Creating a distributed campaign style

For the last year-and-a-half my campaign style across various games has converged to something I've started to call a 'distributed campaign style'. It's an open table, episodic sandbox where multiple GMs can run adventures in the same living world without anyone needing to manage its cohesion, allowing GMs to focus their energy on the adventure at hand. It assumes OSR principles of play and takes inspiration from other sandbox campaign styles such as West Marches. 

Agenda behind a distributed campaign

Here's why I've been growing towards a rather specific campaign style: for a while now I've been a regular GM at a local public RPG night and have fallen in love with that format. In this context, there is an agenda that I hold in high regard.

1. Newcomer friendly. Anyone can wander in and join to find new games and people to play them with.
2. Standalone sessions. Looking for something fun to do just for the night is a valid reason to join. So each session is an experience that stands on its own. 
3. A living world. Returning players are enabled to dig deeper into their character and their place within a world that responds to their actions.

I know that the agenda can be answered differently using other RPG genres. That is valid, but not the focus of this post. This post is also not intended to communicate a polished playstyle with a ribbon on top, but rather to communicate my thoughts as the style is developing.

Principles of a distributed campaign

Gradually, principles were formed that supported my agenda. They are not the only way, but they are mine. It has lead to a campaign with multiple tables, multiple GMs, and a large variety of new and returning players each night.

1. Anyone can GM. To allow for new players to join when the games are starting to fill up, returning players are encouraged to start GMing their own game in this shared living world.
2. Quick play is the way. I use ultra-light player facing procedures and an intuitive implied setting to allow for unobtrusive on-boarding. Some systems are built that way  (Mark of the Odd games, Knave, etc.). Some have a quick-play version that I use instead of the full game (D&D5e) and some I have stripped down for my own table (Mothership).
3. Drag-and-drop adventures. The setting should be unique enough to inspire, but generic enough for GMs to import their own things. Simple conversion tools are great. Cairn and Ork Borg do this well.
   Also, enable the GM to start a session at their adventure site, without the campaign procedures hijacking the game night. I've had GM's excited to run their adventure, only to spend the whole night on random encounters because I asked them to start at the player enclave.
4. Seasonal campaign play. A campaign season is a setup with major faction goals that are expected to produce some form of climax within about a dozen sessions or so. A season ends when such a climax presents itself, either faction- or player driven. Breaking a campaign up into seasons allows you to periodically refresh the campaign setup and reset the complexity. It's an opportunity to change things up and start fresh, turning the canon of the last season from urgent current events to engrossing historical context. Seasonal play is also part of 10 things I wish I knew as a starting GM with ADHD.
5. Procedural bleed. Again, most GMs just want to run a cool adventure. Incorporating the season events should not be a requirement to do so. Instead, we use a season sheet (if you are familiar with a campaign tracker sheet; it's the same thing). This sheet contains the key factions as well as their agenda, and incorporates those into encounter and rumour tables for the GM to refer to. This injects season play into the adventures and vice versa.
6. Non-competitive. While there are campaign styles where rivaling parties act upon the same world and sometimes against eachother, this is not one of those. Allowing for competivite play that feels fair requires a degree of fixed rules that I have no interest in exploring.
7. Session ritual. With players and GMs switching in and out, it's important to have a clear ritual for each session that puts players on the same page regarding what they intend to experience that night. More on RPG ritual in Lumpley Games' Ritual in Game Design.
8. Become stranger, not stronger. Characters of any level should be able to from a party without one feeling significantly ineffective by comparison. So individual growth isn't an endless linear power creep. It has a ceiling, beyond which powers come with drawbacks (Electric Bastionland has similar advice). In my games, a +1 sword does not exist. A +1 sword that sometimes cuts its wielder does.
9. Reusable rolltables. This campaign style does not provide a consistent player and GM group who can collaborate closely across sessions to create evolving connections between PCs and with the world. To compensate, we reuse rolltables throughout the game to create commonalities between the things you care about and the things you encounter along your journey. My first spark for this was seeing Mausritter players connect over a shared last name from the rolltable, and me consequently applying these last names to NPCs too.
10. Lore migrates. Imagine forming a bond with a minor NPC. But then you don't see that GM again and the other GMs don't know this person exists and you never get to explore this relationship further. This sucks! To allow pieces of lore to travel with you, we let them migrate between sheets. To make sure the lore does not develop in conflicting ways in two different places, a piece of lore exists on one sheet only. So if it migrates to your sheet, it disappears from the original sheet. We have adventure sheets (like one-page dungeons), season sheets (like a campaign tracker), player character sheets and GM crew sheets (like the crews and hideouts in Blades in the Dark).
    This works well for minor lore that a GM won't mind erasing from their sheet. For major lore, you can isolate or create a connected piece of minor lore to give to the player. Example: A player swears fealty to The Green Knight. But they the knight is a major NPC that you don't want to remove from your sheet. Instead, you weave  a handmaid, squire, scribe, item or even a quest into the situation and give that to the player.
11. Pen-and-paper. I love coming together physically, and I want this to be the only requirement to be a part of our campaign whether you are a player or a GM. I don't want any online spaces to be an obligatory part where I can help it. This poses a challenge when you are trying to create a campaign with multiple GMs. I don't want them to have to sync their notes in an online notekeeping tool. On the positive side, I have found that meeting this challenge is an opportunity to create simplifications that benefit the game.

Turning principles into practice

These principles have lead to a distributed campaign style, where a living world can grow despite it being developed by separate tables that don't always have the time or interest to sync their session notes (or even write them down).

The earlier principles I've found easy to implement using available systems and modules supplemented with some simple house rules. And they've been worked out in more detail than I can reasonably fit in this already lengthy blog post. For example, the house rules I described in my previous blogpost Open table rules for Mausritter. 

But as we go further down the line of principles, particularly the last three, it's been more challenging to uphold them without seriously modding whatever RPG system I am using. As a result, a desire has been creeping up on me to design a system or module from the ground up to support a distributed campaign style. That has led to the thesis of this post: we can create a fully distributed campaign, and I intend to explore this further.

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