What are your plans for your campaign(s) this coming year?

Once I'm done being a player in the Blackfire Pass campaign, we're getting back to regular play (with lower combat characters). I've not run any of the "cult" adventures, so I think we're headed that direction. Characters are about at 15 advances though and I'm itching to get back to 1st career characters so I may start anew depending on player turnover.

jh

So far:

Keep the current group going. With all the free & official adventures that are available, I try to weave several together, giving each player something that is written to his character. I'm still working through that

Maybe if I can convince somebody to take up GMing for a few sessions, I could give playing this edition a shot too

Holding ideas loosely depending on Player preferences and possibility of character death.

Having run most published stuff (Black Fire Pass less fun since no dwarves and the Omens of War and Lure of Power adventures not yet) and being into using older material/my own creations it will be a weave of things that "hit" player flags taking their personal stories and agendas into play, possibly via some portion of Thousand Thrones.

Players are approaching 50th advance so the high level box much awaited. A Thousand Thronish "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" era seems appropriate (perhaps with the Yeats poem warhammerized as a prophecy). I've been having "omens of a bad year" appear as 2521 comes to an end.

We've started on TEW, and my players are reaching the end of SoB, with their 4th advancement taken.

TEW keeps amazing me, GM'd 3 times (on my 4th), and I have yet to see a group approach SoB the same way.

While my current group roleplayed a lot, this was at cost of investigation, and I could start to feel their frustration of not getting any where, so I did something I've never done before, told my players to stop for 10 minutes, and draw up what they knew, and what they suspected etc... so they could make an actual plan. Because they were not getting anywhere

I believe in the Gumshoe RPG addage: The players should never be deprived of any crucial clue. Like you did, I give them some time to recoup what they know and then set them on a path again with a, "So you've checked out all these leads. Would you like to check out that bit about the old drunkard that was briefly mentioned by the innkeeper or head to the city watch station to see if they've learned anything new?"

The core of my group has completed Shadows over Bogenhafen as a lead in to The Gathering Storm. Campaign-wise it's tough to predict where things evolve to from there. Things could end with TGS or lead into another Ubersreik-based campaign. My group (and I'm the worst) suffers from gamer ADD, so who it's predict where we will be more than a few months from now.

Spivo, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one there. In my case, it's definitely a product of group size. My old group was 3-5 Call of Cthulhu investigators was an investigating machine. Never had any worries. Suddenly, we added a few D&D vets and switched to fantasy setting and decision-making and deductive reasoning became more of a challenge without these "investigation rally steps".

Well, I don't like helping players, and SoB events happens no matter what, so even if they don't solve anything events will take place.

But I cut in due to two aspects:

1) They'd miss out on half of SoB, never meet Marius, never be in the warehouse, etc...

2) The characters had been in SoB 3-4 days time, which is roughly 60 hours of constant involvement. But the players had only been there 3 times 4-5 hour's, with 2 weeks in between. So it's only natural the players miss elements, which their characters likely wouldn't.

I should add, that at the point where I cut through, they did not even know how Teugen or Steinhägger looked liked!!!

They'd been to the basement, but after that they'd spend 2 days of in-game time trying to get into Steinhäggers warehouse, never actually seeing him...

We had tons of roleplaying fun, but no real progress... they'd missed pretty much all major events, including the magisters illness and such.

Had I just let events take place, I think they'd feel slightly frustrated: "Suddenly you all awake to panic in the town, demons roaming the streets, and in the distance, down near the docks, you see a massive pink being speewing pink flames on the street...".

Now they're back on track, and we had a very fitting cliff-hanger with Marius wanting to talk to them after the meeting in Adel-Ring.

Spivo, I think in this case, so certainly did the right thing and based on your earlier post . . . you did not directly intervene to share info. It sounds like you took a time out and helped them refocus is all. Personally, I would not reveal new information or give them the old "you're getting warmer . . . warmer" kind of talk, but helping train a group to work together and to think with an investigative mindset can become necessary, in my experience. The good news is that I have had to do a lot less of this lately.

Sounds like your "investigative rally step" was very successful and got their focus where it needed to be. Desperate times call for desperate measures and you did what was appropriate IMO to help make the game meaningful and fun.

(Side note: After running three different groups through Shadows, none have ever discovered the magistrate's illness)

Sorry, we seem to have highjacked the thread a bit. I am very interested, as well, to here what campaigns other GMs have for the coming year.

