I'm going to start using some of the 'off' days for the regular campaign to do some musing and ask some questions about gaming of the blogs regular readers. (Yes, I know you're out there - I can see your blog hits....) To keep with the blog theme these are going to be focused on tabletop role playing campaigns.
First up, what was your first role playing campaign world, and was it GM created our an 'out of the box' campaign?
Of course there's room for interpretation: if you started gaming with Vampire: The Masquerade can one consider the entire World of Darkness to be an 'out of the box' campaign or do you limit that designation to the Chicago (or Milwaukee) by Night locations? I leave that up to you.
In my case I got the red box D&D Basic set in 1981 and much of my early gaming was iterations of In Search of the Unknown and Keep on the Borderlands, but at there tender age there wasn't anything like a campaign world for a while. I didn't have a lot of the modules and while I eventually got the World of Greyhawk setting book it was well after I'd developed my own setting. That was the Shankill Isles, a bunch of island city states where each island conveniently held a dungeon, slaver base or marauding monsters for my players to smite. It wasn't terribly well developed at first, but it was all mine.
When I got my second RPG - Villains & Vigilantes - I likewise developed my own 'world' for it, one where a group of super-powered Jr. High School students could become a world respected super team fighting a Chess-themed evil organization that had a base on Pluto.
In retrospect I really admire Dee & Herman in that they explicitly tell you to not use the Crisis at Crusader Citadel module for your 'real' characters, nor should you ape any existing comics and your stories are going to diverge rapidly from the source material. better to start fresh with your own stuff, using their examples only as examples. Likewise the Basic D&D rules give you some tools, and the B1 and B2 modules give you examples of sites, but you're otherwise left on your own for fleshing out your own setting.
That's something I've obviously taken to heart, given the purposes of this blog.
Plans for 2024: Creation of an NSR setting for super-heroes; My D&D 3E campaign as an example of sandboxing via published adventure, and likely more.
I can't actually remember my first campaign as a player. It was either AD&D or Runequest 2, and almost certainly a mixture of an out-of-the-box setting and the GM's own weirdness.
ReplyDeleteThe first campaign I GMed was with Runequest 2 and started with the venerable Apple Lane scenario that came in the box. The setting was Glorantha, which in those days needed a lot of fleshing out and sub-creation.
Pretty much all my early high school games were built on someone else's setting and to be honest none the worse for it.
Started with Runequest? How common was that in Ireland over starting with D&D? I ask just because I don't know anyone state side who started with RQ, but a decent number who moved to it because of its more detailed mechanics and flavorful world.
DeleteObviously I don't mean to denigrate starting in (or continuing to play in) someone else's setting - I'm just curious how many did or didn't. In my case neither of my 'go to' games at the start had a default setting so we had to build our own, usually flavored with bits mentioned in the base rules and first modules. I think that experience influenced the rest of my gaming career.
I started roleplaying in France in an American international school in the suburbs. The group was 2-3 USAns, 2-3 Canadians and 1 eager Irishman.
DeleteI don't know what the gaming scene in the early 80's was like in Ireland apart from the presence of the long-gone and much-lamented Diceman game shop.
My junior high school AD&D campaign was only ever played inside my head, so I can't really count it. My first game with other people was during my 3rd year of college -- a Space 1889 campaign that Jim started after he moved back to Chicago but before we moved in together. Pretty much all of our campaign adventures came straight out of his head, but since he eventually sold most of them to Challenge magazine I guess you could call it a backwards out-of-the-box campaign.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, does that make Jim's head box-like?
DeleteI know Dave*s' first RPG campaigns were also entirely in his head due to a lack of players, but that's quite a gap between Jr. High and Jr. Year of college....
Well, until I met Jim I didn't know anyone else who was even vaguely interested in RPGs. Besides, there were lots of other things to fill my time: choir, high school theatre, a heavy course load, show captaining for my college film society, and planning Scav.
DeleteReal life? Bah! Bah!
DeleteWait, theater group. You may go.
My earliest roleplaying happened before there were boxes to take things out of. The first Basic D&D set I bought didn't have any adventures, just the 1st-3rd Level Monster and Treasure assortments, and some dungeon geomorph sheets. Similarly, the Three Little Black Books of Traveller left adventure design as an exercise for the GM.
ReplyDeleteOne of my friends did run some of the early D&D "Modules" for us -- I remember the hall of the fire giant king and the Demonweb Pits -- but I'd say our campaign was 50% homebrew adventures. Including the monumentally lazy Alphabetical Dungeon I put together once.
Call of Cthulhu was the first game where I didn't have to create the background, and the adventures I ran were 50% store-bought (like Shadows of Yog-Sothoth) and 50% my own creation.
Diane has already mentioned the "Into the Box" nature of my Space 1889 game. When we moved to Durham a friend ran a Runequest campaign which used the canonical setting, but the adventures were all his own.
When we moved up to MA, a friend did run the "Masks of Nyarlathotep" campaign for Call of Cthulhu, and he also did a Forgotten Realms campaign for D&D, but other than that my experience has been very limited.
My biggest problem with store-bought campaigns is that they wind up being pretty much all or nothing. Either you run their adventures in their setting, or you don't -- because anything you invent on your own is likely to be contradicted by some bit of later canon. Several times I've suggested to game publishers that they leave a region of the game world as a "sandbox" for gamemasters to put things in, with the pledge that canon will never override them.
I wouldn't count the early D&D modules as being a campaign 'world', as they were specifically generic (within the assumed to be understood pulp fantasy genre rules of D&D). In the absence of an official 'anywhere' to put them the world would have to be self-built. I suppose you could have used the world of Arduin or the Wilderland or the City State of the Invisible Overload, but we never did.
DeleteRunequest is a harder call since the unique world and its underlying logic are specific to the game. Cthulhu falls into the same boat as Runequest, though I have played in a CoC game where the GM built a whole new magic and monster cosmology from the ground up rather than use standard Lovecraft.
Ultimately I agree with you on the problems with packaged worlds for all that I use them for Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw and An Invitation - unless I'm planning something short term or I really want the specific world rules I'd rather build it myself. Of course, there wasn't a single wholly original adventure in the Emirikol game as I built it by raiding Dragon and Dungeon Magazines of yore, but the world and its underlying logic were entirely my own.