, but I’m sure everyone would agree that they would be quite different campaigns despite those similarities.

You can run a Super-spies campaign using the James Bond game-system, the Babylon-5 game system, Pathfinder, or the Hero game system – and each would be distinctly different for all that they have in common.

That’s because each game system comes with its own baggage – assumptions and choices that may be buried so deeply within the game concepts that you can never fully extricate them, and you could even argue that without them, the game system itself is inherently changed. For example, picture a D&D campaign in which there is no magic. None. Nada. Zip. And no creatures that overtly rely on magic to make them viable – no Dragons, no Deities, no Devils or Demons. Is such a campaign truly still D&D? I can see people arguing yes or no over this for hours with no consensus emerging – because the key question is only inferred and never directly addressed by the question as posed: To what extent is the ubiquity of magic a fundamental part of the D&D tapestry?

Every game system has an envelope describing adventures that are a ‘natural fit’ with those underlying assumptions and excluding adventures that are not, and also contributes to the style of any campaign run using that game system by virtue of those underlying assumptions.

2. Genre and Sub-genre

But that’s not the be-all and end-all of the question. Identifying a key genre or sub-genre within that envelope also contributes to the style of the campaign. This is where the different game settings come in – each also has an envelope or context in which certain adventures just work and certain adventures have to be altered in scope, context, or premise in order to sit comfortably.

Imagine an adventure set in some Hobbiton-like rural environment with lots of Hobbits at its center. That fits very naturally into core D&D, but assumes all sorts of overtones if the game setting is Ravensloft.

I’ve already discussed most of the content that belongs under this subheading in the previous section – necessarily, because it was also relevant to the game system question – so I don’t have much more to add, except to say this: just as there are certain adventures that are a comfortable fit within a given game system, so there are certain genres and sub-genres that fit comfortably within that game system. So much so that quite often, you are well served by choosing your preferred Genre and, perhaps, Sub-genre, and letting those choices guide your selection of game system.

3. Style-supporting House Rules

The only way to really push beyond the boundaries of a given game system is to institute House Rules to expand the scope of the core system. Most of the famous D&D game settings do this. Forgotten Realms and Eberron are not interchangeable. Even when the game system is explicitly enabled for a particular Genre – “Pulp Hero” within the “Hero System”, for example – House Rules may be necessary to fully embrace the Genre that you want as your campaign foundation.

One of the things that distinguishes my many D&D campaigns is that each has its own game setting and set of House Rules that expand the boundaries of what is natural under the combination – while excluding things that aren’t. I won’t go into buckets of detail, there isn’t room; I’ll just say that without those house rules adding oomph to the campaign style, they would feel very ‘vanilla’. A large part of the campaigns is often set aside for discovering the cultural and social implications of the House Rules, of exploring the uniqueness that each set brings to the campaign environment..

Supporting a Genre, a Sub-genre, or a Style within those, is one of the best justifications for a House Rule. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only alternative valid justification, the correction of broken rules, should never manifest a new House Rule that is not (at the very least) mindful of the Stylistic impact of the change. There may be six possible fixes to any broken rule; Style should be your guide to choosing between them. This may result in choosing a solution other than the most efficient in an absolute sense, but the added contribution to style may justify it.

4. Style Of Characters

In a game world without magic, certain character archetypes need either re-imagining or complete rejection. It might be a different story if magic were to suddenly stop working (the implication being that it can start again), but – in general – validity in character choice is dictated by Game System, Genre, Sub-Genre (if applicable), and intended Style. In this context, Style may be thought of as a lens of colored glass – altering some choices and making others all but invisible.

If the intended style is Political, a Barbarian character won’t fit very well – not without a little cosmetic surgery to the class concept, at least. Rogues, Mages, and Clerics are a more natural fit. Fighters, less so – they may be right on the edge of suitability.

It follows that the GM should give the players at least a vague idea of the intended style of a campaign before character generation takes place, and that the players should be guided in their choices by that information. It further follows that the GM should reject some characters as unsuitable for this campaign at this time if they don’t fit the style – or should at least discuss how the character will fit into the planned style before accepting an outlier.

But style is a two-way street; part of the style of a campaign comes from the choices of the PCs, and that derives from the options available to the PCs, and that derives in turn from the original design of the PCs. If ‘desired style’ is used as a design criterion for those PCs in the first place, the characters themselves become natural amplifiers of Style, pushing the campaign in the desired general direction.

