Are campiagn planners worht it?

[TheAuldGrump]

Hmmm...not sure, I have been wanting to run an Iron Kingdoms game, is the Campaign planner worth it for published settings?. I've read the description of the planner , just wondering if it's worth the $5...but then again it is only $5.

Heh, I use the Campaign Planners for my IK game.

A lot.

Some sheets see use every session, such as the Session History sheet, the encounter sheets, etc. Some are in the first planner, others are in the second or third, and all are in the Deluxe.

If you intend to print 'em out and use 'em then the Deluxe may be the way to go, but if you are going to fill them out on the computer then get each of them individually, since that way you get the fillable forms.

For me they are a way to impose order on what would otherwise be formless chaos in my binders.

The Auld Grump

 

[philreed]

Heh, I use the Campaign Planners for my IK game.

A lot.

Sounds like they work just fine for the Iron Kingdoms. But then, they should work with any campaign setting.

 

[BSF]

I have banned halflings, modified gnomes, and marginalized half-breeds. I've also added hobgoblins as a major PC race, along with trolls (not RAW, think Vikings), yeti, and whisper gnomes. Multiple nations of elves, dwarves, and hobgoblins exists and are nearly as spread out as human nations. The paladin, cleric, and sorcerer are gone but I've added about half of the "Complete" classes, along with the XPH classes, the artificer, and two homebrew classes (priest and noble).

I'm guessing the planners won't be of much use to me. Is that likely true?

That depends. Allow me to explain why I might disagree with Phil here.

Do you already have all of these changes fully documented and put together for your players? Or are you still in the stages of thinking out and documenting these changes?

If you have already done all the footwork, certain portions of the campaign planners will be less useful. If your notes are scattered to the four winds, the campaign planners might help you consolidate and organize!

As TheAuldGrump says, there are a lot of sheets that could still be useful for you. There is a lot of good material in the planners. But if you are already heavily organized, there are a lot of forms that will be less useful to you.

 

[Mercule]

If you have already done all the footwork, certain portions of the campaign planners will be less useful. If your notes are scattered to the four winds, the campaign planners might help you consolidate and organize!

Door #2, Wink. For a 20+ year-running setting, it amazes even me how crappy my documentation is. That's gotten even worse with 3E and fitting (new) ideas into the new mechanics.

I need a system that works for bastardized house rules, new races, new classes, excluded races and classes, nations, NPCs, deities, pantheons (I have four, plus some extraneous gods), cities, groups, etc. Basically, I'm running a d20 fantasy game slightly further removed from D&D RAW as DragonLance (at least from my purusing of the book).

 

[Aus_Snow]

Well IME, Campaign Planner I, II & III have been really useful, both on the notebook PC and selectively printed - more the latter though, these days. My brief obsession with digital tabletop GMing has been officially over for a while now.

I run some pretty heavily house-ruled games, for the record. And these pdf's still help, a lot.

 

[philreed]

I think out of all of the PDFs I've created the Campaign Planners see the most actual, game session use. It makes me very happy to hear that the products are useful to people.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Three other things the Planners are good for - writing down the names of Inns, Town, and Contacts that were created on the fly (because if you forget about them the players will want to talk to that contact they met in that inn in some town or other...)

And emergency planning in the bathroom when the PCs go off in a direction that you had not planned on. (Some people can plan on the fly, I prefer to plan things out ahead of time...) This works well with Bard's Productions Common Grounds series.

And third - bring them along so you can do some quick, but organised noted while at fast food restaurants etc.

All of these have occured in my games.

The Auld Grump

 

[carpedavid]

I just picked up the True20 Campaign Planner for one of my players who is running a True20 campaign. So far, he seems to be pretty excited about it. There were portions that he immediately found useful, and other portions that he knows he's going to use in the future.

I'd recommend them to anyone who's in the process of getting their campaign organized.

 

[philreed]

I'd recommend them to anyone who's in the process of getting their campaign organized.

Agreed. I think a very important note regarding the various Campaign Planners is:

Do not buy one if you are not actually running a campaign. Seriously. I be a lot happier if the only people buying these products were either in a campaign (as a player -- since they can be useful) or running one as a GM.

If all you do is buy game products to read as fiction do not buy a Campaign Planner. Please.

(Note: The use of You isn't targeted at anyone specific. I've just noticed that anyone not actually playing gets upset when the try to treat a Campaign Planner like a work of fiction.)

 

[Man-thing]

Do not buy one if you don't want forms to fill out your information on is a good guideline.

People buying rpg products as fiction should look at "Behind the Spells:Magic Missile" or "DM's Directory of Demiplanes".