I've got two campaigns going right now. Our Warhammer campaign is based in Stirland with forays into Sylvania. The group is trying to reclaim an ancestral barony inside the province, so the characters are either natives of the barony, or related in some way to said natives. For example, one character is the son of the former baron while another character is his retainer. I've been weaving some D&D modules throughout the storyline and converting them over to the Warhammer world has been fun. The first one we did was Night of the Walking Dead (Ravenloft) and now they are on Against the Cult of the Reptile God (the cult in the village is a Slaaneshi cult charmed into obedience by a demon instead of the cult being charmed followers of a naga as they are in the original). Next up will be some Warhammer short scenarios. It's been fun watching the group take shape. We're doing a cast of characters, so each person has three different characters that they can rotate between scenarios, each with their own subplots and relationships.

My other campaign is a Dark Sun campaign using the Warhammer rules. The characters are all part of a small merchant house and are in Tyr building their dynasty. The game takes place before the fall of Kalak and continues on through. The chaos of his death should provide a lot of opportunity for intrigue, dirty politics, and some actual muscling back and forth between merchant houses, criminal enterprises, desperate templars, and opportunistic nobles. Speaking of which, the core Warhammer system makes an awesome universal rpg. It's easy to add in and take away specific rules. For example, we got rid of corruption and insanity since those seem much more Warhammer than Dark Sun, but we added in psionics, poisons, defiling magic, and terrain hazards and arranged the cards in spell lists to reflect the different caster types in the setting. The only real work that needed to be done was creating the races, careers, and some new action cards and you only really need to create what you are going to use. Well rewarding and lots of fun!

I have started recently fresh in Warhammer 3rd and found 3 former colleagues of role-playing newbies to form a dwarf-only group. We started with “Love or Money” from "Plundered Vaults" 2nd Edition. At the end when they kill the chaos spawn and bad guy, he drops a letter which he wanted to send to a person Named “Herr A.” and a piece of broken stone with some old Runes on it.
So actually I build in two leads. The first might lead to Lord Aschaffenburg, the second into the Doomstone Campaign or a several adventure chase of the lost parts of the dwarven map through Karak Varn.
The map is actually from the Hero Quest supplemental, “Kellars Keep” which was named “Karak Varn” in german. There it was named Grins Map and part of the Campaign.

Picture here at boardgamegeek, the down right corner.
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/421321/the-thomson-boys-tiptoeing-through-the-dwarven-d

Now we are resting a "Rough night at the 3 Feathers inn" and then we maybe go back to Karak Azgaraz to read the Old Runes on the Stone Tablet.

Ha!

Just found the map in the german Heroquest Wiki. For Licence see their page.

http://www.hq-wiki.de/wiki/Bild:Grins_Landkarte.jpg

This year we'll start playing my custom campaign using all the new material

• Prelude - the chase (starting in median res from where we left of in Eye for an eye, that we played as the very first sce
• Flashback: Winds of Change (Liber Mutatis)
• Horror of Hugeldal (Liber Infectus)
• The Edge of night
• Mirror of Desire (Liber Ecstatica)
• Revenant
• The Gathering Storm.
• Harrower of the Thanes (Black Fire Pass)
• The Witch's Song
• Crimson Rain (Liber Carnagia)

I've written the scenarios together to a big campaign with a general plot running through the entire campaign. I won't release this as I've done it in danish and because it's tailored very specifically to my group.

What kinds of careers are you GMs hoping your players will take?

I'm currently a player in Blackfire Pass, and I am going to try to steer future pcs away from heavy combat/armored careers when I start running again in February. Although all of my campaigns have a fair amount of monsters thrown at them, I prefer more of a "lingering dread" about combat.

With my current combat-heavy dwarf Ironbroken, I have zero fear of anything..whatsoever. I don't have to worry about stress, insanity, wounds, permanent wounds, mutation, corruption, disease (ok maybe swimming..a little). Also, since the career itself doesn't lend a lot of ideas towards variance in character personality, it's kind of been an experience trying to make my Superbreaker into something more than her tough exterior.

What I've done in the past to get players to diversify is to review how insanity works and stress that there will be a lot of social and sneaking checks. I always tell my players that every combat could be their last and that there is ALWAYS an alternative or two to fighting (sometimes it involves shooting your companion in the leg and leaving him as bait!)

This makes me jealous of Gallows' schedule. I may copy it.

jh

I'm working on a followup to Underworld Rising which we wrapped up before the holiday.

