Now, first off I think what FFG is doing to the Roleplaying hobby is amazing and the 3rd edition Warhammer brought a completely new life to roleplaying for my group. It has been great to see the continuous support to the game, but what I think the game is missing is a really good, long and complex campaign. This is actually the reason for our (mine as a GM) enthusiasm for the game to die. What I want is a series of adventures, where in the end the world is saved or the evil engulfs the land. Now what we have is just a series of random adventures, which don't really have anything to do with each other.

Last week I visited my LFGS and ended up talking about campaigns with the owner. He told me about Paizo's adventure paths and since I had heard good things about them earlier I decided to grab a couple, just for fun. Now after reading couple of the first books, I wish we would have something like that for Warhammer.

Now, don't get me wrong. Most of the stuff in the adventure paths is good (or bad) old D&D stuff, so it's not really anything new. The thing is that in good or bad it's old school RPG stuff, but it's very very well done. The main thing is to have a series of adventures, where the bigger plot is slowly revealed to the players. The world around them feels alive and the players actions have impact on the world. Of course building the campaign from a scratch and then somehow trying to incorporate the ready made adventures to this bigger plot yourself is an option. But I'm lazy GM and would like to have my campaigns ready served. It would be amazing to have a full idea of the plot and adventures even before the first session takes place.

So here's my plea FFG:

Give us a campaign(s) published the same way as the adventure paths, which use the core box (and maybe existing expansion) materials and give us a loooooong and interesting campaign that see the rise of the PC's from the lowly rats to the powerful heroes. Remember that the best ever campaign for any RPG is still after all these years Enemy Within for Warhammer. Now top that!

The Thousand Thrones was an attempt similar to this. Personally, I would like to see multiple scenarios that can be linked. Each scenario should help detail a region or town.

jh

Emirikol said:

Yes, TTT was a nice attempt but it's for 2nd edition. What we are yet to see is a BIG campaign for 3rd edition. Also although the single scenarios of TTT are golden, the overall campaign plot is lost somewhere along the way. In TTT there was also nice plot "behind the scenes", which the PCs never get to really experience. The GM knows the big picture, but what the PCs get is just a series of loosely linked adventures.

It is really important that both the single scenarios AND the big plot are high quality and most importantly have well written NPCs whose actions make sense.

Now I'd be even happy with a big storyarch without completely written scenarios. If you have the main antagonists and friendly NPCs and their drives mapped and the big story done, it's easy to in single scenarios that drive the big story. Coming up with single adventure is easy, coming up with a big long campaign plot is hard...

I like the way it is now. So we get a box with a campain in a option one box=one campain. I get all what I need in it. Every adventure is set in a diferent part of the Empire and I can link those the way I like.

ffgfan said:

Maybe this fits in the idea of each adventure being a different "book" in the heroes saga, where between the "books" there is actually a lot of downtime and they travel to the different part of the world. My problem with this approach is the lack of continuity and lack of recurring NPCs, unless GM does a lot of work to write his own campaign around the official adventures.

I don't need a box full of stuff. I'd be happy to have a slim approx. 60-100 page document, which outlines the major campaign plot and moves it forward. Maybe with suggestions how to the plot hooks within the already published adventures. Every GM could build the story the way that fits their group and the GM could choose how to reveal and incorporate this bigger plot in the adventures. In its most basic form this could be just a group of well written NPCs with clear motivations, timeline what they're doing and a dozen or so major encounters/plot points during the campaign.

I think something like this would add to the value of the game a lot.

There are some good ideas in this discussion in the GM's forum:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=165&efcid=3&efidt=411294

On linking published adventures and creating the backbone of a larger narrative. I won't go into more detail here due the risk of leaving spoilers.

There's another similar discussion going on too, which has some ideas you could use.

Thanks for the link Angelic, the stuff there is really good. Still I'd love to see FFG creating the official plot (or three) for us. I'd get it. Even pdf would be sweet. Oh, well maybe I just have to start writing and hope that I don't create too many contradictions with the upcoming official adventures.

...or just work the adventures into your overarching storyline when they appear.

I don't see FFG going back and doing anything on the level of TTT. They seem to be set with the more 'encapsulated mini-campaign' boxes like we have with The Gathering Storm. It's a sad fact, but gamer attention spans (in general) for lengthy, like months long, campaigns has waned over the years.