If the GM decides to take an alternative vision for the PCs, asking the players to generate “Every-men” who will find themselves in extraordinary situations and have to rise to the occasion – in other words, requiring design choices to be based upon an intended campaign Theme – then the results will be a modifier to the campaign style, not an Amplifier. The differences can be both subtle and profound.

I could, at this point, launch into a related topic – the stylistic contributions of the players in play – but I’m trying to follow a logical progression here, so I’ll save that for later.

5. Style Of Plotlines

To start with, I should make it clear that I’m distinguishing between plotlines and adventures because the one plotline – a plot arc – can be woven through multiple adventures. Plotlines are ‘big picture’, in other words, while ‘adventures’ are parts of the big picture, expressed in playable form.

If you want to run a political campaign, you had better have adventures that deal with the politics of the game setting. All the shaping of Style in earlier sections comes down to making room for focus on a particular type of adventure – so not having plotlines that generate those kinds of adventures is rather pointless.

That said, if you follow the advice elsewhere in this article, your style will often be able to support the occasional digression or diversion from the core style, in order to keep the adventures fresh and interesting, and will be the richer for it. At least half your plotlines should directly reflect the chosen style, though, and no other style should be more than half of what’s left. This gives you scope for the occasional Romantic Interlude or Action Plotline or whatever. And if you can give these an overtone that hearkens back to the core Style, these become explorations of the fringes of that Style, and perfectly valid within the campaign structure.

A brief review of my Zenith-3 campaign might be relevant at this point, something I’ve never done from this particular perspective. It’s divided into phases.

  • In Phase 1, campaign elements were introduced and campaign themes hinted at. Most adventures existed only to put the right chess pieces on the ‘board’ for later use. Individual adventures will be resolved but most plot arcs will persist.
  • In Phase 2 (where the campaign is now), more campaign elements are being introduced and prior campaign elements – NPCs, situations, plotlines, plot arcs – are starting to interact. Again, the campaign themes are only being hinted at. Individual adventures will be resolved but most plot arcs will persist.
  • In Phase 3, a few campaign elements will be introduced having been foreshadowed in Phases 1 and 2, and existing plotlines will continue to develop and unfold. Some plotlines that initially appeared unrelated will coalesce into more complicated situations. A few plotlines that existed only to introduce or manipulate early campaign elements will be resolved. Adventures will continue to be resolved on an individual basis but most plot arcs will persist. Campaign themes may be hinted at in specific adventures. Consequences of past adventures will have secondary effects.
  • In Phase 4, several campaign plot arcs will coalesce or be resolved. Consequences of past adventures will have secondary effects. A few campaign elements will be introduced but this will be a relatively minor part of the phase content. Those few will be highly significant, however. Around half the existing plotlines will continue to develop and unfold. Most adventures will either explore ideas tangential to the main themes or will foreshadow the main themes. Consequences of past adventures will have secondary and tertiary effects. There will be some increase in the stakes of individual adventures.
  • In Phase 5, most of the remaining plot arcs will interact or coalesce or be resolved, forming one primary plot arc with lots of complications and a number of side issues that threaten to worsen those complications. Most of those complications will derive from past adventures, directly or indirectly. Adventures will increase markedly in stakes. A few campaign elements will be introduced but this will be a relatively minor part of the phase content. Those few will be highly significant. A number of plot twists and revelations are planned.
  • In Phase 6, the major plotline will be resolved, the game world will be utterly transformed, the stakes will be as high as they get. Everything will relate to the one plotline and to the campaign themes.
  • In Phases 7-9, handful of individual adventures will explore the early consequences of whatever happens in Phase 6, and bring to a conclusion the plotlines of the surviving PCs (if any). This deals with the aftermath in different regions of the game universe.

So the campaign starts by more or less ignoring the campaign theme and consists of a number of different adventure styles. As it progresses, though, there is increasing alignment with those dominant themes and increasing consistency of style – though the campaign themes are broad enough that a number of variations and fringe issues can and will be exploited.

6. Style Of Adventures

Again, I’ve addressed this fairly solidly in the previous section – because that was necessary to fully explore it. It’s important to note that your adventure styles can’t be monotonous; even if your primary style is Political in nature, you will still need the occasional variation. As the campaign works its way to a conclusion, however, everything should focus in on the central style and theme.

