I'm currently in the process of writing my own shitbrew. Not because I think I can do it better than those who have gone before me, nor because I think that it'll be a massive success. It's an urge I've had for a while. I must indulge in it, because I feel like it'll eventually start oozing out in some unsightly way if I don't.

My lack of focus is making it hard, but one of the things I have been working on is a section of advice. It will not be as expansive and complete as some of the other works on this subject; McGowan's the Living Campaign and various other works are way more complete. However, I do think that my experience running a similar sort of campaign does give me some insight into what can be done to make the game more successful, and I'm self-involved enough to think that people would be interested in reading it. This is advice I collected primarily from my own mistakes. These are the mistakes I made (an in some cases: continue to make; I will never say I'm not a hypocrite), or seen others make. With this I'm hoping to show people the pitfalls that me and my groups stepped into. I thought to kill a few birds with one stone: post on this eternally dying blog about this, maybe get the advice out to people, and get some feedback to hone what I've written.

These sorts of campaigns, which I have heard called the Grand Campaign by people like Gelatinous Rube, are great. They are unlike any kind of conventional play I've been part of, in that they exponentially put out more the more the people involved put into them. Once you get beyond a small hurdle of initial resistance you create the perpetuum mobile of tabletop campaigns. It builds on itself, creating intrigue on top of intrigue, and each action of one player will feed into the actions of others.

For this to work you need the right mindset and attitude, but there's also some rough guidelines to follow. Not because the campaign won't work without them, but because following these principles leads to a much higher return on investment on the things you do. Especially for players and referees new to this style of play, or even non-conventional campaigns in general, there is stuff that you need to relearn how to do.

There's three separate sections of advice here; for Table Players; the people running Player Characters in a session. For Patron Players, or Downtime Players, as Steven over at Purple Druid/Wargaming Culture/Shadow over Sojenka and various other nicknames calls them. And lastly, of course, for the Referee.

Table Player Secrets

Passionate but dispassionate

Player characters can and will die, because there is no true heroism without a real and present risk of death. Accept that this might happen, but do not let it see your characters as completely disposable pawns. The story that you tell in the waffle house the night after is bigger than any one character, and a good death adds to this story, but only if the struggle to survive was real. Be passionate in your attemps to defeat the odds, to let this character be the one which becomes the king of his own domain. Be dispassionate in defeat and do not let your response to a death sour the campaign.

Use your time well

Like in real life, this separates the truly excellent people from the amateurs. Both in session and in downtime be economical with your use of time. The character that spends a week in the tavern will start lagging behind when compared with the one who spends a week of downtime investigating rumours, or scout out those hexes you thought might contain a dungeon.

Set goals

A campaign is driven by what the players in it do. If you as a player wander about aimlessly with no direction, or even worse: wait for other players or the referee to give you direction you will not just inhibit your own enjoyment of the campaign, but also provide a substandard partner for the rest of the party. Give your PCs goals to work towards. Maybe it's that domain you wish to build, or maybe it's wanting to clear a hex, or kill a lair of kobolds. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, but have something you are working towards.

Sessions are for adventures

Do not drag down sessions with stuff that could've been done outside of them. Come prepared. You will not make friends if you come to a session and make people wait for fifteen minutes because you forgot to level up, or because you really want to spend some time roleplaying with that shopkeeper while the rest is twiddling their thumbs. Do this stuff outside of sessions, so that the three or four hours of session time can be spent in actual adventures.

Patron Player secrets

Be interesting

One of the many reasons for having Patron Players is to outsource the creativity of building the world to the entire group. If you create a boring faction you aren't doing yourself or the campaign any favours. Have your faction be interesting in some way. Not only does it create a more interesting world, but players will be more likely to deal with an interesting faction than a boring one. The democracy of the table will create more action in your territories when you aren't boring.

Be proactive

Don't wait for the action to come to you. A Patron Player that just waits on the referee to feed him events to respond to is a drain on his energy. Be proactive in what you do. Create plans and start plotting.

Cultivate interaction

Similarly, there's little interesting about 10 factions which all act insularly. Being a Patron Player isn't a game of solitaire with the referee. Search out other players and interact with them. Create alliances or enemies, sabotage people and announce rewards for that Hippogryph that's laired up on the edge of your territories.

Write yourself into the world

Grab onto some piece of lore the referee (or anyone else) has created and make it integral to your faction. Write your faction into the world so it settles into it and naturally creates interconnections. Or hell, create some entirely new bits of lore and leave them open-ended enough that others can latch onto them.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission

The referee will be plenty busy adjudicating. Feel free to referee yourself where possible; roll the domain encounters yourself, handle them and report back to the ref. Roll up lairs and populate them as needed, and add interesting things there. Don't wait for the ref to mediate contact with another player if your faction could reasonably contact them. Generally your ref will thank you for creating more things that fill out the world because it reduces his workload. And in the cases where it turns out what you did doesn't work, work with him to find a solution.

Work with the Fog of War

No one in the campaign will have anything near a complete image of the situation that's going on. It can be frustrating at times, particularly if you're under attack, or your lack of information makes deciding on a course of action difficult. However, knowing this beforehand, you can twist it to your advantage too. Ensure you have scouts in play, so you know what's happening in your lands and beyond the borders. Employ spies. Hell, if you want to really be devious: engage in some fifth-generation warfare. Set up false rumours, engage in misinformation. Make Fog of War your friend.

Referee secrets

Timekeeping

I've written about this before, but Gygax was entirely correct when he said that you cannot have a meaningful campaign without proper timekeeping. Especially in a world where you have such differing timescales interacting as one where you have small adventuring parties at the table, larger armies roaming around and doing battle, but also the long term plans of Patron Players.

