The question for Day 15 of RPGaDay is what was my longest campaign played?
Having played for over thirty years, I’m can vaguely recall some long-running D&D campaigns from my youth, but it’s so long ago, nothing specific comes to mind. Instead, in recent memory the longest campaign I ran was about 5 years ago, a Savage Worlds home-brewed version of Mouse Guard that ran for almost two years.
I loved the graphic novels and the Mouse Guard RPG was simply gorgeous, but some of the mechanics of the Burning Wheel system, even when simplified for Mouse Guard, just didn’t work for me. Savage Worlds probably wasn’t the best foundation given the setting, but it wound up working quite well.
The Quest for Aquilla began following the second book in the graphic novels and then I used a reference from Umberto Eco’s Baudolino (an amazing read, highly recommended for anyone who loves historical fiction) to the legend of Prestor John to launch a series of events.
Following the long and difficult winter of 1152, the Guard’s resources are pushed to the breaking point. The Territories are fracturing, despite the defeat of Midnight’s attempted coup, there are still those who support his ideas and some cities are turning away from the Guard. Gwendolyn, Matriarch of the Guard is desperate. Then, like a ray of hope, an impossible letter arrives from the apocryphal King Praetor Jon, turning everything on its head.
The campaign followed the heroes as they travelled across the sea to find the legendary Praetor Jon, to rescue the mouse Territories. This epic journey culminates in actually finding him (though not as expected), despite the original letter having been a fake to divert attention while a real coup again swept the Territories.
The heroes returned to find the Territories under the control of a pretender king and then had to foment rebellion in hopes of overthrowing the new rulers, finally facing them in battle, only to fail and then have to regroup and try again.
The campaign was epic in all respects and presented major challenges to the players. It was in some ways, like the Game of Thrones for mice, combined with the treacherous journeys of the Fellowship of the Ring.
My favourite part of running it using the Mouse Guard setting was the simplicity of it all. Very little magic (if any), very simple settings, but incredibly complex motivations, interactions and challenges. It was a great time!
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
For the vast majority of my gaming, our group(s) had always switched gears after about two to three months. It wasn’t until an eleven month Spycraft game that I had ever considered long campaigns. Then just recently we went for a two year Rise of the Runelords. Sheesh!
I think I simply like the short campaigns – more games and genres that way, I guess.
Thinking back over the last six years or so, I tend to try to run campaigns that span about a year, sometimes they fail after only a few months, but that’s about the average and then a lot of one-shots in between. I don’t think I could keep interested if it went on for years and I agree, more games and genres with shorter campaigns.