Campaign Autopsies...

As will be clear by now I've started work on my latest attempt to run an "open-ended" campaign for the Tuesday Knights.

This will actually be my fourth campaign since the Tuesday Knights first started gaming back in August 2008.

So, what went wrong with the previous three games?

TEKRALH I: The first game I ran for the Tuesday Knights started as heavily houseruled version of Castles & Crusades (with a heavy dose of Hackmaster and Arduin) and it worked really well to start with...

Until, for no readily apparent reason, I decided to switch horse mid-stream and changed the rules system to a by-the-book version of Labyrinth Lord. The characters were severely de-powered and the game turned into a meatgrinder of TPK after TPK.

Within a few sessions all the fun that we'd had at the start of the campaign was sucked from the campaign. Eventually, I had to pull the plug on the game as it wasn't getting anywhere.

When we started the players were giving me nice backstories for their characters, with plot hooks etc, but by the end I was lucky if they'd give their characters names as they knew their life expectancy had become so limited.

MORAL: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

KNIGHT CITY: Next up was my Villains & Vigilantes campaign, set in Knight City. This was driven almost entirely by the naive dream of trying to recapture the magic that Steve, Pete, Nick and I enjoyed with our original V&V games back in the '80s - the games that led to the creation of the concept of HeroPress.

Almost from the start things started to go wrong with this campaign due to the simple fact that we weren't all singing from the same hymn sheet. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular, but when we were teenagers we were all (except for Nick) avid comic book readers and had reasonably similar tastes in comics and superheroes.

Thirty years later, tastes have changed and the sort of scenarios I wanted to run (e.g. dimension hopping, cosmic stuff) didn't sit comfortably with some of the players, who were expecting more straight-forward supervillain bashing.

There were also problems with the rules (from the clunky combat table at the game's heart to the peculiar diversity of character's random power sets), but ultimately these were just the straws that broke a very unhealthy camel's back. I think we could have overcome these if everyone had had contiguous ideas of where the game should be going.

MORAL: Make sure everyone is on the same page.

TEKRALH II: I thought I'd found a winner when I came across D101's Crypts & Things (a sword & sorcery variant of Swords & Wizardry) as I thought this kind of human-centric adventure game was the way to go.

The simple problem with this very short-lived campaign - and it had nothing to do with the rules - was I had just discovered A Song Of Ice & Fire! I was in the grip of Westeros-fever and spent all my time thinking about developing the wider world, quickly losing sight of the intimate adventure I should have been running for the players. 

This would have been fine if the player-characters were all high-up members of House Stark or House Lannister, but they were actually 1st Level D&D proto-adventurers and tunnel grubbers.

Instead of developing scenarios or stocking dungeons I was researching medieval legal systems, clothing, cuisine, bartering etc My eyes were fixed on the horizon rather than the gamestable in front of me.

MORAL: Intimate, not epic.

Therefore the stage is set for my third attempt at running a game in my Tekralh setting. Learning from my past mistakes, I first asked everyone what sort of game they preferred playing (the verdict came back: fantasy)  and I'm starting with a single town (Sanctuary) and a single dungeon locale.

We'll be using the Crypts & Things rules (but with houserules gleaned from what worked and what didn't in our earlier campaigns).

None of the previous background material or world-building remains canon (although if anyone wants to use names or locales from previous Tekralh games I'm happy to allow that) and players are free to extrapolate as much backstory or as little as they want from the basic framework of their character - if they're a noble, they can create the house they come from; if they're religious, they can invent their god(s) etc

Hopefully then from these small seeds, a mighty campaign may be allowed to grow.

But that's already getting ahead of myself...