Do you track history within your games?
- Thread starter megamania
- Start date
jmucchiello
Hero
Of course, but a word of warning about what a friend of mine did. Over 12 or so years with 3-4 campaigns, his timelines always had an event within 5 to 200 years before the start of the campaign: the Ogre/Centaur wars. Whether it was intruding ogres on centaur lands or imperial centaurs driving back the ogres or even the team of ogres and centaurs against the humans, the war was there. It became a running gag to find remnants of the war in his latest/greatest campaign setting even if he left it off the campaign background.
IOW, try to keep that history fresh if you move on to another campaign setting.
IOW, try to keep that history fresh if you move on to another campaign setting.
barsoomcore
Unattainable Ideal
For me, a large part of the fun of a campaign is the history, which I break into two parts (being a wanna-be screenwriter):
The Backstory -- the history that happened BEFORE the campaign started, how the world got into the fix it's currently in. I tend to be over-ambitious on this stuff, and end up with thousands of years of not-very-well-defined historical progress, but it's fun. I try to set things up so that as the campaign begins, there's half-a-dozen forces in the midst of motion, and bad things erupting all over the place.
The "Actual" Story -- the story that takes place during the campaign, both in terms of what the players do and what else goes on in the world around them. Keeping track of that is pretty challenging -- I usually start by making "mini-timelines" for any individuals or groups I've identified as entities worth tracking, and as the campaign progresses I just keep updating the files with whatever they're up to now. Browsing through those files on a regular basis is an important tool for my imagination as I try to dream up new adventures and stuff.
Thirteen pages seems like a lot to me, though. Mine is probably longer, but it still seems like a lot.
The Backstory -- the history that happened BEFORE the campaign started, how the world got into the fix it's currently in. I tend to be over-ambitious on this stuff, and end up with thousands of years of not-very-well-defined historical progress, but it's fun. I try to set things up so that as the campaign begins, there's half-a-dozen forces in the midst of motion, and bad things erupting all over the place.
The "Actual" Story -- the story that takes place during the campaign, both in terms of what the players do and what else goes on in the world around them. Keeping track of that is pretty challenging -- I usually start by making "mini-timelines" for any individuals or groups I've identified as entities worth tracking, and as the campaign progresses I just keep updating the files with whatever they're up to now. Browsing through those files on a regular basis is an important tool for my imagination as I try to dream up new adventures and stuff.
Thirteen pages seems like a lot to me, though. Mine is probably longer, but it still seems like a lot.
