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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galfridus" data-source="post: 135773" data-attributes="member: 119">The best campaign I ever ran only lasted a semester of college. I called it the "Thieves' World Campaign", but it had nothing to do with the similarly-named books. The PCs formed a majority on the council of a large city's thieves' guild, and the campaign was centered around them running the guild rather than going on adventures.The campaign started with the apparent death of the guild's Grandmaster; what had formerly been his advisory Council suddenly had to step up and start running things. The players had a wonderful discussion about how to do this (and how to present it to the guild!), followed by a wonderful swearing-in ceremony where most members swore loyalty to the new leaders.Of course, thieves being thieves, things quickly turned sour. One of the PCs, angry over the kidnapping of his wife, created a secret alternate persona and started threatening and killing people all over the city, guildmembers and civilians alike. Before long he was the Big Bad Villain of the game -- and the other players didn't know it! The player in question made some wonderful speeches ("We don't know anything about this guy! For all we know, he could be me!"), and eventually betrayed the guild to form his own faction. Another pair of players pissed off an elemental cult, so of course one betrayed the other to save his own skin. The campaign ended with one PC fleeing the city, one dead by ritual sacrifice, and two survivors -- but everyone had a grand time. The game was set in a home-grown world, low fantasy with a very different magic system. I used the Hero System (which is excellent both for low fantasy and for running custom-made magic systems). I used "blue booking", where players do a lot of communicating with each other and the DM via notebooks, so that each PC could pursue their own agenda in secret (essential for this sort of game!). Many sessions were composed mostly of bluebooking, interspersed with meetings or other encounters that were roleplayed normally. I have still have those bluebooks somewhere...great to have a record of the game like that!</blockquote>

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