Multi-player weekly campaigns - ideas?

[amysrevenge]

Hi,

I've recently moved cities, and while there is a reasonably good gaming community where I've ended up, they are more multi-game and less AoS focused than I'd like.  I want to influence them more toward the King of Games, and was thinking that a really great campaign might be the way to go.

Does anyone have any experience running a more... interesting campaign than just a Path to Glory or simple escalation?  I've only really ever run campaigns for folks who were all-in on AoS already (or all-in on WFB before AoS was even a twinkle in Jervis' eye).

Things I already know:

• A little bit of story is good.  Too much story can be too hard to maintain.  A good starting point is to make everyone write a paragraph (or even just a couple sentences), naming their army and general and stating an objective.  Have a place (a Facebook group for instance) where players can write up after-action reports if they want to.  It's even better if it's a place where other people in your community who aren't playing can read it and see how awesome it is....
• Less is more.  The more onerous the campaign overhead is, the less buy-in there will be from players.  Keep track of who was there, who won, who has painted their stuff, not a lot more.
• Know when to end.  If the campaign drags on much beyond 6-7 sessions, some of the less keen people will start to lose interest and the campaign will fade out.
• End with a bang.  Do something extravagant for the final session.  Huge multiplayer games is a good one, are there others?
• If you charge them, they will keep coming.  Charge a small fee for the campaign, and turn around and give it all back as prizes.  Recently been charging 20 bucks, could do 10 bucks even.
• Don't just give prizes for winning.  I've found the most interest is generated by mixing up the prizing.  Most recently, I gave out 4 equal prizes.  One for the winner.  One a draw for whoever had all their painting done, one a draw for whoever had their results in on time for every session, one a draw for whoever put money in no matter how they did or whether they even showed up once.

Any other tips or experiences that anyone can share?

 

[Praecautus]

Thanks this is really useful. I am trying to plan a smal campaign for myself and some club mates. Never done it before but this was great reading.

 

[Melcavuk]

I went with the following:
 

Narrative campaign
Big map made from the old mighty empire tiles
Army size dictated by number of tiles held (attacking army is bigger than your garrison armies but both grow based on tile size)
Players can ally up with each other if it suits their narrative (my players were too nice, seriously half the board didnt attack each other at all, the other side were a bit too aggressive, I got sylvanethed in the back turn one for my stormcast)
Have certain parts of the map off limits until certain stages in the campaign
Campaign turn effects (smaller army size, or defender boosts etc)
Big narrative clash to finish where each player must choose to help, or attack the narrative faction at the centre.

 

We had about 8 players, cards with relics on for the campaign you could search for instead of taking tiles, ended up with 2 large armies (both stormcast) because they werent afraid to fight for tiles and 4 minor armies (they wouldnt fight each other so became starved for room to expand their empires) and then 2 drop outs.

Final fight was the 4 attacking vs the 2 defending the narrative faction, with the winners getting to pick what happened to the region.

[Requete]

If you don't mind thinking of some elements of the campaign as a board game, maybe it would be helpful to take some cues from Gloomhaven.  That one, if you don't know about it, has elements of a sandbox / hex crawl D&D game, except that there is no DM and the game itself governs what happens to you and where you can go. One of the neat things is that making some choices actually unlocks areas on the map (sometimes that is part of a planned story arc and sometimes it's just random... "You found a map in this treasure chest! Draw a random location card and add it to the map" ... "Hey guys, we can now explore the Pit of Dead Adventuring Parties over here in the Blood Mountains!").

Part of the draw is that you are not only unlocking new content, you're also making permanent changes to a shared environment. In fact, you're making permanent changes to the physical game set, so if you never go to the "Ruins of Rattenheim" with your adventurer, someone else might go there if other players are sharing that set (the Company of the Prancing Wolf has a revolving door policy for sellswords...).

I agree with the above advice that a shorter campaign is preferable to an overly ambitious or open-ended one. However, that's not to say that there won't be additional campaigns on the Plain of Daggers. There could be events, conditions or even battlegrounds that get unlocked by the events of the first campaign there. Some of those factors should persist so that subsequent campaigns will be affected. The ability for the players to make lasting changes to the setting increases their sense of ownership in the setting. "Predictably, Valkia's forces killed everybody in Flattenburg, so now it's a ruin and does X instead of Y", etc.