Where is your campaign going?

[Epically]

I've introduced superpowers.

[Silveressa]

My first campaign was sort of a mini series of 20ish adventures to showcase the setting to my group and see if they wanted to do a more involved game in the setting.

It basically involved them traveling from Texas near the Mexican border, (where the players were all on vacation at a cowboy horse ranch, which worked well as a reason why the group was all together and gave them a interesting alternative transportation option) up to Alaska where one of the group had a brother who worked at a remote weather station he was sure would make for a safe zone "until things quieted down some."

The actual adventure was a lot more lengthy and in depth then I expected, especially after the attempt to swipe a Cessna from a private airport with several dead inhabitants, and the ensuing gun battle blew up the refueling truck (stray bullets from an assault rifle wielded on full auto by someone without the w.p) and nearly killed a quarter of the group made them change their plans to a ground based road trip that while taking longer, turned out to be far more fun and enjoyable in the long run.

The longer campaign is currently focused around the players trying to locate missing relatives/friends/fiancees etc.. (one of which is all the way over seas in England sadly enough) Fortunately they realize the strength in numbers and are sticking together using a "find the closest loved one first" mind set, and having all started off at a truck stop, have a mack truck to use this time around for a vehicle, although recently they seem to be on the look out for a quieter form of transportation for some odd reason.

Once they have all found their loved ones (either living or (un)dead I plan to have them hear of a scientific group working on a attempt at a cure that hopefully they'll attempt to hook up with; although currently a couple of the group are talking about the international orbital space station being a suitable safe location and staging ground to take back the planet from. (which in my game is larger, a bit more well developed and far more self sufficient then in real life)

[Severus Snape]

My first campaign was sort of a mini series of 20ish adventures to showcase the setting to my group and see if they wanted to do a more involved game in the setting.

It basically involved them traveling from Texas near the Mexican border, (where the players were all on vacation at a cowboy horse ranch, which worked well as a reason why the group was all together and gave them a interesting alternative transportation option) up to Alaska where one of the group had a brother who worked at a remote weather station he was sure would make for a safe zone "until things quieted down some."

The actual adventure was a lot more lengthy and in depth then I expected, especially after the attempt to swipe a Cessna from a private airport with several dead inhabitants, and the ensuing gun battle blew up the refueling truck (stray bullets from an assault rifle wielded on full auto by someone without the w.p) and nearly killed a quarter of the group made them change their plans to a ground based road trip that while taking longer, turned out to be far more fun and enjoyable in the long run.

The longer campaign is currently focused around the players trying to locate missing relatives/friends/fiancees etc.. (one of which is all the way over seas in England sadly enough) Fortunately they realize the strength in numbers and are sticking together using a "find the closest loved one first" mind set, and having all started off at a truck stop, have a mack truck to use this time around for a vehicle, although recently they seem to be on the look out for a quieter form of transportation for some odd reason.

Once they have all found their loved ones (either living or (un)dead I plan to have them hear of a scientific group working on a attempt at a cure that hopefully they'll attempt to hook up with; although currently a couple of the group are talking about the international orbital space station being a suitable safe location and staging ground to take back the planet from. (which in my game is larger, a bit more well developed and far more self sufficient then in real life)

This sounds like one hell of a campaign. And I'd love to keep hearing details about it. Any chance you can post the happenings for this much like Iczer is doing with his heroes campaign?

[Silveressa]

This sounds like one hell of a campaign. And I'd love to keep hearing details about it. Any chance you can post the happenings for this much like Iczer is doing with his heroes campaign?

Sure, it should be something I can manage easily enough, do you want the mini series campaign or the main campaign detailed?

[Severus Snape]

This sounds like one hell of a campaign. And I'd love to keep hearing details about it. Any chance you can post the happenings for this much like Iczer is doing with his heroes campaign?

Sure, it should be something I can manage easily enough, do you want the mini series campaign or the main campaign detailed?

If I've got a choice, I'll take C - all of the above. But whichever one is easiest for you to do is fine by me. I just love reading about what happens in campaigns.

[Silveressa]

And now there is no campaign and probably never will be again.

Sorry to hear that, what happened to kill it off?

If I've got a choice, I'll take C - all of the above. But whichever one is easiest for you to do is fine by me. I just love reading about what happens in campaigns.

LoL, I feel in an obliging mood today so sure, why not?

I'll start up a couple threads later on tonight around 1amish, one for each campaign. (rather rude/inappropriate to hijack this one) and update as desired, in the mean time I'll toss elsewhere up a BTS 2nd edition fiction I'm slowly in the process of working on.

