Musings from Fanterland

You might find yourself in the same fortunate situation I found myself in, perhaps without even realizing it, where more players want to explore your setting than you can comfortably fit around a single table. And where some of those players would actually make for great GMs themselves. This post describes a way for multiple players and GMs to mix up who plays with whom for each session, without the need to syncronize notes. It follows my principles for a distributed campaign style .The GMs each control their own region within a shared setting, and information only travels between those regions through the player characters. Once someone starts GMing, they are free to do their own thing without needing to worry about what’s happening in the other regions. But at its best, a distributed campaign makes the GMs eager to affect other regions through the player characters, and delighted by what the players bring into theirs, for better or worse. Perhaps another region has been plagued by a ...

Illustration by Emiel Boven under  CC BY 4.0 After playing Exquisite Biome by Caro Asercion , I had the feeling its overall approach to worldbuilding would work very well for all sorts of situations. So I jotted down a more generalised game on the back of an envelope. Soon, I got the chance to apply it. My Mothership players brought back new genetic materials, and they wanted to bioengineer them into solutions for their luxury ship. At the moment, it was being forced to survive indefinitely in deep space, which it wasn't built to do at all. I thought it would be fun to just do a worldbuilding game for a session, in which the players think of how the ship changes over a span of decades, as its crew uses their available means to adapt to deep space survival. It was a great session, so I've written the steps down, with some wording adapted from  Microscope by Ben Robbins . We'll set up a big picture , the type of things we will  focus on, lenses  through which to insp...

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. Always open to newcomers. Anyone can wander in and join to find new games and people to play them with. Standalone sessions.  Looking for something fun to do just for the night is a valid reason to join. So each session ...

Since December I've been running Mausritter on Wednesdays at the RPG night in a local restaurant. It's an open table where each session different players can sign up and drop in. A session takes up 3 hours, and I aim to make each session self-contained, so that players looking for a one-off have a good time. To facilitate this, I've picked up some methods along the way. Maybe they're of use. 📅 Synchronized calendars When a week passes in real time, it passes in game time too. The same is true for the start of a new season. This simplifies high-level time keeping and allows for a full rest in between sessions. 😱 Flight response Mouse knights go where other mice won’t. But even you have limits. 15 minutes before the session ends, you are overwhelmed by the session's building threats and you gain the Flight Response condition. This ensures expeditions are contained within a single session and raises the urgency to seize the available time. 📣 The knight's call A...