A Campaign Proposal: When Freedom Calls...
Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 3:23 pm
So we've got two new D&D campaigns ramping up, but we've also got some Mutants & Masterminds playtests under our belts, a bunch of the rule books, and a desire to play.
How do we do that without bumping one of the other campaigns? I was thinking about this at the gym the other day, (after having written up some notes on our "gaming in the round" approach to Dark City during lunch) when an idea occurred to me: we could take a Dark City-like approach to playing Mutants & Masterminds, reworked somewhat to run in the "pre-gaming" time slot.
Here's what I'm thinking: everyone could create their M&M characters, and give them a reason to be in Freedom City. Then, like Dark City, we allow things to unfold -- characters investigate strange happenings, go about their thrilling day jobs, stumble across street crimes, etc. Each M&M session would have to be short -- say about an hour -- and would probably give us enough time to have two or three characters do something (including a quick combat or two).
As the campaign unfolds, characters might team up, and go on adventures together, occasionally splitting up (again, like in Dark City) for their own adventures.
This approach would take some work on my part, trying to figure out how to run short, quick sessions that can get done in time to start the main game, but I think that comic books themselves provide inspiration for this: most ongoing titles don't try and tell you an entire self-contained story, instead it's part of an 3 or 4 part arc.
So in this model, each session becomes an "issue". The occasional full-size, 4-hour Friday or Saturday night game might be a special while a NukemCon event could be an annual.
Now Dark City did consume a huge amount of my time, thus leading to its hiatus, but Mutants & Masterminds is different -- I already have the Freedom City source book which is packed with locations, story ideas and (most importantly) villains. Putting together an ongoing series of short adventures should be pretty simple.
What do you think?
How do we do that without bumping one of the other campaigns? I was thinking about this at the gym the other day, (after having written up some notes on our "gaming in the round" approach to Dark City during lunch) when an idea occurred to me: we could take a Dark City-like approach to playing Mutants & Masterminds, reworked somewhat to run in the "pre-gaming" time slot.
Here's what I'm thinking: everyone could create their M&M characters, and give them a reason to be in Freedom City. Then, like Dark City, we allow things to unfold -- characters investigate strange happenings, go about their thrilling day jobs, stumble across street crimes, etc. Each M&M session would have to be short -- say about an hour -- and would probably give us enough time to have two or three characters do something (including a quick combat or two).
As the campaign unfolds, characters might team up, and go on adventures together, occasionally splitting up (again, like in Dark City) for their own adventures.
This approach would take some work on my part, trying to figure out how to run short, quick sessions that can get done in time to start the main game, but I think that comic books themselves provide inspiration for this: most ongoing titles don't try and tell you an entire self-contained story, instead it's part of an 3 or 4 part arc.
So in this model, each session becomes an "issue". The occasional full-size, 4-hour Friday or Saturday night game might be a special while a NukemCon event could be an annual.
Now Dark City did consume a huge amount of my time, thus leading to its hiatus, but Mutants & Masterminds is different -- I already have the Freedom City source book which is packed with locations, story ideas and (most importantly) villains. Putting together an ongoing series of short adventures should be pretty simple.
What do you think?