7. Style Of Encounters

Every encounter adds to the style of the adventure, obviously. But they cumulatively add to the style of the campaign, too. Some encounters are all about talking, others about combat, and still others are about applying skill. In some encounters, the PCs give information or direction, in others, they receive information and encounter circumstances that circumscribe their options either immediately or for some time to come. Some encounters create opportunities, others eliminate choices. All of these variations and distinctions (and more) combine to reflect the style of the campaign.

Again drawing upon the Zenith-3 campaign for examples, a few situations have to be resolved with combat, but in far more cases, the PCs are levers in search of a fulcrum that will permit them to change a situation without conflict; in this way, they can deal with social movements and enemies that are far too potent for direct confrontation. At the same time, they are frail and usually damaged human beings, and the work they do leaves scars and wounds on their personal lives. Sometimes, there is tragedy and heartbreak; sometimes, life-and-death choices need to be made; and sometimes, they can relax and enjoy life, however momentarily, even in the darkest of situations. The most trivial of decisions can have repercussions many orders of magnitude greater, given time. Personal connections are one source of those fulcrums – so, ultimately, the campaign is roleplay oriented, and puzzle-solving oriented, more than it is a combat-fest.

That means that most encounters don’t involve combat, they involve talking and comprehension of ideas, and expressions of ideas, and give-and-take negotiations – and even those that do involve combat are usually resolved in one or more of these other interaction modes.

The current stage of the campaign broadens their campaign world and reveals it to be a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. But it also introduces them to resources that they can use to solve later problems. All of that happens in the form of encounters and discoveries. The pretext (at a metagame level) is that they are searching for a new base of operations from which to operate a sub-campaign – one in which they have different identities and a different leadership structure. The pretext is quite literally a vehicle for delivering various unrelated encounters – that, at a future point in time, will become very relevant to the campaign.

8. Style Of Challenges

Again, I’ve touched on this in the preceding section. A Challenge is a problem that needs to be resolved without combat or talking – it might be using a character’s skills or abilities to accomplish something or it might be making a decision or figuring out something. Some of these can be resolved with dice rolling, but many of them come down to difficult decisions.

9. Style Of Narrative

I’ve discussed the power of narrative many times. Your ultimate goal with narrative is to impart information, and the secondary purpose is usually to impart a sense of realism or believability to the environment and world. But an important tertiary function of good narrative is to impart a sense of atmosphere, and that contributes to the overall style of the campaign and the adventure. So important is this tertiary function that I’ve done an entire series on the subject – The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative – so I don’t have to say very much about it here!

10. Style Of Imagery

Imagery comes in two forms, so far as I’m concerned (in an RPG context): Theater of the mind and something you actually show the players. The first derives its stylistic flourishes from the nuances of descriptive language that you’ve imparted – stylish narrative again – and the second? It can either add to that impression or detract from it, depending on what images you choose.

Learning to manipulate the images that you find that aren’t quite right can extend your reach considerably. For example, of late, I’ve become reasonably adept at converting autumn images into high summer. That involves color manipulation, and textural manipulation. and masking off protected areas, and the addition of realistic foliage – well, reasonably realistic foliage! To be honest, 2/3 of the images are just “good enough”, but the remaining 1/3 are things to be proud of! (I’m unsure of the copyright availability of the base images, so I can’t risk sharing any of them with my readers, I’m afraid).

You can even play games with the imagery subtext and choose styles that give clues to the players – I did that a while back with a scene supposedly obtained from a security camera that the PCs hacked in an emergency.

11. Style Of In-game Outcomes

How you describe outcomes is also important; you need to phrase these in terms of the overall style of campaign. In a political campaign, the political impact of an event or action needs to be front and center. Equally important, because it feeds that narrative, is how you assess the outcomes.

It can be equally important to leave out or subvert outcome descriptions that are both obvious and that detract from that style. “You persuade him to back down, but have offended many religious onlookers who may actively start to undermine or bypass your authority in the future” – the result of a successful roll to do something that solves the PCs short-term problem but didn’t pay enough attention to the longer-term ramifications. The shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line!

12. Style Of Rewards

This is something that probably wouldn’t occur to many, but the rewards that you impart to the PCs can contribute to the style of the campaign in surprising ways, because they expand the options available to the players or the capability of the PCs to employ a particular solution to a problem. Your rewards for solving a political problem should not make the character more effective at combat unless the political problem was a deviation from a combat-style campaign. The reward should, instead, be political in nature – “X admits that he owes you a favor and asks what he can do to clear the debt”.

