It’s unlikely when starting a new campaign that you begin with the end in mind. If you do, great, but for the majority of us we start at the beginning and let the end define itself over the lifespan of the campaign. Now, not all campaigns have an ending–I am certain that many of our readers will attest to campaigns lasting years, if not decades, or are even still progressing. As the lifespan of the campaign draws on, these stories can begin to span virtual lifetimes. So what concepts help define this generational campaign?
The Mechanical Conundrum
A handful of systems over the years have looked to incorporate or define the mechanics of a generational campaign within themselves. Probably the most readily quoted is the venerable Pendragon RPG, where each adventure spans a year. Between adventures (“seasons”) the players and GM are taking care of bookkeeping activities, courting, or healing near-mortal wounds.
As the years–and adventures–roll on, age takes its toll upon the characters, births and deaths take place, and the players are invested in not only their character but conceptually the entire family of their characters.
Other examples include Aria, Exalted: The Dragon-Blooded, or A Song of Ice and Fire RPG to name a few. (I’m certain our readers can share a few more in the comments section as well.) In some cases (Legend of the Five Rings), the death of a character can provide some small benefit to a new character of the same clan, reflecting the storied history of the family.
Truthfully, the generational campaign doesn’t require these mechanical trappings. You can turn any campaign into one that spans centuries or longer.
The Roll of Years
In general, there are some elements to keep in mind should you desire to have your campaign span multiple generations.
- As the World Turns (Albeit Slowly): Towns grow, cities burn, political boundaries change and leaders change. The world should change around the characters, reflecting the passage of time. Or, perhaps as an interesting element, a campaign remains frozen as in amber, a mystery unto itself.
- Mapping the Tree: A basic family tree should be on your to-do list to help keep track of who is who. Speaking from experience, running A Song of Ice and Fire would have been near impossible without a detailed family tree for the PCs, one of which sired twelve siblings! A minor in genealogy is a bonus.
- Technology Marches On: Much like the physical aspects of your world should change over time, so should the common elements and technology that characters interact with on a day-to-day basis. Based on the technology level it could be as simple as the introduction of gunpowder or in the far-future campaign, the use of metamorphs and clones. See also, Moore’s Law.
- So Go the PCs, So Must the Villains: Nothing should happen in a vacuum, so while progressing the lineage of the player characters make sure to not overlook their foils as well. The legacy villain, if you will, that transpires the years, fueled by whatever wrong the PCs may have righted in the past.
- Do It With Style: Your visual descriptions should adjust to reflect the changing of the times. Social convention, slang, and clothing within your game should slowly change, engendering a sense of time progressing. A memorable game that I played in based in the 80s was made more vibrant by the GM’s use of slang and clear descriptions that harkened back to that time period.
So whether you’re using a game that inherently supports a generational structure or creating your own, expanding the campaign to include these elements adds an additional layer of depth to exploit. For my part, I’ve been party to very few generational games although I would like to play (and run) more.
Any tips or extremely long campaigns that you’d like to share? Tell us below!
I haven’t had the chance to run a true Generational Campaign, though briefly I took part in two games being run by a couple where the games were set 100 years a part.
I have used a contracted version of this, with the players finishing a campaign arc and then a year or two passing in game between then and the next arc. It gives the players a chance to develop their character a bit by saying what their characters were up to and usually comes with some bonuses like new contacts or treasure they can spend as they see fit.
Red Aegis just finished a very successful Kickstarter for such a type of game/campaign. I know I’m looking forward to checking it out when it releases.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vorpalgames/red-aegis-roleplaying-game
Interestingly I am just beginning to gear up for a second generation Legend of the Five Rings campaign which should be interesting. All of the characters being sons and daughters (or nieces and nephews) of the earlier characters, just now old enough to be called into service. I am hoping that it will go well.
Through the ’00s I got together with my old high school / college gaming group about three times a year. We’d have a long weekend of gaming. The games varied, but for several of those weekends in a row I ran a mutli-generational campaign.
My idea was to explore a lengthy history and have the player characters influence its development in small but meaningful ways initially, then in much more important ways later in the history.
I used Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying primarily because for us it was a simple, straightforward system that got out of the way.
The campaign started in the near future, with a band of PCs who were skilled in various domains getting together to start prepping for what they saw as a likely decline into chaos. Wars over water and other natural resources were heating up, diseases were breaking out faster than modern medicine could contain them, and global cooperation was becoming less and less prevalent.
The PCs took on mercenary missions to fund their efforts, and created a small mountain enclave in Colorado. As they were preparing for the impending breakdown, a strange virus swept across the globe. It turned people into… wait for it… zombies. Crazy, I know. We played through the PCs making it out of the carnage to their stronghold.
That consumed three sessions. Then we shifted to their offspring, the next generation. I confined their available skills to those that could be learned from their parents, learned from books, or obtained via offline computer storage. This group dealt with their own challenges, mostly having to do with other survivor groups, some of which were enslaving zombies and using them as shock troops.
After two or three sessions with that group, we fast-forwarded to about 100 years later. The enclave had expanded a bit and changed radically. Much of the old technology no longer worked. That knowledge that was not practical was lost. New social mores had taken root. Exploring and looking for more uninfected humans became the primary motivation for adventure.
Then a series of adventures revealed that most of the United States had been essentially quarantined by the rest of the world, and an occupying force from abroad observed the thinly-inhabited, post-technological remains of America. It turned out that several nations managed to deflect the zombie virus, and had maintained and improved on early 21st century technology.
The resulting conflicts between the hardy backwoods survivors and the well-equipped occupiers was a lot of fun. The campaign wrapped up when the survivors found out that the occupiers had a cure for the zombie virus, but had not used it in America for various reasons. They got hold of the cure and started a larger rebellion, and at that point our gaming sessions sort of petered out.
Everyone seemed to enjoy the campaign, in part because it was so dynamic. While it didn’t allow for lengthy character growth, each player wound up playing four or five characters, so there was a feeling of being immersed in an epic.
That sounds like a very cool setup and game.
I’m gearing up to run a generational game now. The concept is a fantasy game where each generation of these great families grows up and heeds their own call to adventure, travelling out of their village and taking on the troubles of the world.
I’m building tables to randomly determine what happens to the heroes between the end of their adventures and their heirs coming of age. They could have economic hardships and have to sell of their adventuring gear, they could start a successful business and their heir could start with exceptional wealth, they could develop enemies who take their vendetta out on the next generation. I’m toying with how severe I want to impact to be and what level of influence I want the player to have on how their lineage fares.
I hadn’t thought about how the world might change other than developments that spurn the story on. It could be interesting to for the players to see their little village grow or fade away, watch nobles grow old with their parents and be succeeded by different rulers. I had liked the idea of having long-lived NPCS remember the parents of the previous generation to give them a sense of the ongoing scale of their legacy. I like the idea of having the big-bad of the story be an immortal or near-immortal threat that the Players must continue to thwart.