Example of Tailoring A Campaign: My Summer Vacation Game

I've recently experienced a severe stall in my Silver Gull campaign.. a couple of my players suffer from chronic illnesses that have been bad lately, and they haven't been able to make it. While my campaign is normally run in one to one time, my players aren't really interested in playing unless they have the full group available. Another of my players has a psychological block when it comes to trying to run multiple characters at once. He simply isn't able to do it, and so it doesn't want to start anything on the side. 

The end result is that my players have needed to move to a pause time model of play, and then we have been unable to play simply because some of my players are being too sick.

I'm not willing to give up on the Silver Gull. This campaign has been one of the most enjoyable I've ever run. And, in spite of stalls and brakes, the player characters are now sitting between 7th and 10th level depending on class. They have intrigues, long term goals, romances, sworn enemies, holy missions, and are building towards a dominion now. 

But I get the feeling that things are not going to work themselves out for another few months.

And so, I've decided that for the Summer I'm going to be running something a little different. And this is where tailoring your game to the campaign is absolutely vital.

Setting Goals

What I want from this Summer: 

• Is a campaign that runs once or twice a week,
• I want sessions that run between two and three hours.
• I want a large cast of easily tracked characters
• I would like to have low prep
  
• And I want to run it as a semi-open table. People I've gained with before and who I have enjoyed playing with we'll all be receiving invites.

What I Will Do to Meet Them

Every adventure will be designed to be played in a single night. And I will run something akin to one to one time between sessions.

I have chosen Hot Springs Island as my basis for the campaign. His campaign has been on my gaming bucket list for a while. I ran a four session campaign in it that sadly ended with a TPK about a year ago and I'm dying to try something a little more complete. Using a big module like HSI cuts way back on my prep work. The tables and locations in The Dark of Hot Springs Island can do most of the heavy lifting for me.

And I will be using Swords & Wizardry Complete (Revised) as my game system of choice, it is still recognizably Dungeons & Dragons, and players from almost any table I have ever played at would be instantly familiar with the games basic mechanics. His also elegantly incomplete, as Travis Miller once put it: the game has so few formalized rules, and so much is left up to imagination and logic and reason, that it feels relaxing and open compared to more modern iterations of Dungeons &Dragons, which have far too many rules for my taste.

If I'm going to pull this off, speed needs to be one of my watch words. I need a game where I never have to look at a rule book for more than a few seconds, and where I can find everything I need very quickly. S&W will serve me well there, also.

It also does require a few simple modifications to HSI to work: 

Tailoring the Game to the Desired Experience

I have several requirements to meet to make this campaign work as desired:

• In-game and out-game methods of allowing PCs to drop in and out easily.
• A game geared for low level play.
• An easy way go give the layers things to do for each session.

First, I need players to be able to easily get on and off the island, and have a town where it's easy to recruit new player characters, hirelings, and henchmen. For that reason, I will be putting a town run by the Martell Company on an island that is only 4 hours of sailing away, close enough that clear characters who set out for Dawn will arrive in mid-morning, and if they wish to leave the island, their characters will be available then a couple of days if they want to play them again. 

This way, the island is close, but not so close that events on the island have an immediate effect on the townsfolk. And puts the player characters outside the magical cloak and feel that protects hot springs Island from being seen by outsiders.

(I think I will call the town Tanaroa as a tip of the hat to the Isle of Dread, the classic D&D module that is one of the major inspirations for hot springs island.)

To keep the game moving, I will also be creating a few and PC parties at, like the adventurers from Orhan in my Silver Gull campaign, will be getting themselves entangled in affairs, and doing things in the background. Much of what they will be doing, is simply exploring jungle hexes, and bringing back rumors of locations of interest.

This will make sure that given the constraints an open table places on you, that the players will always have clues as something they can do in a single session.

Likewise, I will have , the leader of the colony have his own agenda. One that will become tangled up with local factions as information gets fed back to the colony both by the player characters and the NPC parties.

One of the big prep things I'm going to have to do for Hot Springs Island is set up all of the monsters. HSI has its own bestiary of nearly 60 different monsters that are found on the island, a little more if you also stand out major NPCs.

While the game strongly plays into specific Dungeons & Dragons conventions, the module remains essentially system agnostic. Or, at the very least, edition agnostic. And part of that is accomplished by simply not offering stats or mechanics for the monsters.  Many people view this as a weakness of the module, and I've said so myself. 

However, also an opportunity: I am able to calibrate the difficulty of the monsters on Hot Springs Island to the needs of my campaign. With an open cable, there will always be low-level player characters floating around. I will honestly be surprised if I have a session in the first month where there isn't at least one first level PC in the mix.

If I were to try to convert the monsters in the setting from close analogs, such as using the AD&D2e Monstrous Manual Mephits for the elemental imps of the island, or using a Spirit Naga to stand in for HSI's Muttering Serpent, the islands monster population would turn the setting into  an absolute meat grinder. Which is not at all but I'm hoping for.

Instead, I'm down-scaling some of the monsters with the assumption that the campaign will never see PCs much over level 5. Many of the lower powered monsters like the Bone Wydarr, Zip Birds, Imps, and Orange Sludges can be kept down to 1-2 HD to make it possible for the PCs to experience these monsters without all going home in a body bag.

Unfortunately, most OSR adaptations of Hot Springs Island I have seen so far tend to keep the monsters pretty high-level and expect PCs won't be coming to the Island until level 4 or 5. Not starting out at level 1. I have, as of the writing of the article done most of this work.

Getting the Word Out

Once I had the basic notions of the campaign, I wrote up a campaign pitch. In this case, I wanted to emphasize the open table, casual play, and my big goals. I also wanted to make sure that players had an overview of Hot Springs Island and its more risque themes, so I wouldn't blindside anyone.And I wanted to make sure they knew what I was expecting from them, as well.

Here's an edited version of my pitch document.

I feel that this offers a pretty solid overview of what I am hoping to accomplish it and how, gives players a sense of the content, and establishes a bit about the play culture.