Whole career campaigns?

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:07 pm

The Enemy Within Campaign, in my opinion, seems to be something of a rarity in RPGs, since it covers the players' heroes from "womb to the tomb", you can roll up a party, adventure through the half dozen or so 'adventure collections', and retire at the end.

I'm curious, how many other RPGs even have such an entire campaign, with a somewhat connected story, built from the ground up, with the intention of covering a character's entire career?

Granted, there's Dungeon Delve (which, in my opinion, is execrable and I'm embarrassed to admit I bought and read it through), but as someone most astutely pointed out, I don't know all games ever made.

So, any others such "world encompassing" campaigns out there, especially good ones? I'm not talking worlds to adventure in, or campaign settings, but, literally, a collection of completely laid out adventures covering many sessions of play following something of a storyline and intended to be the entirety of a character's adventuring career.

(good as a matter of opinion, of course)

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:22 pm

Doom314 wrote:So, any others such "world encompassing" campaigns out there, especially good ones? I'm not talking worlds to adventure in, or campaign settings, but, literally, a collection of completely laid out adventures covering many sessions of play following something of a storyline and intended to be the entirety of a character's adventuring career.

Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:38 pm

Isn't this the whole point of the Adventure Paths? Rise of the Runelords, Age of Worms, that sort of thing?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:54 pm

Well, the old G-Series and D-Series ran right into one another and went all the way up to murdering a goddess in her demon web pits. The GDQ series was voted "The greatest adventure of all time" back in 2004. I mean heck, that series got a 9/10 from White Dwarf. Kind of dungeon crawly, but a lot of people apparently like that. A lot.

The Sunless Citadel is "stand alone" but frankly it specifically runs into another adventure and another all the way up to Lord of the Iron Fortress. And don't forget the Temple of Elemental Evil. That's a whole campaign as well.

Shadowrun drops Missions segments that could cover an entire character's life fairly easily if you care. And there's Harlequin.

-Username17

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:16 pm

As already have been mentioned, there are 3.5 adventure paths from Paizo, three from the Dungeon magazines and three published separately. Age of Worms and Rise of the Runelords are very good, Savage Tide and Curse of the Scarlet Throne are quite good, Second Darkness, Shattered City and currently-ongoing Legacy of Fire are mediocre-to-poor.
Even the best of them are not without flaws. Age of Worms and Savage Tide are built on the assumption that the party actively uses 3.X supplements and those its members who aren't full spellcasters are seriously optimized. They use downright murderous encounters alot. Like all DnD adventures, they tend to treat monsters like mobs, who take no active actions in responce to PCs attacks, but the adventures try to tone this down. They also tend to automatically scale the world with the PCs, even if this makes no sense, so a cowardly loser you meet in 3rd-4th adventure down the path is likely to be a level 7 cowardly loser. But I'm willing to forgive them these flaws - I'm not going to run them strictly by-the-book, but they give me both inspiration to DM and alot of help in DMing (pre-written locations, maps, some monsters and statblocks).

Frantic · Post by **Frantic** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:22 pm

>>Age of Worms and Rise of the Runelords are very good,

Age of Worms is horrible because of its ridiculous PC mortality rate. HAVING to dumpster dive just to survive is really annoying.

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:39 pm

The only reason WoW has a high mortality rate is most people play like idjits. I'm pretty sure my college group could have gone through without losing anyone. My current group, on the other hand, lost a PC every session.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:48 pm

Actually, it doesn't fucking matter how good you are. Shackled City/Age of Worms/Savage Tide are all made by Paizo. And Paizo is terrible at balancing things, so while it being hardcore is not necessarily bad, the fact you get sneak attacked by DNS moments fairly often is.

So while skill can deal with the hard moments, you can't do anything about the fuck you moments. Except say fuck you Paizo, and fuck your APs.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:49 pm

I mentioned that, but I feel that high difficulty (relatively high - twinked full casters still can rape AoW) is not so much a bug as a feature. If I'm ever going to run it for a non-optimizer party, I'll likely grant PCs some perks, such as ability to pick some "powerful" races and templates free of ECL/inherited wealth and magical stuff from the start.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 12:19 am

DNS what, Roy?

-Crissa

Doom · Post by **Doom** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 3:33 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Well, the old G-Series and D-Series ran right into one another and went all the way up to murdering a goddess in her demon web pits. The GDQ series was voted "The greatest adventure of all time" back in 2004. I mean heck, that series got a 9/10 from White Dwarf. Kind of dungeon crawly, but a lot of people apparently like that. A lot.

The Sunless Citadel is "stand alone" but frankly it specifically runs into another adventure and another all the way up to Lord of the Iron Fortress. And don't forget the Temple of Elemental Evil. That's a whole campaign as well.

