Forum > Fantasy Adventures

Fantasy Wargame Campaign Building

(1/3) > >>

horridperson:
For the past couple weeks I'd been discussing the possibility of building a wargaming campaign in a DIY fantasy world.  I ended up reading about Tony Bath's Hyperborea campaign and found the ideas a great inspiration even if the implementation felt somewhat dated.   I'm early to task and just drafted a design/style guide for myself to get me  through the early stages of "construction'.  This leaves me with a collection of "big ideas" as a framework but, quite a lot of holes to fill.  I have  Tony Bath's, Setting Up a Wargames Campaign for guidance and was wondering if anyone might have any insights from their own experiences or recommendations for further reading on the subject that might be helpful.  The subject is a departure from what I typically blog about but it's of interest to me so I thought I would gather the information HERE.

Oldben1:
Will you be playing solo?  Are you interested in an rpg feel?

lethallee61:
Coming from a strong RPG design background myself, I’m interested to follow this thread and your continuing thought process through your blog.

You seem to be asking the right questions - historical or fantastical, magic heavy or light, non-human races or not and so on.

One other question I always ask myself is how technologically advanced is the setting? Are we talking Bronze Age, dark ages, medieval or late medieval? Has blackpowder been discovered etc?

Apart from that, and this follows on from Oldben1’s question, who is the setting designed for? If it’s for a group of players, then you may also have to consider their own preferences. No point building it if they aren’t going to come. I once spent many weeks designing a wargame setting (including creating fake newspapers to set the mood), only to find that the various players likely to be involved didn’t even bother to read them.

You may also need to consider miniature choices available, terrain requirements and other practical elements.

In terms of further reading, there was a set of campaign rules published in the White Dwarf magazine about 20 years ago - for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the setting (it wasn’t the Albion or Storm of Chaos setting) but I’m sure it was based on a large island. Players all started with a number of territories and battle results determined bonuses or penalties as the campaign progressed. We modified them for games of 40K but I remember it worked pretty well.

I wish you luck. Happy to elaborate on anything as you progress.  :)

dadlamassu:
We have run many campaigns in our fantasy world of Morval Earth morvalearth.co.UK and several other settings. We based our area on Middle Earth and a mixture of the Dark Ages and Medieval times.

Our maps are drawn using Campaign Cartographer software and the skills of John Mumford. We decided that the campaign map should reflect a version of real life reduced to ease table top creation.I

The states, realms and nations reflect our collection of figures and over the past 40 odd years we have added tribes, expanded the history as required.

We started off with one main state and its immediate neighbours in some detail. We chose the easy ones. The medieval and Tolkien based orcish opposition. Then we fleshed out the others - amazons, dwarves, elves, chaotics ext as required or as a new range added ideas from the figures.

John Mumford wrote up one of our campaigns and published it as th Dame Morgana Trilogy which included our rules and a lot of campaign background.

Citizen Sade:
The White Dwarf campaign you mention sounds like the Thorkinson’s Island one. As it happens, the chaps behind the Sowing Dragons’ Teeth revisited it for this year’s BOYL. They kindly posted details here https://sowingdragonsteeth.com/draft-rules-wfb-campaign/

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page