Based on two-faced man by pixabay.com/ambroo, photoediting by Mike

…at least, I hope it’s new. As I wrote, a strong sense of deja vu crept over me, and it started to sound awfully familiar. But a careful search of past posts failed to turn up anything…

I come up with more ideas than I can ever use. Until I co-founded Campaign Mastery, I simply threw away the excess; these days, it’s my practice to give these away for free to the readers here.

On Saturday, I was talking with the players in my Zener Gate campaign about Ian Gray’s new Fantasy Campaign before play commenced for the day. As he described his new campaign, I suddenly came up with a very novel idea of my own, one that has nothing to do with his – so I can quite happily reveal it here.

In actual fact, this is not one campaign, but two that have to be run contemporaneously. Players may be in either or both campaigns, but it would make things more interesting if there was a less than 100% overlap the rosters. Both are Fantasy campaigns, but could be adapted to Superheroics or Sci-Fi.

D&D could be problematic as a game system with editions for which Epic Levels are not available (i.e. 4th ed and 5th ed.) 3.x would work just fine, but you might need to adapt The Epic Level Handbook from WOTC before you could run the campaigns using the Pathfinder game system.

The First Face Of Janus

The first campaign is high-to-epic level. The PCs are agents of the Gods, a task force devoted to furthering the Gods’ will, protecting Heaven & the afterlife, and the souls that abide there, confronting the Gods’ enemies, undoing the handiwork of those enemies and disrupting those enemies’ schemes – sort of a divine “James Bond” campaign.

The overall campaign objective of the PCs is to ensure the Primacy of the Gods, because the Gods empower mortals and shelter their spirits after death, harvesting power in the process, which is used by the Gods to empower more mortals. In a way, then, all clerical magic is the will of the ancestors with the Gods more as “Guiding Middlemen” than the ultimate powers.

The Gods have a number of enemies that the PCs of this campaign will have to contend with. There are those who would supplant them and harvest soul power for their own benefit; there are those who suffered when the Gods made some mistakes in the remote past, and who hold a grudge time can never erase; there are some whose ancestors held positions of power within reality but who were evicted from these roles when the Gods created the universe as it now is; and there are those who are philosophically opposed to what the Gods are doing.

It is very much the design intent of this campaign that the mortal realm be extremely remote and irrelevant to the campaign; its just there. This campaign should occupy a grander stage of strange metaphysical places and planes of existence.

The Second Face Of Janus

The second campaign is low-to-mid-level. The PCs are just ordinary people trying their best to make ends meet and – if it’s not too much trouble – make life a little better for themselves and others. There are a number of social forces that strive to exert control over everyone within reach, from the Church to the Local Nobility (and ultimately, the King or Queen). To this end, draconian punishments are meted out for trivial offenses; fleeing this oppression, the PCs have become outlaws and scofflaws and bandits. Some are good people, others are rogues, but most are just ordinary folk swept up in something beyond their control.

The Nobles, both local and overall, are appointed by Divine Right, and backed by the Church and their Holy Magics. The Rebellion was little more than an annoyance until a drunken friar discovered that Clerical Magic was not forbidden to those who went outside the lines of standard Theology. In fact, most of the edicts of the Church are intended to do nothing more than keep themselves in Comfort and Safety, protected by the armies of the Nobles that the Church imbues with political Authority. Some churchmen, to be fair, believe earnestly in the Holy Scriptures; but most are hopelessly corrupt.

With this discovery, the Rebels began to discover Purpose. And so they began plotting, and training, and now are ready to begin recruiting allies of their own, in a (perhaps quixotic) quest to overthrow the whole corrupt mess and cleanse the True Faith of the demons that have corrupted it.

What Neither Group Knows

Events in the Mortal Realm mirror those in the Divine, and vice-versa. In Campaign One, the PCs are the authorities dealing with enemies of their own making; In Campaign Two, the PCs are the rebels created as a reaction to the overbearing of the Authorities.

The players are likely to put this together in reasonably short order, however. The Divine Agents plan an ambush, and the Rebels are caught in an ambush. The Rebels capture an important magical heirloom and ransom it for the release of an important figurehead, and a Celestial Kraken attacks the Afterlife and escapes, stealing one of the Capstones Of Reality, demanding the release of the Spirit of his Ancestor that it may continue its’ cosmic journey, interrupted so long ago by the Gods. And so on – you get the idea.

The PCs are literally, their own worst enemies, and are doing half the GM’s work for him….

Both groups have laudable goals, even essential ones, especially when the Divine Agents learn that the Gods hold all creation together by the force of their Wills, and victory for their Enemies could mean the destruction or enslavement of all.

Which makes it seem like, if only one faction can win, it is the Gods and their Divine Agents, and the Rebels should be sacrificed. This decision is far more easily reached if the roster of players is the same in both campaigns, which is why I recommended that there be at least some players in one campaign but not the other.

Then the Rebels learn that the apostasy of the Church threatens to undermine the power of the Gods; the Rebels can’t lose, or it could mean the destruction or enslavement of all….

Metagaming, Metagaming, All Is Metagaming

Once the Players in both campaigns realize that both factions have to “win” their respective campaign challenges in order for any of them to “win”, despite it being apparently impossible for them to do so, expect them to start metagaming the two campaigns with a vengeance.

Let them.

This is, in fact, what the whole campaign is about. The PCs will have to go beyond what any of them know about the game universe and the physics that underlies it, will have to find a way to change “the rules of the game” (in a social, political, and metaphysical sense), and may in fact have to overthrow the Gods themselves in order for any of them to have a lasting success in their respective campaigns. They will have to redefine what Victory is, and what it means, in order for both groups to achieve their objectives!

And it will have to work at the small scale, in the Low-to-mid-power Campaign, as well as in the more cosmic high-to-epic-power Campaign.

The ultimate solution will probably be Diplomatic in nature, stitching together fragile agreements between natural enemies and compromising on long-cherished ideals and – possibly – removing those who are obstructionist to these terms. Because both sides winning (in one sense) will also mean them losing (in another) – the specifics are up to the PCs to devise.

That’s where the campaign supposedly ends, but any event that upsets the status quo in either facet of reality will also disrupt the fragile peace. A natural disaster in the mortal world; invaders from the “outside”; a hot-headed younger generation of Divine Enemies…. there’s LOTS of scope for sequel campaigns.

Of course, you will never achieve that same level of through-the-looking-glass elevator-down-in-the-pit-of-the-stomach surprise of the big plot twist, but that doesn’t negate the challenge posed by the enforcement of Symmetry between the two faces of Janus.

Bonus Content: A Cosmic Phenomenon

Another idea that I had during the course of the same conversation, that is rather too small to make a post on it’s own, is the arcane equivalent of “Old Faithful”. A place that “casts” a spell as reliably as clockwork, sometimes to greater effect, and sometimes to lesser. What you choose to do with this concept depends on the spell you choose as the “eruption”, but whatever you choose will have a profound impact on the underlying “physics” of how it works and where it is – and don’t forget to think about what people might be able to do with the phenomenon / location. Think strategically….


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