Shadowrun drops Missions segments that could cover an entire character's life fairly easily if you care. And there's Harlequin.

-Username17

I rather liked the GDQ series, for all its warts...but didn't Against the Giants start at like level 9? Granted, that's arguably level 7 in 3.0+ rules, but still a far cry from freshly rolled...similar for Temple, although perhaps I just misremember that one (played it, everyone got bored with it shortly past the outer doors).

I never even realized Sunless Citadel was part of a campaign, really seemed like the modules of that era were about as thinly connected as S1-S4, although, again I concede some level of ignorance here.

Guess I'll have to break down and look at the Paizo stuff.

Thanks all!

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 3:47 am

Crissa wrote:DNS what, Roy?

-Crissa

Death, No Save, which doesn't really happen in 3e.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 6:45 am

I hear most Call of Cthulhu modules take you from womb to tomb *trollface*

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 7:30 am

Psychic Robot wrote: Death, No Save, which doesn't really happen in 3e.

Yeah. Taking AoW as an example even obvious traps which any party that bothers to look at all can recognize don't instakill you there. Even if logically they should.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 12:09 pm

Crissa wrote:DNS what, Roy?

-Crissa

Death, No Save. From the 2.0 thread.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 4:39 pm

COC? when has that been world encompassing? everytime I've played that. We've always gotten together only for a one-shot. I always try to think of a campaign for it and my old group used to groan at the idea of making several characters. Even if you didn't make it that lethal, apparently, players expect a horror behind every door. which is annoying for a dm.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 6:28 pm

Actually, there are several in Call of Cthulhu. Any self-respecting shop that intends to stock out of print games will have them... From the mountains of madness to umm...

Look, reading them was awesome, but I pawned them off on a friend. Too creepy for me.

-Crissa

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 9:41 pm

A_Cynic wrote:COC? when has that been world encompassing? everytime I've played that. We've always gotten together only for a one-shot. I always try to think of a campaign for it and my old group used to groan at the idea of making several characters. Even if you didn't make it that lethal, apparently, players expect a horror behind every door. which is annoying for a dm.

Again, look up Masks of Nyarlathotep. It's a world-spanning campaign.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 3:14 am

I don't dispute that these books exist. I suppose my above post came out incorrectly. I'm just in wonder at how you would play a COC long-run game.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 4:02 am

If you recall the games I ran, survivors did exist, and I could've scaled the actions of the horrors so everyone had a better chance to escape/survive. However, I never saw the rules as conducive towards a long run game (sanity rules alone), so I encouraged the view with you guys of it being ideal for a series of one-shots.

And everyone seemed to enjoy it that way.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 6:16 am

virgileso wrote:If you recall the games I ran, survivors did exist, and I could've scaled the actions of the horrors so everyone had a better chance to escape/survive. However, I never saw the rules as conducive towards a long run game (sanity rules alone), so I encouraged the view with you guys of it being ideal for a series of one-shots.

And everyone seemed to enjoy it that way.

if you see the above quote, it's not only about how the dm scales the horror.

it's the player anticipation. Virgil. (Virgil, Eso, hmmm.....*real name*eso) of the horrors that await them behind the next closed door or the the shake of the bush. It's so fvcked up.

VIrgil might remember this adventure that I ran:

It was a one shot that I printed off of the club or society that existed at one point where you could go and play in the Greyhawk world but you also had access to all these adventures and pdfs that other people made. THere was this "fairly" decent CoC one-shot that I printed out.

I use that term rather loosely in retrospect. It was about a 100 or so page document that I printed out a week ahead and it was more umm what's the Lumley-like, than Lovecraftian, is that it? I don't mean horrors running everywhere. Just that, if you went into the woods at night, you were SOL, no matter if it was you or the entire village. So, I had re-tooled it to be a little more lovecraftian so that there was more of the touch of the impending doom rather than "Why, Mr. Shelly, I find it quite courteous that your courtin me this even---ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..." thing. well I might be exaggerating. But the players continually wanted Shelly's courting in the evening. I don't mean that plot point. I mean they kept wanted that sort of horror. These are seasoned players. They enjoy other games too. Read Virgil's Tome's Tome sessions and you'll see one of them at least. My wife was one of them. And I finally drove one of the others to the nuthouse, he's out now. but they are all proficient in systems. But they expected pound me in the ass prison --- horor, i mean. you know where my mind is.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 6:24 am

I was actually joking. See, when I said it runs you from womb to tomb, I was implying that:

everybody dies

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 6:48 am

Well, don't you know the way you make the most optimized CoC character?

flaws: NO Eyes to see the horrors. No ears to hear the horrors. no nerves that are related to touch or feel the horrors and high will & wis.

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Whole career campaigns?

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