Friday, January 19, 2018

The Two Towers - Lord of the Rings: A Master Class in Campaing Planning part 2

Check out Part One, here!

The Two Towers: Setting up the Next Stage

Welcome to part two of our look at how Lord of the Rings offers us a master class in creating and running an epic campaign in the old-school style for your home game. In part one we looked at how the campaign starts simple and grows through side adventures and the addition of new players, and how it deals with divergent character levels by allowing for foes of different abilities and giving all players a chance to shine despite their relative level of power. It also deals with what happens when people's schedules change and the game needs to divide.

It also touched upon the commitment that a GM puts into their campaign, how there's a ton of planning and time put into it, and admittedly it faces issues that some people have difficulty facing: those of simple time. You may not have the time to deal with the issues that come up in your life as they appear in this series, and if that's the case, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone has the kind of time to create new gaming groups and play several times a week.

When we last left our heroes, the Fellowship had fractured, largely due to life and scheduling reasons. Merry and Pippin's players had to drop out of weekly play, but agreed to keep in touch in hopes they could jump back in eventually. Frodo and Sam's players had moved to Monday, and had left alone with the Ring, heading for Mount Doom. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli's players had sworn to track down Merry and Pippin, and run interference for Sam and Frodo in the process by making some noise to draw the attention of the Enemy. Boromir had died.

What had begun as a straightforward quest has now, of necessity, turned into a very nuanced game with multiple storylines and multiple adventuring parties. No longer is the GM planning a straight quest to Mordor; now he's dealing with two major story paths.

In this blog we'll move on to part 2 of our Master Class in running an epic home campaign: The Two Towers. The theme here is running variant groups of gamers in the same campaign world, roughly simultaneously in time, and how one group's actions could affect the others. 

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