Fanmade scenarios - a suggestion and a request

By Konrad von Richtmark, in Battles of Westeros

Few things increase the commercial life of a product as much as proper post-release support, and few forms of such support are as cost-effective as harnessing the creative power of the player community. Since scenario play is the core of BoW, more scenarios is more, and it's something the player community should be well capable of giving a hand with.

Would FFG be willing to give some kind of "official" support to community scenario-making? Hosting fanmade scenarios (evaluated for goodness, of course) in the support section of the BoW webpage would be a natural way of doing it. Though, it would be neat, user-friendly and consistent to have the scenarios in the same graphical format as the officially released scenarios. Regarding this I have two questions. First, do you at FFG use some utility specially made to make BoW scenarios? If so, could it be released to the community? It would facilitate the making of scenarios, and I can't think of any commercial or other loss for FFG that could follow from doing so. Second, if the first can't be done, would it be too much to get someone from FFG to convert fanmade scenarios to the official format?

How about holding a scenario design contest? The Warhammer 40.000 RPG crew of FFG have done fan contribution contests from time to time, with great success, publishing the top few entries on the website.

This is a great idea, particularly since the game needs more scenarios that utilize both of the currently available expansions.

I'd third this suggestion. Tides of Iron has this and of course Memoir '44 is the king in fanmade scenarios. Of course Memoir '44 may be the only Commands and Colors game with enough of an online community to make it worth developing a scenario generator. But if that is so then I'd still suggest releasing a PDF template with images that would allow us to at least photoshop our own scenarios and then submit them.

Not only would fan made scenarios give the game a feeling of being supported and active it would ALSO make it easier to form an online community around the game as it would give us something to DO together and comment on.

Make that a 4th and counting. Any game of this format would benefit from it. You won't stop fans sharing their favourite scenarios on other sites, so it makes sense for FFG to encourage it on theirs. It has worked before, and think of the wealth of ideas they would create right in their own backyard. I remember saying very early on, that a lot of scenarios will come out of the skirmish rules. I personally haven't used them yet, as official scenarios are still keeping me busy - not to mention new rules - but I bet some really exciting, balenced and interesting scenarios will be randomly produced that people would love to share. I expect you could even find an obscure mention in the books to make it almost factual. Bring it on! Cheers!

hmmm, good idea! i will try develop something as this in the weekend