A distributed campaign for Cloud Empress: the Land of Cicadas

Instead of continuing my theoretical rant on distributed campaigns, I want to just show you my current game as an example. If you're new to this blog series; a distributed campaign style lets a large group of players adventure across multiple GMs without any coordination between GMs needed.

  • Part I goes into the agenda and principles that led to this campaign style.
  • Part II goes into the first steps of setting up a distributed campaign for yourself.
At the start of this summer I began a new distributed campaign at the RPG Night Utrecht for Cloud Empress in the Land of Cicadas. Currently we have two GMs actively running weekly games with room to grow. We wrote the campaign setting truths in a Discord post, restricting it to the Discord character limit of a single post to force brevity. It goes into how to deal with published materials and how to split that amongst GMs, which is something I already planned to address in this series. In the discussion at the end I also talk about a situation where we created a paradox between GMs; also something I was planning to address in a future post. 

Campaign setting truths and regional aspects

We split the official Cloud Empress materials into fixed campaign setting truths that are unchanging, and regional aspects that only the region's GM can change.

Campaign setting truths

The campaign setting truths are the only fixed truths across all regions.
  1. Source materials: The entire Cloud Empress core rulebook is a campaign setting truth. The book 'The Land of Cicadas' is split into campaign setting truths marked orange in the image below (notably the hex map, 29th Expedition and the Cloud Empress & Skull), and regional aspects shown in the 'regional aspects' below.  Other current or future official materials fall under Peter's GM regions by default, to be divided later.
  2. PC organisation and goal: PCs are a pact of travelers normally looking for mountains of chalk to collect and fortunes to turn in summer, who now have the foolish wish in their heart to be the ones to find the Cloud Empress.
  3. Regional divide and traversal: The starting regions are The Breadbasket, The Weeds, The Rustbucket and The Thickwood. The war makes travel between regions too dangerous. The 29th Expedition blames farmerlings for the missing Empress, so a network of packsquab smugglers aids the PCs to travel between regions, find the Empress and stop the Expedition's terror.
  4. Season ender: the campaign season ends when the Cloud Empress is returned (or can no longer be returned,) the 29th Expedition or the Century Brood achieve their goals or winter comes.
  5. Mystery: the mystery around the Imago is to lead players to a deeper connection with the ecology and cultures that rely on the Imago's presence, not to complete the puzzle. Drip feed campaign setting truths about the Imago. Highlight how ecologies and cultures rely on them. Emphasise how this informs approaches to player goals. Show how various factions have their own beliefs based on rumours and legends, and rituals that apply those beliefs. Especially if players could somehow use them. If a ritual seems to work, that doesn't automatically mean its underlying belief is true. Make beliefs matter; when people act on their beliefs, those beliefs can end up being the thing that impacts peoples' lives. The underlying truth becomes secondary.
  6. Timekeeping: The fictional and real world clocks are synchronized. when a week passed in real time, a week roughly passed in game time as well.
  7. One for all: GMs are free to organise their own sessions, so long as all players of the RPG Night Utrecht are given the opportunity to join, in or outside of the RPG night itself.

Regional aspects

Regional aspects are controlled by the GM to whom the region is assigned. Some chapters of 'The Land of Cicadas' are assigned as regional aspects, with a few exceptions noted further below.
  • The Breadbasket regional aspects in yellow. 
  • The Thickwood regional aspects in blue. 
  • The Weeds regional aspects in green. 
  • The Rustbucket aspects in pink.
  • Tables where each row is an aspect belonging to another region in purple.
  • N.B. Any future Cloud Empress published adventures (such as Life & Death) are automatically assigned to Peter. These might be unlocked as part of a new season or assigned to a GM upon request. This is the only thing that has to go through a central person.

Exceptions

Wanderlings (p.24) and Brood Monks (p.37) are setting truths, because they occur in multiple regions.
Captain Stello (p.22) ,Small Onion (p.34 as 'sweet onion') and Genmo (p.16) became regional aspects of Peter because they appeared in the starting adventure Last Voyage of the Bean Barge.

When the rubber hits the road

The other active GM and I are talking about the campaign all the time and loving it. The point of a distributed style is not to eliminate communication between GMs, but to eliminate its necessity. It's very freeing that we can come up with cool cross-overs where we want to, but can also just do our own thing. 

At a certain point we created a contradiction. I wanted to throw a cool artefact into the session, but accidentally rolled on the Slip Stuff table, forgetting that this contained stuff from Dave's region. And wouldn't you know it, I picked an item that belonged to Dave, and he was using it as a plot hook that very same night. In a future part in this blog series I'll talk about Twist Reveal, a simple move to use contradictions as a promt to add interesting twists to the narrative. In this case, the version of the item in my region was revealed to be Slippery. Without spoiling anything for any of our players reading this, this resolved the contradiction between GM regions while adding to the intrigue.

We've also been finding a balance between episodic exploration and rabbit holes. Rabbit holes are when pursuing something in a region prompts the players to dig even deeper in that same region. It's a totally natural part of adventuring, but one that should be balanced with a drive to explore the breadth of what the campaign has to offer. We haven't found our equilibrium on that matter yet, which makes it a fun topic to explore.

In the next part in this series, I plan to wrap up the tools to set up a distributed campaign. After that it's time to get into how to run one!

I hope this inspires your next game in some way. Please find my existing games on my itch.io page, hear about upcoming projects by subscribing to my mailing list,  or follow my thought proces by subscribing to this blog.

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