Campaignhammer - Feel the Hate

I've been taking part in a long-running warhammer campaign which has been running now since October 2011. You can see it here, we've blogged the whole thing. We started with eight players. Currently there are four left, the Dwarves, Vampires, Bretonnians and the Warriors of Chaos. We're seven years in in campaign time, and it's been a blast. I do love my warhammer, but when you're gotten the added background and context of a campaign game, it can really up the ante.

Two of the biggest problems with campaigns as far as I can see are getting games played and running out of steam. We seem to have solved both issues. Games that can reasonably be played on the tabletop are preferred, but when people just can't make it the GM rolls off using the old Mighty Empires rule, and this has worked well. On that note, having a non-playing GM is pretty much mandatory. We've been very lucky to have someone willing to make all the rolls, harass people for orders, send out fluff and all the rest.

Running out of steam is the other biggie. We're playing until there's a certain amount of victory conditions met, but another way to do it would be a time limit, perhaps five or six years. You have to have committed players, but a definite end point gives people something to aim towards.

The other thing you need is somewhat thick skin, certainly in the company I keep. My gaming group are notorious backstabbers, evidenced by my former allies the dwarves and bretonnians combining forces to give me the shaft this turn, as you can see above. I'm the vampire player. This will result in my next tabletop games against them being somewhat coloured by a barely controlled need to enact painful and over the top revenge upon them. I live for this kind of gaming, not just a simple warhammer game, but part of an ongoing story where you get emotionally entangled.

Love it.

Campaignhammer - Running a Long-Term Campaign

For some years now, myself and my gaming compadres have been trying to put together a system for running a decent warhammer campaign. We've had some successes, with mini campaigns run over a long weekends and some attempts at designing our own system. But the holy grail of campaign gaming eluded us, the long-term narrative campaign. Recently, it seems as if we have cracked this particularly hard gaming nut. The problems ranged against you doing this are manifold. Coordinating player's games and orders, people living in various parts of the country and thus the problem meeting for games, life in general and campaign fade out syndrome, to name a few.

Using a modified version of the original mighty empires rules plus various extra rules from old White Dwarf articles, we've set up a campaign running among nine players with a dedicated non-player gm. We've set up a blog for all map updates, fluff and general campaign news, as well as a dedicated email group. I think the key to it all is the gm. someone willing to run the campaign long-term. It's a lot of work, and we're lucky enough to have such a person. That in place, I have taken on the mantle of map-maker and updater (see the pretty picture above) which also helps. When we meet up for a campaign weekend, I have a large-scale version of the map printed out so we can set the game up easily.

We've so far been lucky with players too, everyone knows it's a commitment, but not overly so. Tabletop games can be resolved without playing the actual game due to an alternate system, but those the want to and have the time to play can. We've had only one player fall at the first hurdle and just not participate, and as we have nine, that's not too bad as we can compensate.

As a big fan of narrative games I'm loving it. There will be scenario driven games depending on the hex and various conditions, and it's way more fun to have the host of  the vampire lord Stephane Dreux send his rotting fleet to brave the magical storms and land on the island of Asur's Rest to assault the remote dwarven coastal settlement there than x vampire counts army battles y dwarven army.

We're still only in year 2, but it looks like it will run it's course. We still need to settle on specific victory conditions, as I think all good campaigns need to have a definite finish point, or they just fizzle. We're having a blast so far though!