I'm all for longer campaigns, though I think I prefer the adventures that have been published so far and the loose links that can be made between them.

What I really don't want to see is an over-arching, setting-breaking metaplot like the one that killed OWoD back in the day.

@Keltheos

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing... Big campaigns (in my group) tend to die before they can be finished... Smaller ones get finished, at least

Of course the sense of epicness you can get from something like TEW or TTT is wonderful and absolutely worth the time... I do share your sadness in that sense.

keltheos said:

But I want FFG to give me an overarching (loose) storyline. Although mentioned in the title, maybe the Pathfinder or TTT style campaigns wouldn't work as such. But a flimsy (pdf?) booklet, just describing a big arch, where the published adventures could be placed and in every adventure there would be notes how to foreshadow the upcoming events and advance the overarching storyline. FFG has a lot of talented writers and to come up with something like this shouldn't be too much of an effort.

The problem with working the official adventures into the overarching storyline of your own device is that you don't have any control over the stuff that is published. By creating this loose campaign around their upcoming releases FFG would make the whole line stronger. Just look at what happened with Descent. Where as the Vanilla box and first expansions were good, the release of Road to Legend gave all those one off games a bigger purpose and meaning. FFG did it with Descent, so why not with WHFRP too?

Mordjinn said:

Collaborative mega-campaign design (especially over the internet) is actually trickier than it seems. The more writers involved, the harder it becomes to keep everyone on the same page. You pretty much need a dedicated "plot coordinator" (possibly several) working constantly alongside the writers. For a modular campaign like the one you envision, the plot coordinator would have to be an FFG staffer since freelance contracts don't usually cover extended employment terms, and a coordinator's "productivity" is difficult to quantify. Coordinating a collaborative mega-campaign that's interlinked but also modular could easily tie up half of Jay Little's design time for a year.

Herr Arnulfe said:

Yup, I'm aware of this. That's why I said FFG has a lot of talented writers. I don't mean any collaboration stuff, just Jay to pick one or two of their "best" writers/designers (or do it himself) and contract them to write a simple storyarch, which can run in the background of their upcoming releases. I'm really not looking for anything super complicated. Just a bigger picture of what's going to happen in the next X years and how to foreshadow these events. I don't need a box or new rules or anything else but a idea of a story. I will write the story with my group, but for that I'd love to have a structures to support the single scenarios. Just a thin booklet, nothing fancy. And preferably written in a way that the people who don't wish to incorporate the bigger plot have a choice not to do so. Maybe there is a big dragon awakening and the adventure to go against it is going to be released 2014. Well, why not foreshadow it now already in an earlier adventure? Maybe the heroes meet a band of adventurers on the road, who are going to those mountains. Or something.

Why don't you do it yourself you ask? Well because I don't have ANY control over what plans FFG has for the releases and I do wish to keep on buying and GMming their release adventures without tweaking. I also understand that they might not have a longer timespan plan for the releases (more than a year or two or so) and don't wish to tie their releases down to a one specific campaign storyline. Also I'm aware that the game itself is really young and already fabulously supported, but I'm not getting younger here

Mainly what I'm looking for is continuity and FFG to give me tools to run a living and breathing (or at least seemingly so) world around my heroes. I could do it myself and probably I will, but it would be absolutely fantastic to have this kind of backup from the company.

Mordjinn said:

One approach might be publishing a booklet of short adventures (interludes and travel encounters) that can be used to connect the freelance-written adventures together (e.g. a whole book of Carrion Up the Reik -style mini-adventures). I don't think a booklet consisting of just campaign background would be very helpful unless firmly woven into the main adventures through recurrent NPCs, McGuffins etc. from outline stage to final edit.

Alternatively, one could do something like the Restless Dead campaign for v1 (i.e. unrelated, episodic one-shots plotted along a travel route with a thin metaplot plastered over top).

Herr Arnulfe said:

That could be one answer. Now that I've had a couple of days to chew upon this issue I've come to a conclusion that I'm just unable to decide a big campaign goal for my group and this leads me to want someone from the outside (FFG) to tell me exactly what's going to happen. Also I'm too lazy to think many adventures ahead and therefore all the cool foreshadowing stuff and kind of "oh, so that's what the old man was rambling about three adventures ago" - moments don't happen

I just better get off my butt and start writing.