If you do not keep a proper timeline of what happens at which time, you will do yourself, but especially your players a disservice. How you do it is somewhat immaterial as long as you do it. You can do jojo-time and just keep a very tidy calendar meticulously. However, this is hard work. To me, 1:1 time is just simpler in its execution. Either method is a trade-off, but I prefer the neat simplicity of 1 day of real time equalling one day of time on the campaign calender outside of sessions.

Keep the sanctity of the dice intact

Look, we all know that the fudging """discussion""" has been had so many times that calling it 'beating a dead horse' is no longer apt. Its corpse has long been pulverised and all that comes off is small puffs of dust. I won't rehash it too much.

You are the impartial arbiter of the rules. The dice are the oracular power you use to decide what happens when the results aren't clear beforehand. If the result is clear from the get-go: don't roll, tell them what happens. If it isn't: roll the dice out in the open, for everyone to see. As soon as you roll you are committing to it. If you roll and then go "well this isn't what I wanted," you are no longer the impartial arbiter you ought to be. Not only that, but by enforcing your will on the world over letting the dice decide, you are cheating yourself out of being surprised.

Set an example, not boundaries

This style of play is about outsourcing large parts of creating and running the campaign world to others. Do not constrain them too much in what they do, because their unique ideas are a huge reason for doing this. Set up a framework of a world, with some sort of theme and setting, but let them push that framework to its limit. Let them come up with new stuff you didn't intend or think about, because that's how the truly innovative and great ideas come about. Even if, no especially if it's not part of your original vision.

Create a world worth exploring

With a sandbox it's easy to fall in this trap: you create a world, you add factions, you create dungeons. But is it worth exploring? Is there a sense that going beyond the boundaries of civilisation is dangerous, but doing so is worth it? There might be a host of factions, but are they interesting enough to interact with? Are their goals not so far beyond the players that they can't influence them?

As the referee you ought to create a world that inspires players of either kind to set out and interact with it. If it's too boring, or the risk/reward ratio is off, why would your players bother? Create wild rumours of riches. Create fantastic lairs of weird creatures. Create wonderous locations that speak to the imagination. Being gonzo is great, and going overboard on it is better than to be boring.

The Three Ps

Prep People and Places. I know that #zeroprep is still a thing. If it's your thing: go for it, but for those of us who do like to place things in our world: be economical with your time and effort. Don't prep scenarios, and certainly don't prep plot. Create people and factions with goals and means, and create places where adventure takes place. Combining these creates a scenario on the fly, since a scenario is in essence nothing more than people doing stuff in a specific place at a specific time. But unlike scenarios, these things persist, and add to the world long-term.

Surrender control

In part it is very obvious: don't try to keep a firm grip on what Players are doing. You do not control the game, you simulate the world in accordance with what the Players do. Don't try to finagle them down a specific path. That way lies madness, railroading and burnout. Be like water, my friend. Go along with what they do, and sometimes be that crashing wave that drowns them when their plans are stupid.

But also this: don't try to be privy to anything and everything that happens. If two Players in the same town concoct some plan, or Patron Players decide to form some sort of alliance, you don't need to be involved in their discussions. Give Players the freedom to create in their realms what they wish. Firstly: your time is better spent doing your job instead of trying to see if they are doing theirs 'properly'. Secondly: it allows for that most marvellous of things to happen: you get to be surprised by what the players thought up in your absence and get to respond in the moment.

Let Patron players ref themselves

Let Patron Players be as autonomous as possible. If they're starting out: hand them the high-over hexes of their area and tell them to fill it with any and all cool stuff they wish. The rules ought to cover what's possible and what's not. If they're a tribe of goblins the rules will tell them how many there are, what kind of other beasts might be in their control, and how much treasure their lair contains. As for their activities: the same thing. If they want to, for example: create an extension to their dungeon: the rules ought to tell how much of that can be done in a timespan. Let them tell you how long it will take. Let them tell you which Domain Encounters they had and how they handled them. That way your role is simplified to the interactions between factions, or other outside influences which might put a spanner in their plans.

Use a functional ruleset

The OSR principle of 'Rulings over Rules' is not good advice in a campaign like this. There are two major issues that come up if you have to constantly put out rulings. The first is simple and direct: it is a massive slowdown. If Patron Players have to ask you how you want something done that's one extra round trip of messages at the very least before they can inform you of their actions (or, with the previous point of advice, the results thereof). The second point is slightly more abstract: if it isn't clear what your ruling will be beforehand they cannot take it into account in their plans. If assassination isn't part of the rules, how will they know to take potential attempts at it into account, or prevent them? Additionally, if they have a wrong understanding on what your ruling on it would be their plans might be based on a false assumption and invalidated before it even starts.

Use a ruleset that covers all actions you can reasonably expect players to make given the kind of game you intend to run. Or failing that: at least one that comes close. This way Players can act on their system knowledge and know beforehand the rough odds of something succeeding. Now of course, Players will always come up with stuff that's not covered by the rules. The resolution for this is simple: not 'rulings over rules', but 'rulings become rules'. Note down the rulings you make in a living document that gets updated (and altered as you find out you misruled).

Man that was a lot of preaching to the choir

As always, I have written roughly thrice as much as I should have. If you made it to here, give yourself a pat on the back, and let me know what you think. Have I made a grievous error? Is there advice you entirely disagree with, or do you think there's something important that I've missed? I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Reach out to me and tell me that I'm wrong.

Until then, count your torches and keep mapping.