The next part is a Keep on the Borderlands style sandbox, called Buried but not Forgotten . It's set in the small Ostland town of Bökenhof, which borders the Forrest of Shadows. Instead of having a series of adventures that happen in succession, the players are given a few plot hooks and then can freely pursue them or head out and explore the forrest on their own (which contains a number of unknown locations, as well as more plot hooks). Certain events that demand attention will still occur on their own timetable, but they really only come to the forefront when the players show interest in them (rather than having the unspoken "this is the adventure" marker that tells the players to focus on it).

I'm also trying to make the narrative a little more character-motivated. I'd rather more instances of a PC approaching the rest of the party because they need something done than solely having NPCs do so.

My campaign is very much sandbox, centered around Ubersreich and the Stromdorf area, where players aquire a small fort at some point, that they can manage and possibly rise up through nobility. The fort is their home base giving them increasing benefits and resposibilities and posing challenges and rewards. The official scenarios are woven into this base sandbox template for the campaign.

Emirikol said:

Vis a vis your Black Fire Pass comment, I'm fortunate that no one has been exploring those options at my table. My houserules made Ironbreaker not available as a starter career anyway "right out of the box' and we have no dwarfs (though I suspect 2 of 4 players would take a dwarf as next character if someone died just because they seem to fit warhammer so well). The Ironbreaker might just "vanish" from the deck of options all together and I don't think the suicidal Troll Slayer arc wouldn't really appeal to any of my players. If I got a dwarf I hope for an Engineer buidling contraptions etc.

I don't expect the Wizard or Priest to do other than continue on those tracks, particularly with Hero's Call coming out. I allow each to dabble in "consistent alernative careers" and hope they continue to do that as it enriches story (Apothecary and Investigator for example).

I'm hoping that the Charlatan with social ambitions tries to fake or break his way into nobility with a noble oriented career - that's the path player seems to be on (he's roleplayed paying a down and out noble to teach him social graces) and its a fun one that I'm catering to with plot lines that are coming up (he's a noble's bastard child abandoned to his fate who is determined to confront dad, who is currently childless).

There's a recognition by players that the group is weak on social actions and Fellowship - the Charlatan is the Face for the group, which is interesting as he started as a Ratcatcher but is now the "Gentleman and his dog" - neither the Priest nor Wizard is really comfortable having him "represent them".

I mostly want them to take careers that go down those roads more representing different actual connections in the world - I don't want boatman to mean those mechanical options, I want it to mean you've bought a boat and are tyring to make money on the river. The next two adventures will have substantial NPC interaction stuff in them (along with chances to fight things of course) so I hope to see some musing different players have made about needing to get more social actually come to fruition. The Wood Elf who's been mostly scout/hunter/waywatchery so far is most likely to experiment I think.

I also plan on updating my Interlude rules with the option of "earning some money" to make it more profitable to be in a "money makng career" and do well at it.

Kill ALL the PC's.

Actually no, I've already done that. The rest of the group have made themselves much less murder-able, so I guess at this stage I'm holding back the grim spectre of death to see what people do.

That said, next session has a zombie hoard in it. *glee*

My group has the following careers:

A Kislevite soldier (knight wannabe)

A dwarf thug (may end up as a slayer)

A human student (out to see the world, his career may go anywhere)

A human Jade Order wizard (dedicated to the order)

Better descriptions can be found here, but the players have made some very interresting and colourful characters : http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=165&efcid=3&efidt=587379

AFter changing my house rules to not use the higher lethality rules I have cut down on damage. What this does is that is really makes the NPCs with high toughness and soak MUCH harder. Damage on the higher lethality optional rules was usually after soak, meaning it was pure wounds. I have stripped everything that I had to deal extra damage. This means that where the iron breaker on our old campaign would do 18-21 damage to a stone troll troll, he would now only do 15-18 damage. After soak that's a difference of 9-12 damage in the old system and 6-9 in the new system. That's potentially half damage in some instances. That said my trolls and giants all have +3 toughness and +50% wounds as I find them too weak. That's a general rule I'm using with all special creatures/NPCs - just add 3 toughness and 50% wounds. The difference for me then is 6-9 damage in the old system and 3-6 damage in the new system. A major difference by removing that optional rules.

This forces the players into alternative strategies. To buy cards that lower soak, to buy other cards that somehow debuff etc. It opens up the game for more variety in combat. And trolls aren't killed in two swings by an angry dwarf.

Emirikol said:

That line makes me sad.

This is a perception/expectation issue, not a career issue.

I kept my interlude money making rules simple: "You can make money if you have tradecraft trained." Then I put some silver piece amount of gain or loss in there depending on dice rolls (in my house rulebook).

dl.dropbox.com/u/167876/WFRP3%20HAFNER%20Houserules%20v8.pdf

jh