Tim Leask, who was a Club Campaign stalwart, bless 'im, writes:
>All this talk of TTRP vs Freeform reminded me of MOB's great "Club
>Campaign" experiment. Back in his undergraduate days at Melb Uni MOB
>was Prez of the Uni Role Playing Club (MAG Inc) and he and Trevor
>Ackerley came up with the idea of a "Club Campaign" to take place
>on our regular gaming night. The basic idea was that multiple parties
>would be "adventuring" simultaneously in the same campaign. Each party
>had it's own GM and ideally a spare master GM would circulate between
>parties so that events and interactions could be co-ordinated.
>Characters could freely move between parties and plotting against and
>competing with other parties was strongly encouraged. It had elements
>of both Freeform and TTRP but while it showed great promise we never
>quite acheived critical mass of either players or GM's to make it work
>as planned. We did however have some great game sessions. MOB, perhaps
>you would care to give us the Secret History ?
Tim's right, we never quite got there, probably due to lack of GMs more than anything else. There were just the two of us, Trevor Ackerly and me. Over the summer vacation we created a campaign setting, based in the Blank Land of Garsting.
One of the first things we did was the most adventurous, and involved two parties of PCs encountering each other deep in an underground chaos temple. The parties were in separate rooms, and Trev and I were connected by telephones, and when this didn't work out too well, a live runner (Phil Green).
To begin with neither party knew the other group were PCs, and a bloodbath ensued: in the dark, storm bull horns look a lot like broo horns y'know! This experiment wasn't really what you could call a success, as rapid communications were difficult and the two sets of PCs soon twigged something was up. But, a long way down the track the upshot of all this was the book "Sun County" so it did have some positive benefit in the end (the underground temple was, of course, Rabbit Hat Farm!)
We had two and later three main groups of PCs all wandering around the campaign setting, with a number of people shifting between groups from time to time. The Pcs would get together for various events such as elections, chariot races, trollball, and on one memorable occasion, to hunt down a rogue PC who had a huge bounty on his head (a fallen Healer, who had sunk by various degrees until becoming a Mallia cultist!). Another PC got elected "Guardian of the Bread-belt" (sort of like Guardian of Sun County, in charge of the People's Militia) and was later killed by his own troops in spectacular fashion.
Trev and I usually devised the various plots while scoffing down dinner in the notorious Student Union caf half-an-hour before kick-off time at half-seven. Probably the best scenario we ever cooked up had one PC group trying to find the unknown 8th Lunar Priest in the city, with a warrant to summarily execute him/her (too long to go into here, but a treaty stipulated only 7 Lunar Priests were permitted in the city). Naturally, the PC in charge of the investigation was the priest in question!
The Club Campaign was fun while it lasted, though after the first year we pretty much ended up with one large group of PCs (about 8-10 core players plus occasional players and blow-ins) that Trev and I tag-team GMed. Eventually, when the well of inspiration ran dry - and Trev got run over by a semi-trailer - we choofed off to Balazar and Griffin Mountain to our overstretched imaginations a rest. Unfortunately, I'm not young or stupid enough to take something like that on again!
Cheers
MOB P.S. BTW, I never reached the dizzying heights of MAG INc President. In the term I served as Club Secretary, there were a number of candidates for Prez, and in a strongly-contested election campaign they all spoke earnestly and convincingly at the annual general meeting as to why they should be elected Prez, what direction they'd take the club in (then, the biggest at the uni), etc. etc. Then, just before the votes were due to be taken, a total unknown got up, and simply said he wanted to run for Prez too. His campaign speech: "Hi, I'm Stuart Wayne, and you should elect me President of MAG Inc. 'cos I can skoll (ie. swallow in one go, chug-a-lug) a pack of smarties (a box of candy similar to M&Ms)!". He proceeded to do so and was of course elected almost unanimously! Such a display of bravura politicking certainly got my vote; shame we rarely saw the guy again... (that's probably why Tim remembers me as Prez in our Smartie-guzzling leader's absence).
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