Further Worldbuilding Through RPGs, and Other Scattered Thoughts

Half a year ago, I talked about building a world with your gaming group using a series of games to flesh everything out. As you recall the games involved were Microscope, Downfall, Kingdom, Wield, Reign, How to Host a Dungeon, Dawn of Worlds, Mythender, and The Quiet Year. Now I’m actually planning a campaign, which will culminate in a Burning Wheel campaign.

As I’ve been mentally putting the whole thing together, I’ve realized I don’t really NEED to do Wield, Reign, or How to Host a Dungeon before the campaign begins. How to Host a Dungeon can be done by players between sessions. Reign and Wield can be played on weeks we don’t have all the players, or a week before we need something from one of those games to show up.

Speaking of, I really like the idea of regularly diverging from the main campaign to look at things from the past, using old rules sets. Kind of like when a show does a flashback, you could do the same, but pull out a Powered by the Apocalypse game, or a session of Fiasco. Doing this also separates the players from the XP.

One thing I’ve found is that when I’ve tried to run, say, a D&D campaign where I wanted to switch to another POV, I would present the players with new character sheets for that session, and run that. Afterward, some of the players felt it was a “waste”, because their original characters gained no XP for the actions of the character they played this week. This could be remedied by just assigning XP to the original PCs, but again, the players didn’t like that either, because their characters hadn’t earned it.

So by using a completely different system, it appears more detached from the main campaign, allowing you to delve in without worrying about that.

I’m not sure where all this is going, honestly. This feels maore like an extended Twitter rant, but I think that the upcoming campaign, which I plan to kick off in January, should be pretty cool, if we can manage to have people show up for the sessions.