There's always a "next campaign" right? You focus on running the current one - or the several current ones if you're multi-tasking recreationally - but there are usually at least a few inklings of what might be "next". Well, I am at that point now.
The Necessary Evil campaign is winding down. Heck it may be ending tonight. If you've been reading the recaps you may have picked up some notes of dissatisfaction in the GM Notes sections and that's definitely a recurring theme. I want to finish the campaign and finish the recaps and then I will get into the whole experience more but for now it's ending for a variety of reasons. That means I need a new campaign for 2027.
Before getting into the details I should probably mention some of what I want:
- Longevity: I want an extended run this time. We played 3 short campaigns this year with Time of Crisis, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Necessary Evil. We had fun with all of them but I want to dig in and stay with something for six months at least, 20-30 sessions or more. The Temple and Deadlands were both 18+ month campaigns and I want to do that again. Of course, if it turns out to suck we will stop but I think it's an achievable goal.
- Depth: I want a system that has some crunch, something worth exploring for an extended time, that will reward a long run
- Support: Given those first two points I want something that is well-supported with monsters, NPCs, even adventures I can steal/adapt to whatever we are doing as the game progresses. Really anything that makes my job easier as the GM when it comes to actually running a game.
- Freedom: I don't mind running published adventures or incorporating them to some degree but I don't want to be on a tight schedule or constrained by an over-arching narrative thing. I've run a lot of someone else's material this year without a lot of wiggle-room - for next year I need some wiggle room. I also don't want to be handing out a mission every week - I want the players to have some say in where they go and what they do.
After I talked to the crew about the approaching finale for N.E. I talked to them about what we might do next. I had already looked through the stacks and brought up some options and during the conversation we threw in some more. Some of what I threw in:
- Marvel Multiversal - we liked it when we played it before and there's more material out for it now so why not give it a go? Reading back through the recap had me fired up to set up an extended run through our own Marvel Universe and see where it could go. It has plenty of material, plenty of support, It's familiar, but it has plenty of freedom so it's a good fit for what I want to do.
Campaign idea: maybe a traditional supers-in-a-city game, maybe something more Marvel-specific like a new chapter of the X-Men with a new mix of heroes dealing with some new threats. Could include some troupe-style stuff with each player having a small group of Marvel's Finest to call their own plus a newly-made character. - Wrath & Glory - a 40K RPG seems like it would be an easy sell around here but every one of them has had some weirdly specific assumptions about what people want from this setting. There's enough stuff out now for W&G that I could run whatever I want using the Forsaken system as a base, not a prison. It's a system we have not played before so it would be new territory mechanically speaking. The published adventures are short so I could use them without basing the entire campaign around one. It has a lot of potential.
Campaign idea: Uncovering a mystery from planet to planet as the Inquisition, the Mechanicus, and some chaos cultists get involved. It would involve a tour of the entire system - some fun exploration - and some interesting multi-sided conflicts. Think the original campaign from Dawn of War. That's a start anyway. - Savage Rifts - I ran it years ago now and everyone had a good time. With all the books that are out now there is plenty of depth, plenty of support, most of the adventures are tied to the ridiculous Tomorrow Legion they bolted on to the setting so I can comfortably ignore those. Plus since we've been playing a high-powered Savage Worlds game for the last few months the system would be instantly familiar, minimal learning curve. I do have a concern about running the same system back to back but it's not a deal-breaker.
Campaign idea: My oldest Rifts campaign in Original Recipe in the 90's involved a cross-country quest and that's not a terrible idea to revisit - It's just a question of where. My prior Savage campaign was exploring post-apoc Florida, aka Dinosaur Swamp in Rifts geography, and that has a lot of potential too. There's a lot to explore in this setting. - Savage Hell on Earth - My other Savage-Worlds-Post-Apocalyptic inclination. We get system familiarity, a distant setting familiarity though with many changes. There's not a ton of HoE material out there for Savage Worlds but there's plenty in the old books so there would be some conversion work ahead.
Campaign idea: break out the old fluorescent green softcovers and map out the epic campaign using all of the various sub-groups from those, become legends of the Wasted West and take the Unity to Banshee and let Variable Dave run the next campaign there since he bought the set. - Achtung Cthulu - Savage Worlds again but this time a secret fight to stop a bunch of bad things happening. Much of the same concerns about the system here but it is something different from the typical fantasy & scifi.
Campaign idea: less developed here but base it around the big Shadows of Atlantis adventure they published years ago and flesh it out to my own liking. - Stars Without Number - Different system, sort of a cross between original Traveller and old school D&D. Not a lot of system depth but oodles of freedom, support, and room for longevity. The issue here is that it does tend to be player-driven, GM-reactive and that's not always a great option for our group.
Campaign idea: the core SWN concept is getting a ship and exploring a largely unknown galaxy which sounds just fine to me. It's a lot like early Traveller if your in-galaxy maps were 100+ years out of date. Could be fun and would stretch my GM wing-it muscles.
Those are the main non-fantasy concepts I had but I included some fantasy as well because it's been a year since we did that and it might be a good change. I'll cover those in the next post.