Edit: Link to the fiction here: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=116282

[Silveressa]

I'll start up a couple threads later on tonight around 1amish, one for each campaign.

Update:

And here is the first thread:

viewtopic.php?uid=36590&f=77&t=116300&start=0

[Silveressa]

Moved on to other things and it is harder and harder to get my gamers to play Palladium.

Perhaps try converting the setting to another rule system, such as the Cortex system? It's what I had to do to draw my group back to the table for my second DR campaign, and tbh the game plays 100x better & faster with Cortex Rules then it does with Palladium's. (they had major issues with a .9mm round point blank to the chest doing less damage to a regular human then a baseball bat swung by someone with a 17 P.S, which was understandable, or how a basic Karate kick from someone with a p.s of only 10 did the same amount of damage as a .9mm (2d6) and a leap kick does as much as a .45 caliber/.357 magnum pistol round! (3d8/4d6)

These days with the growing dissatisfaction of Palladium's aged rule system there's lot of conversion notes out there on how to convert the Palladium system to Cortex, d20, , Shadowrun, and others so with a little digging it shouldn't be hard to find conversion rules for the system of your choice and likely a good portion of the conversion process already done for you.

[MaxxSterling]

You know what I do when people won't play palladium or rifts. I disown them and get a new group. And I tell them that suck it hard too, so they know that when they are calling me names later playing their stupid little sell out D&D canned crap, that I'm still on their minds. Only really had it happen twice, and believe it or not, if you're really willing to look, at the expense of looking like a lamer, you can find gamers almost anywhere, and there's always tabletop virgins willing to give it a go. Remember, FPS on xbox are a gateway drug in the occult... I mean table top gaming.

[MaxxSterling]

Uh oh. You'd be kicked out of my group.

[psam_rage]

I have two Dead Reign games nearly ready to roll, I just need to find the time and room to run them. The first is power power gauging game (So I don't slaughter the players in the main), the prompt is the players are part of a gang called the New York Shepherds and, you guessed it, they run into New York and guide people out, their first goal will be to guide out a group they start with out, then they'll go back in to save that one ex Brulyx acolyte (I don't feel like hunting down my copy of R40 right now to find his name).

My other game is going to be an impromptu Z-day game starting in Greensboro NC, all the characters are civil servants, a cop, paramedic, and a firefighter. (For those who know the area, their first safe house will likely be the Fire-station near the womens hospital on Westover Terrace.)

[Aaryq]

I ran a zombie campaign long before dead reign came out. The players started out in western ND and started strong. They raided a few stores and barely survived a raid on a barely manned military base. After that, they wanted just to hole up, wait, and shoot zombies for sport...long story short to break it up, they started receiving HAM radio transmissions from the Montana Rockies about some city that the military has a secure area, others said there was a cure, and the entire rumour mill but nobody from this city transmits anything. They start debating what to do. Well when they're debating, an NPC sees her boyfriend outside of their perimiter and lets him in. He starts to turn and the main gate ends up getting shot to bits (no WP's for the hardware they're running and a few natural 1's they rolled) and here come the zombies. They retreat while grabbing what they can and started heading towards Montana.
The town was nothing special, basically what they had in ND except they had about 20x as many people and weren't taking survivors so they were turned away. By the time they got there (lots of fun stuff in between) we were playing that so infrequently it just kind of petered off...

[Silveressa]

Part of the trick is to keep the campaign fresh and moving, without sinking into a repetition of events. Raiding a gas station or grocery store will be fun/suspenseful the first two or three times they do it, but after that the players will have a pretty good idea what to expect in these places and begin to lose interest in playing through the details of looting yet another convenience store for necessities.

The best way to keep them from getting bored is to make sure there's never such a thing as "just another store" when they need to scavenge for supplies. Make sure to mix up the weather, the terrain, the state of the building, and potential for other threats, from a pack of wild dogs, to structural damage threatening to dump part of the first floor into the basement. As long as each looting encounter is kept sufficiently different from the one before it the group and GM will be able to maintain their interest.

The other easier solution is to simply gloss over unimportant scavenging and only focus on the events if they directly matter to the adventure at hand or would be otherwise unique and different from the norm. If as Gm you know there's no zombies or other threats inside the gas station there's really no sense role-playing through the encounter and can just summarize what they got from the looting and move on with the adventure and thus keep the pacing and excitement high.