13. Style Of Contributions

I struggled to give this section a proper title. I’m not really happy with “contributions” but it will suffice.

Players and their approaches to problems will have an ongoing impact on campaign style. Where those influences are simpatico with the intended style, they can act to further define and refine your vision, evolving it toward a unique variation on the main style. Where there is a conflict, you can fight it (reducing the overall fun of the campaign) or go with it (and take it as a hint that your players might not be fully onboard with the style targets that you’ve set, and perhaps should dilute them a bit more).

High Fantasy Campaign

So, let’s take a look at the four styles of campaign, from a D&D perspective. High Fantasy is relatively easy, so it makes a nice soft entry point into this part of the article.

High Fantasy is all about exploring the fantastic, and is often bombastic in nature. It’s the “space opera” of Fantasy. I love it because it gets to explore all the conceptual mechanics behind the game world, and those are great fun to create. Others may not like it as much because the adventures tend toward being a bit ‘cosmic’, though I always try to keep the campaign’s feet on the ground by exploring the ramifications for ordinary people. Gods and Mythic figures stalk this sort of campaign, and some critters are just too mundane to be the focus of attention – at least without some dressing up.

  1. Game System – D&D
  2. Genre and Sub-Genre – High Fantasy
  3. House Rules – Exotic places and Races. Maybe a specialist character class or two.
  4. Characters – Intelligent characters are favored. Characters with an obligation or desire to protect / preserve / maintain the multiverse are favored.
  5. Plotlines – Something awful is happening to the multiverse. PCs have to become aware of it, identify it, discover who’s responsible and why, and do something about it.
  6. Adventures – Initially, fairly mundane with hints at something bigger going on. Side effects of the something awful. Exploration beyond the Material World in search of the cause. Probably one or two raids on possible culprits. Discovery of the true enemy. Confrontation. Consequences.
  7. Encounters – Most of what the PCs encounter will be beyond direct confrontation; they will need to be targeted carefully and need non-combat resolution. More encounters with potential allies than is usual, some reluctant.
  8. Challenges – intellectual and aimed at the Players and their understanding of the game world, for the most part.
  9. Narrative – The dryer and more sciency the subject, the more poetic should be your approach. Save the non-flowery stuff for PC interactions with the exotic, when clarity is more important. Beware of pomposity. Above all, use “nitty-gritty” language as sparingly as possible.
  10. Imagery – Explosions and rays make everything better. Look for the fantastic. If necessary, create it. Beware of pomposity, but be grandiose.
  11. Outcomes – Every adventure should result in the PCs knowing more about the structure and nature of the game world (and/or its inhabitants) than they did. Much of this knowledge will be ‘forbidden’ so an early adventure needs to give them unreliable access to such knowledge, perhaps at a price.
  12. Rewards – see above. Resources for information gathering. Resources for exploring beyond the Material. Favors, obligations, alliances – the more unlikely, the better.

That’s a reasonable prescription for a generic High Fantasy campaign, and shows how every level of the campaign contributes to the totality of the style.

Science Fiction Campaign

This is much harder. What we’re talking about here is providing reasonable, plausible, pseudo-science explanations for everything that’s fantastic, making the fantastic mundane – while keeping it awesome and amazing..

