Two Groups, One Campaign.

[Wik]

(was gonna name this thread Two Groups, One Cup, but then I figured I'd be tasteful.... sort of)

So, I'm thinking of running two 4e campaigns - a tuesday night, and a wednesday night. ON the tuesday night, I'll only be GMing about twice a month, but still, this means I can expect to GM around 5 or 6 games a month, which is still a pretty heavy workload for a guy like me.

Still, I'm looking forward to it, because I'm liking 4e, and I feel pretty "liberated" since for the first time in a few years, I'm using my own campaign setting while writing my own adventures. And it feels good.

One thing I want to do is put both groups in the same campaign world, and use a wiki or something to collect world information. I have a wiki site in mind, and I have a bunch of notes to transfer there. What I'm interested in is the actual process of doing this.

Have many DMs out there done this sort of thing? What are the pitfalls, if any, of this set-up? I realize if I do this, I can't make both groups the big heroes of the setting, but since I plan on a sword of classic Swords and Sorcery setting (a sort of High Magic version of Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories is what i'm aiming for, right now), that's fine.

I kind of want both groups to be travelers of a sort, so that they can interact with locations touched by the other group of heroes. I think it'd be real neat to have Group #1 save a village, and then have group #2 come by a few months later and find the villagers talking about just how great the first group of heroes were.

So, yeah. Any info or tips on doing this sort of thing would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Wik]

other things I'd be curious about:

1) How to best mix the adventures. ie, the actions of one group potentially affecting the other
2) campaighn development: how PCs can change the world.
3) Recording the developments via Wiki.

 

[Gears]

Check the 'West Marches' articles here for some ideas:

http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/

 

[Wik]

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

 

[MortalPlague]

My gaming group decided to do this with 4th Edition. We had always gone through the whole 'new campaign, new world' thing, so we decided to stop it and settle on a consistent world for 4th Edition. That way the players could create their characters and would already know the lore to draw on, and would be able to work that into their backgrounds.

In addition, both myself and a friend are going to be running campaigns, starting at level one. Mine kicked off last Monday, and his game starts tomorrow on the opposite side of the continent. As the adventurers become more and more powerful, either side will hear about the exploits of the other group. We want to have each group have a small influence on the other game, which would be very cool for the players involved.

The only thing we're striving for is to make sure the groups never meet, at least not for a while. The fact that several people would need to run two characters, and both DMs would wind up running a PC... it could get messy. It might be neat for a session or two at some point, but that's not something we've got planned in the near future.

 

[Wik]

Yeah, that's sort of what I was thinking, too. But I want the pcs to be in the same region, since there's no player crossover. Each group would be self-contained, so I think it would be cool to have them cross each others' paths, without ever actually meeting.

 

[Wik]

Another idea that could be cool would be to have a marketplace where PCs from one group could trade magical items to the other. It'd be neat to have group A (which lacks a cleric) find an item that would be perfect for group B, and have group B pay for said item with that sweet magical sword that group A needs.

 

[RichGreen]

Hi,

I'm interested in doing this too. I've been working on a city campaign setting (see sig) and plan to have both of my regular groups of players adventure in it. I was inspired to do this in part by Monte Cook's Ptolus campaign journals which had both of his PC parties adventuring in the city and occasionally crossing paths. Since this is the first homebrew setting I've worked on since FR was published (!) I'd also like to get as much play out of it as possible by running it for the two groups. The only thing is that sometimes I might be tempted to run the same adventure twice (i.e. for both parties) but won't be able to.


Cheers


Richard

 

[Tervin]

Me and an old friend ran twin Vampire chronicles for much of the 90s. We let our groups base themselves in its own corner of a metropolis, and kept each other informed of timelines, happenings and NPCs which took a lot of time before we started to use emails.

Some time into the chronicles we constructed a special encounter when the two groups ran into each other - which we arranged so that both groups met up at a local gaming club, without having any prior knowledge of our plans. (My friend moved his session from his home to the club at the beginning of the evening, so that we would be sure that noone suspected what we were up to.) After that the two groups no longer just heard rumours of the other's doings, they also started to exchange notes on the overall chonicle plot which was the same for both of them.

It was a blast, and something I would love to do again now that we have all these tech tools that can make it easier.

I have been part of other meetings of two groups on a special game day (where our group was used as a special encounter for another group's campaign...) and in an AD&D 2E tournament that I cowrote and ran - where a special mirror of opposition in the end encounter caused two player groups to be faced off against each other. Both those events are right up there among my fondest RP memories.

 

[roguerouge]

I've done this with four groups. It can be done, but it's more work than you think it will be. Players love it, though. My recommendation is that you have them slowly start to converge, such that the characters eventually realize that they're not alone, that there's others out there like them, that the world doesn't rest only on their shoulders, that there's help. That's an awesome feeling.