One campaign, two parties - twice as nice
You're a DM and you're looking to run more than one campaign
during the same time period in the same world.
Let's give the two adventuring groups the super imaginative names of Party A and Party B.
In this video I want to talk about the advantages this gives you
and how to overcome some of the problems.
World building
Let's say you're doing something akin to spiral campaign building
and you're leaving unexplored parts of your world
as a blank canvas until either party and their surrounding plot threads reach them.
Party A travels to Generica, where, as the DM,
you can invent lots of stuff just ahead of time suited to the characters' backstories,
a rough sketch of the over-arching plot points and the main villains and so on.
After a few weeks' play, you've a pretty good idea of what's to be found in Generica,
whilst leaving yourself a land-mass large enough to host all sorts of other plot-threads.
All good.
Meanwhile, Party B is in The Derivative Empire,
doing much the same.
A few weeks ago, you knew little to nothing about either land-masses.
Now, if either party travels to the other continent,
you have some sweet lore plus as much wiggle-room as you need to accommodate new ideas.
Don't cross the streams.
Keeping the two parties separate in-game,
preferably on separate land-masses,
doesn't just help with world-building.
Maybe, if your gaming groups are small enough,
you might be able to host a session where the two could meet.
Good luck getting the players in the same room at the same time, though.
Might the two groups want to fight each other?
Or might they want to join forces permanently,
so that you have one, almighty party chasing multiple goals at once?
Better to keep the two separate, I say.
Consider making sure the two player groups are composed of different people.
A piece of crafted terrain or freshly-painted minis
can be completely new and novel at the same table twice in the same week,
if you play your cards right.
Same world, same minis.
If the two campaigns take place in the same world,
then it's likely the two different parties will encounter similar enemy types,
albeit at different times.
This saves a lot of time when it comes to creating minis and terrain.
Have different main baddies.
Although some cultural overlap is useful for making the most of your maps and minis collection,
make sure the parties aren't trying to defeat the same villain or achieve the same goal.
I've managed to avoid this so far, but for one party's victory,
hinted at over a period of months, to be stolen by another party,
might not go down well at the table.
Time.
Party A fast-travels and the narrative hand-waves weeks or months of transport overland or by sea.
Party B spends entire sessions, maybe multiple sessions,
doing a dungeon crawl, during which only a few hours of in-game time pass.
Whose clock is right?
Answer: don't worry about it.
Assuming your games go well enough to run for several sessions,
the amount of in-game time spent fast-travelling and compressing the passage of time
will just about even out between groups.
As long as no-one looks too closely at the timeline,
you can hand-wave continuity problems and say that the two groups are acting simultaneously.
Have I missed anything regarding more than one party existing
in the same campaign world at the same in-game time?
The comments section is yours to spam, molest and otherwise get stuck into.
The map used in this video is not Callathiforay,
the game world in which the two campaigns I run take place,
believe it or not.
This map was knocked up very quickly in the rather excellent Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator,
with which every DM should be familiar.
A link to it will be in the description.
The music was provided by a mate of mine, Graham May,
who also sometimes uses the moniker 'Loci'.
Please do visit his channel to discover more amazingly creative and unusual music
and tell him I sent you!
As always, until next time,
insert snappy sign off
right about
here.