  1. Game System – D&D
  2. Genre and Sub-Genre – Middle-Fantasy Pseudo-science
  3. House Rules – Answer the hard questions. Explore the conceptual ramifications. Rewrite rules as necessary to reflect them. For example, applying inverse-square laws to magical effects.
  4. Characters – Intelligent characters are favored. Characters with a down-to-earth attitude can be useful foils.
  5. Plotlines – The quest for answers, for an understanding the underlying game physics and how to manipulate the environment to your advantage. How this understanding is to be achieved defines the road-map of the overall campaign, the ultimate application of it in defense of it’s achievements defines the campaign conclusion.
  6. Adventures – Early adventures should emphasize the apparently fantastic nature of the world and create a sense of dissatisfaction at the illogic of the explanations. Opportunities to acquire new perspectives and worldviews should follow. By mid-campaign, the PCs should be amongst the foremost experts in the nature of reality, with a clear path of discovery and exploration to follow. Ask and answer “Why” repeatedly.
  7. Encounters – These will fall into three groups: those with information to teach the PCs, those who seek to protect their dogma, and those who don’t care (and are therefore ‘grunts’ of various levels of ability, some of them well-educated in what – to the PCs – should be trivialities.
  8. Challenges – Intellectual and imaginative.
  9. Narrative – you can use the florid modes of expression when describing effects but otherwise should focus on the ordinary and matter-of-fact delivery of narrative.
  10. Imagery – use of traditional fantasy imagery will be fine, much of the time. And look for illustrations in junior science books – things like falling apples.
  11. Outcomes – like High Fantasy, every adventure should result in the PCs knowing more about the structure and nature of the game world (and/or its inhabitants) than they did. Much more of this campaign structure should focus on those who want to prevent the PCs gaining knowledge that is (or “should be”) forbidden. This is a story of social revolution, and all sorts of otherwise quite agreeable people will oppose it.
  12. Rewards – allies, resources, understanding. Even wealth is a resource in this context (and presumably a very expendable one).

Mystery Campaign

Fantasy mysteries are even harder than fantasy sci-fi, for the same reasons that sci-fi mysteries are hard. I discussed Asimov’s basic principles in The Butler Did It: Mystery Plotlines in RPGs and his technique in Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs. The same principles can be adapted to a Fantasy mystery – but it’s twice as hard, because cause-and-effect can be uncoupled by the Fantastic. That means that a lot of your technique will need to derive from the science-fiction version of fantasy discussed in the previous section.

It gets harder still when you realize that, for your entire campaign to be mystery-oriented, you only have two choices of model: the police procedural, in which a new mystery is introduced and resolved in each adventure, and the serial police procedural (like ’24’) in which a single mystery can be large enough to comprise the entirety of the campaign. And it’s really hard to keep big mysteries interesting, and really hard to keep small mysteries interesting and not trivial. The first is actually the easier problem to solve – you simply need to keep raising the stakes, but at no point can you let the situation grow too frustrating for the players – progress must always be visible, or they might just give up.

  1. Game System – D&D
  2. Genre and Sub-Genre – Mystery
  3. House Rules – Tools and resources for examination of locations in detail
  4. Characters – Intelligent characters are favored, but some bulldogs are often useful. Specialist characters who can bring different areas of knowledge to a situation can be useful, but will probably require expansion of the Knowledges subsystem.
  5. Plotlines – If you go with the one-big-mystery approach, that is your plotline, and everything else needs to dance around it. If you go with the Sherlock Holmes / Police Procedural approach, your plotline is likely to involve the personal and professional lives of your characters, and take the form of subplots entwined within the mystery of the week.
  6. Adventures – In the one-big-mystery approach, there have to be multiple layers which can be penetrated one at a time. Each adventure’s yield is a clue or a lead to be followed up in a subsequent adventure. In the procedural approach, adventures are self-contained mysteries that have to be solved and the personal / professional lives of the investigators.
  7. Encounters – Encounters can be grouped into two types: encounters that advance the plot towards a solution, and encounters that don’t. A percentage of the latter will be encounters that hinder the solution of the plot, but most of them will relate to other aspects of the campaign.
  8. Challenges – Intellectual.
  9. Narrative – Lean towards the detailed and matter-of-fact. The first can be quite difficult to achieve with compressed narrative, so you will need to find ways of delivering detailed information without creating a blur of details. You will also need to bear in mind that the players are not their characters.
  10. Imagery – You can find lots of images that reflect theories of what may have happened, but everything else will be harder to come by. Resorting to on-the-fly sketches and the like can add an air of authenticity, though, so think about getting some “paper” printed up that looks like old stock, and experiment.
  11. Outcomes – In the one-big-mystery approach, adventure outcomes should emphasize progress toward a solution (or a reversal in same). In the procedural model, outcomes should emphasize the resolution of the mystery of the week, perhaps by doing what Colombo episodes did at the start of the show – revealing the who and how of the crime by showing it. An element of Agatha Christie may also be useful as a framing device, having the PCs gather for a dinner party at which the final solution is to be revealed.
  12. Rewards – There should be some scope for the characters getting better at solving mysteries and getting involved in bigger mysteries as a result. But at least part of the rewards should focus on resourcefulness outside of the mystery-solving arena for those occasions when confrontations are necessary. Much will depend on whether or not the PCs number some “bulldogs” amongst their compliment.

