AUGUST 12, 2024
by Keaira
<aside> 🔖 This is my contribution to Autocratik’s event happening during the month of August aimed to talk more about the hobby of table top roleplaying games.
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What RPG except the simple (and to me a bit boring) choices are out there that “support” campaigns well? The wording of the prompt feels like a trap into the pool of “classic” epic games. I avoid playing DnD (and similar games like Pathfinder) for multiple reasons - fantasy as a genre is not my cup of tea, the prominence of tactics combat is a nightmare for me and generally, I prefer more indie variety of games and DnD is just frustratingly mainstream. No doubt it supports playing in campaign mode, even if I have no idea if its done well; you are not meant to stay a level 1 newbie, you are supposed to save the world epically. Another choice that is ruling my social media feed is Call of Cthulhu, but I have never tried any of those legendary campaigns and, in my books, the BRP system is overshadowed by its investigative genre brother GUMSHOE.
So which other game, besides the obvious, supports campaign play well? I can mention games that are meant to be played as a campaign, like Blades in the Dark - while designed in clear episodic manner, it shines when you can build your crew properly, gain new turfs, gain reputation, make your name in the crime underbelly of Duskvoll. With clever downtime mechanics, it motivates to work on long-term projects, create crazy inventions, dive deeper into the faction politics.
Or I can talk about games that have popular epic campaign published, like Dracula Dossier for Night’s Black Agents, with such a pile of hooks, possibilities and a conspiracy pyramid, that can keep you busy for years. Or the impressive Eternal Lies campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, which - while sadly crossing some of my personal lines - gets deserved praise for its worldwide scope.
My pick for today will be another favorite of mine - Yellow King RPG - a GUMSHOE Quickshock game which is designed to be played in four interconnected settings, spanning over century, with mind-bending horror influenced by the player actions. You can of course play the game as one shot, but the way it is designed it shines at least in an interconnected set of scenarios to get the most of it. There is no published campaign for this game out there yet, but one is in works and playtested currently and it will be epic.
When you create a character (an art student from USA) for the first setting, Paris in the year of 1890, buzzing with culture and art, things are relatively quiet, there is a play out there, making people’s brains melt, and it is forbidden by the government (for good reasons), but the weirdness is hidden behind the curtains.
Then you continue to the Wars in 1947 - an endless war between Loyalists and Crown, none of whom knows why they are even fighting, nightmarish things both supernatural and “natural” happening in the fields and insect like helicopters flying in the skies.
Then you move to Aftermath, the North America after the fall of a dictatorship that ruled for decades and revolutionaries have to deal with building new better state. And finally, This Is Normal Now gets us to the weird nowadays, familiar, but different. While set of characters is new for each setting, they are somehow connected to your previous one and they all carry a memory, an experience of something very strange that happened to them. I do have different preference for each of these settings, but the premise is very thrilling and attractive and makes this game quite unique.