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Making a campaign and looking for feedback

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AaronLee AaronLee's picture
Making a campaign and looking for feedback
So this past week before I left my family at the end of the holidays, me and my old friends got together to try out the new sourcebook I'd gotten. Awesome ensued. You know; eggshelling a reaper straight out of its armor using a half-broken anti-material rifle and two HEAP rounds, sniffing out a cloaked ultimate, holding him at gunpoint, having his invisible friend hold YOU at gunpoint... then some business involving a wasp knife and both of them being well out of the picture. Not to mention a few very interesting close shaves involving lots of explosives and potential massive hull breach. This was perhaps the best session of incidental DMing I've ever had. I have profuse notes from the pre-prepared campaign on binder paper and I'm in the process of putting them to keyboard. This is an experiment, a mini-campaign with an open beginning, middle and end with only the NPCs, their agendas, their secrets and key events to move the story along defined. Right now, I have a first draft of the setting introduction, including some articles on the unique but minor colony on which the story's set, the stark class divisions and the throwback architecture that dominates the once-grand halls of this slum. The formatting is all very experimental, but most of the content isn't. So, I'm wondering if what I have is decent detail for this sub-setting, does it inspire or is it deathly insufficient? What about the formatting? (I'm likely going to convert to a two-column format.) This will likely be a short romp of a project and something I'd like to release for everyone openly. Is this common? Are fanmade works encouraged here? EDIT 2: Release 3, Tabitha Sinqdot's profile has been updated with a new onformation layout. EDIT: Release 2 added 1/16. New info on some initial campaign events and more on characters.
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PDF icon Eclipse Phase - North Star_rev3.pdf174.06 KB
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! -Charles Stross
nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
Looks cool so far! Definitely, feel free to share. I'd recommend you also post it to the Eye and let them republish and distribute it for you. One thing I'd say though is to stick to the current EP format when you can, since it's a good guideline. Also make sure you include the CC information in the front of the book, since you're sort of legally obliged to.
AaronLee AaronLee's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
Glad you approve of what I've got so far. I'll definitely continue this project. Also; The Eye has thus far blown my mind. I'm new to RPG communities so this is the first fanzine I've seen, the idea that that can be done blows my mind! I'll definitely be sure to shoot this their way once I'm done. As far as formatting goes, I'm going to try and take cues from The Eye and the sourcebook from now on. Also; yes the CC info will be on there since I know it's aprecondition for using the license. My bad on that, it'll be fixed next time I roll out a new download.``````
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! -Charles Stross
Rhyx Rhyx's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
Yeah so far so good. And I think you're used to writing technical writing documents because it has the same format, or is that incidental?
AaronLee AaronLee's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
Actually I do a lot of worldbuilding docs for my other writing projects, it's also how I sometimes lay out my devnotes. Chapters and sub chapters just make more sense to me, I guess :P Anyway, the new release is mostly content focused. I'm trying to get the gruntwork done before I go a-formatting as a change halfway through could royally suck. I've added the CC-license info to the cover, glad I've (hopefully) fixed that flub. EDIT: Forgot to mention where I'm looking for critique. Is the information provided in the docs the kind of thing GMs would find helpful? Do I need to cut off some extra paragraphs? Now that I'm writing more on the campaign, is everyone getting a better sense of how they'd DM it?
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! -Charles Stross
thelabmonkey thelabmonkey's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
I only had a quick skim, but it looks like a lot of fun. If I were running this from your pdf, I think I would want at least a few places where research or networking tests were suggested with rep cost, similar to (but maybe not as in depth as) the ones in "Glory". In my notes for my campaign I've taken to separating "free" information and info that is going to need some dice rolls. It may be that you aren't at a point in the plot yet to know or that it's just not your style. Either way, I find that kind of thing useful so I don't have to fudge as much. Keep posting updates!
root root's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
root@Making a campaign and looking for feedback [hr] Added your adventure to the collected fiction/adventures post. Let me know when it is considered complete.
[ @-rep +1 | c-rep +1 | g-rep +1 | r-rep +1 ]
The Green Slime The Green Slime's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
Excellent stuff, very well written. Just in the preview you've got a pretty fertile setting going and the text throughout is lean and pacy, it's not a drag to read through and the layout makes info extraction fairly easy. I very much like the balance you describe between setting and scenario and I think that ought to be the norm for all RPG scenarios: just give me well-written characters in an interesting place and the plot will take care of itself. How far away is this preview from the finished product, format wise? Because my sole criticism would be to compress the text somewhat by adding in sidebars, textboxes, etc. to make the page look a bit snazzier and distill the ancillary info like character motivations, quotes, corporate profiles and whatnot to spaces outside of the main text.
AaronLee AaronLee's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
Thanks for the continued feedback guys! Here I was thinking the thread had died and I come back with three replies. [Dies] Thanks for the content advice. I like the limited information concept. It was one I'd had but hadn't tried to implement well, much to the chagrin of my AGI character. I'll make sure to note the limits/tiers of security information about the setting characters and unfurled plot has. To be fair I won't have a chance to read through glory any time soon, though. So I can't really mine it for ideas. Going to have to rely on my inner sleuth. thelabmonkey: thanks for the suggestion. If you feel like it, some elaboration on limitting information would rock. Root: Thanks! I'll make sure that you've eventually got something that's finished. TGS: I'm glad the text came of lean and well paced. That was actually my prime worry - that I had rambled.
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! -Charles Stross
AaronLee AaronLee's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
I'm working on a new idea based on the layered information suggestion (some stuff is public, some stuff is hearsay, some stuff is hackable etc) where I'm eschewing the bios of t he characters in favor of 2 or 3 layers of character description and agendas. Public, guarded and secret that represent what they try and disseminate, keep mostly among friends and never tell anyone respectively. I may try and extend this so it has a 'net presence (some people have dossiers or old transaction records that might let characters escalate up this scale without actually doing it interpersonally.) This has done a lot for my organization, as I'm now aggregating bio and agenda together into layered elements, instead of trying to cover everything of each one in two separate entries. Sorting by information scarcity certainly puts a new spin on the way I'm writing this stuff. Any feedback on this idea in brief?
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! -Charles Stross
The Green Slime The Green Slime's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
Wonderful! I like the sound of it: characters carrying secrets within secrets, webs of intrigue and conspiracy and the like. Instant plotability. A breakdown of how one's personal information is 'managed' should be de rigueur for all EP characters, I think. I just hope you can lay out such potentially labyrinthine info in a legible fashion. All my past efforts in that direction have ended up looking like something typed by Donald Rumsfeld peaking on salvia.
AaronLee AaronLee's picture
Re: Making a campaign and looking for feedback
The Green Slime wrote:
Wonderful! I like the sound of it: characters carrying secrets within secrets, webs of intrigue and conspiracy and the like. Instant plotability. A breakdown of how one's personal information is 'managed' should be de rigueur for all EP characters, I think. I just hope you can lay out such potentially labyrinthine info in a legible fashion. All my past efforts in that direction have ended up looking like something typed by Donald Rumsfeld peaking on salvia.
Hahah yeah it should be quite an undertaking! I've uploaded a potential layout to the first post. Right now I'm leaning toward layering agendas and giving different goal sets according to those, along with adding a breakdown of some proverbial breadcrumbs for players to discover.
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now! -Charles Stross