Political Campaign

As a long-time fan of The West Wing, I couldn’t resist considering a political campaign – in fact, this was one of the first styles that came to mind.

Any political campaign has a couple of ground rules that have to be followed:

  • Everyone has an agenda that is justified in their own mind.
  • Agendas conflict.
  • Factions. And minorities. All of which have agendas. Say no more.
  • Unstable balances of power. Shifting alliances. Back-room deals.
  • Allies, some of whom can’t be trusted, all of which will have their own agendas.
  • Enemies, some of whom can be trusted if a situation is in their best interest, and some of whom can’t. And by now you know what I’m going to say about Agendas.
  • Power. Who has it, who wants it, and what they are willing to do to get it.
  • The role of the PCs in all of this needs to be clearly defined.

To some extent, Adventures in a political campaign can be defined as “What’s the worst possible thing that could happen now?”. To some extent, consequences of past acts and decisions and compromises coming home to roost.

And whenever anything happens, every faction and individual needs to try to find an opportunity to benefit themselves or their agenda. Even if that makes solving the problem harder for the PCs.

That last is a LOT of work; a system will be needed to reduce it to a manageable routine. I have the preliminary glimmerings of one, but it’s way too difficult to do generically. The general principles are based on a flowchart, isolating specific factions, minorities, and vested interests who are either directly affected or who can make an obvious move to further their self-interests, based on spheres of authority. Political Spectra also factor in. But it isn’t something that’s anywhere near ready to present to the world; I’ll have to leave it percolating in the back of my mind for a while, yet. Possibly for quite a while.

It might even be that a better approach, in the meantime, would be to pick a faction to “be a problem” and work backwards from that to the event that creates the opportunity.

  1. Game System – D&D
  2. Genre and Sub-Genre – Political Games
  3. House Rules – See preliminary discussion above
  4. Characters – Social and intellectual characters preferred.
  5. Plotlines – Kings don’t generally get elected, so re-election is out. That tends to leave either one big political crisis that has to be resolved, or serial adventures and problems of the week. The latter are SO much easier that the preliminary discussion largely assumes that this is the GM’s choice. But if you want to go for the one-big-crisis, most of the advice offered for one-big-mystery campaigns applies.
  6. Adventures – So, problem-of-the-week. The name of the game is political survival, no matter what the world throws at you.
  7. Encounters – Lots of talking. Some deduction. Some subterfuge. An emphasis on society and politics. It would be well to know what you’re talking about, and to maintain political neutrality. That may mean modeling your politics on a country other than that of yourself and your players, if anyone has trouble being neutral. Or you can pick some faction that everyone agrees with and let them be the ‘good guys’.
  8. Challenges – Power games. Watch The West Wing, you’ll see what I mean.
  9. Narrative – The Fantastic doesn’t go over very well in Political campaigns. Matter-of-fact is the better choice.
  10. Imagery – Character design and costume design forums are likely to be your best resources. Start with Pinterest and find some relevant boards.
  11. Outcomes – You probably need some sort of scoreboard. Maybe something based around a deck of cards so that the power and influence of multiple factions can be represented. The deck probably won’t be good for much else afterwards, though.
  12. Rewards – Your faction gains in authority or influence, overcomes a problem, advances their agenda, or stems the blood-loss from a threat to their authority and influence. Perhaps you might gain an ally or an intelligence asset. Most other forms of reward are irrelevant frippery, but titles can be good sources of color if not over-used.

Final Advice

So there you have it – four campaigns, each distinctly – well, arguably – D&D, but each distinctly different. Putting style into your campaigns is so easy that it’s going to happen anyway, and you can’t dictate exactly what the ultimate style of any given campaign will be – you can define a starting point and play towards a central style, but at least part of the equation is out of your control.

Accept that, learn to use it to your advantage, and remember that your goal is to entertain first and foremost.

There are a wealth of stylistic factors that contribute to a campaign’s specific style. So many, in fact, that the occasional deviation from that style is quite tolerable. Use the ones that you don’t need to vary in an adventure or an encounter to ‘make room’ for those you do, and you can have the best of all worlds.

Reminder: Time is running out to contribute to this month’s Blog Carnival! Soon, it will migrate elsewhere!

983… 984…

I’m still looking for ideas on how to commemorate my 1000th post at Campaign Mastery. Sixteen to go!


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