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Map based Narrative Campaign


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Hello

I'm in the process of planning out a map based campaign. My plan is to have a large, unexplored region, about which very little is known. It is connected to each Realm by gates. The players will start by picking a realm, and choosing where their base will be, then the first set of battles will be for control of the gates, and then for resources and land as they begin to colonise the new region.

It doesn't look as though we'll have enough players for me to just GM the game, so I'm planning to use a fair bit of randomisation to keep the surprises coming. We'll also have various NPC factions and wandering monster type things, so that we can have a variety of challenges beyond just fighting each other's armies over and over again.

I'm planning to use Path to Glory, rather than matched points, so that we can simulate the effects of supply lines, reinforcements etc.

Does anyone have any suggestions or advice? I've not organised something like this before, so any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated! What are common pit falls for this type of game, and what should I be aware of?

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I’d recommend using the old Mighty Empires tiles, that way you have fixed peg points to represent armies and spheres of control, clearly defined borders. If you wanted to procedurally generate the tiles you could start with them unpainted and when a player rolls to see what kind of tile it a by capturing it they paint it accordingly.

this gets everyone involved in the shaping of the map.

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15 hours ago, Melcavuk said:

I’d recommend using the old Mighty Empires tiles, that way you have fixed peg points to represent armies and spheres of control, clearly defined borders. If you wanted to procedurally generate the tiles you could start with them unpainted and when a player rolls to see what kind of tile it a by capturing it they paint it accordingly. 

this gets everyone involved in the shaping of the map.

The mainproblem with Mighty Empires should be that the box should be Oop.

@EccentricCircle

Do you want to manage the campaign where you're playing or online. I made multiple campaigns for WHFB in the years 2009-2011 and a 9th Age campaign in 2017.

Most of the time I used Mighty Empires for the map (mostly using an image of the map numbering the fields and coloring the borders in the color of the faction).

For the last campaign I made a map with a game Editor (Heroes of Might and Magic 5 in that case). Inserted a picture of that map into Tabletop Simulator to get a grid on that map and numbered the field, marked the borders, as well as making a spot where I can give the color of faction (I used paint), but with Photoshop or Gimp there should be a possibility for layering (as well as fog of war or something). The result was this. The way I used it needs a png original, so the spots could be recolored easily.

3dG9rdM_95nSllNOfV1r6YVjdrofJkGQAyq500N2

Maybe there is even the possibility to use tabletop simulator with miniatures for that (instead of the numbers and Spots)

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27 minutes ago, EMMachine said:

The mainproblem with Mighty Empires should be that the box should be Oop.

@EccentricCircle

Do you want to manage the campaign where you're playing or online. I made multiple campaigns for WHFB in the years 2009-2011 and a 9th Age campaign in 2017.

Most of the time I used Mighty Empires for the map (mostly using an image of the map numbering the fields and coloring the borders in the color of the faction).

For the last campaign I made a map with a game Editor (Heroes of Might and Magic 5 in that case). Inserted a picture of that map into Tabletop Simulator to get a grid on that map and numbered the field, marked the borders, as well as making a spot where I can give the color of faction (I used paint), but with Photoshop or Gimp there should be a possibility for layering (as well as fog of war or something). The result was this. The way I used it needs a png original, so the spots could be recolored easily.

3dG9rdM_95nSllNOfV1r6YVjdrofJkGQAyq500N2

Maybe there is even the possibility to use tabletop simulator with miniatures for that (instead of the numbers and Spots)

Thanks for sharing your example, its useful to see what others have done! I've taken a similar approach.

Mighty Empires sounds great, but there's no way I am realistically going to get hold of a copy. Fortunately I'm an experienced fantasy cartographer as I've been creating D&D adventures for years (and am an environmental scientist in real life, which doesn't hurt where geographic skills are concerned).

Thus I've actually already created a map for the campaign, and am planning to use Roll20 as the online platform for coordinating the campaign between games. I've set up a hex grid, and am creating various tokens to mark resources, cities, realmgates etc. Each faction/player will also have a token to show which hexes they control, so we can colour in the map as we go.

 

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2 hours ago, Ninelives said:

Please keep us informed, I am really interested in doing something of the sort, and at the moment we're planning on using Firestorm to do it ! 

 

That's exactly what I've just done - harvested the map and location special rules out of Firestorm and plugged it in to our own narrative escalation campaign.

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I would also recommend old wfb 6th ed General's Compendium - it has really nice tips for map-based (and GMed) campaigns and much more other things like rules for fighting in dense forests, frozen rivers and toxic fume geyser plains.

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I've been thinking about doing something similar.  My vision is for PtG warbands to move around on a campaign map and then, once they reach 10 Glory, create a settlement from which new PtG warbands can be spawned.  The retired warbands would only be able to battle to defend their settlements and the players would have to create new warbands to roam the map.

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Some great suggestions, thanks. I will certainly let everyone know how the venture progresses. My plan is to use Path to glory as the framework for building up the factions, but I want to include some sort of factor to track resources and supply lines.

I'm thinking that you need to be able to set up a base (using so many resources) in order to sustain a larger army, and you need to be able to maintain your supply lines to keep your settlement working. However I obviously don't want some players to start getting massively more troops than others, as that could become a slippery slope.

I suspect that there are ways to balance that in story, such as with a GM putting other stuff on the board for the players to deal with, to balance the scales a bit though.

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On ‎1‎/‎30‎/‎2019 at 5:15 AM, Nacnudllah said:

I've been thinking about doing something similar.  My vision is for PtG warbands to move around on a campaign map and then, once they reach 10 Glory, create a settlement from which new PtG warbands can be spawned.  The retired warbands would only be able to battle to defend their settlements and the players would have to create new warbands to roam the map.

I LOVE THIS IDEA!

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  • 2 weeks later...
44 minutes ago, JPjr said:

I just have to say please, please let this be on your actual CV.

It probably should be. Gaming stuff can be hard to include, since not everyone "gets it". I usually put creative writing, and "running and organising" rpg activities. Anyone in the know should thus knows that means GMing, but hopefully it still sounds good to someone who doesn't. M

As for map making, the constituent skills are listed, art, geography, and use of GIS in particular!

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