I’m running a campaign of the Streets of Avalon because it’s important to playtest the game over time. If you’ve been reading at all or listening to Under the Lamplight – the Streets of Avalon RPG companion podcast – then you know its working title is called the Whispers of Erlig. We just finished up scenario four. Here are the working titles of the scenarios so far:
- The Whisper Killings
- The Shadowed Wards
- The Buried Ward
- Thieving from Thieves
I have outlines, notes, and other bits of information on all of them but I’m probably going to wait until I finish up scenario five and maybe six before I start writing them up for other people to use them. That way, if there’s things that happen in the last scenarios I can link them to the earlier scenarios. I can already see where I need to make some changes about the Erligian cults involved in these scenarios. I have based a lot of how the campaign structure works around the concept that scenarios don’t just happen back to back. There’s a period of time between them for the downtime phase of play. I’ve also tried to put together scenarios that highlight investigative play, delving play, and heist play since those are the three playset rules included for the game.
It’s been a lot of fun to try and figure this out but it’s also a fair amount of work. Not the initial creation part but the constantly going back over and over my notes to figure out how to present this for use by anyone who picks it up. It’s not going to be a traditional kind of adventure. I’m taking some large amounts of inspiration from the Carved from Brindlewood games. Those scenarios feel more like presented situations which allow the player to take a variety of avenues to complete the scenario. That means there’s not exactly a through line, at least when it comes to investigations and heists. The delving/dungeon crawling part is a lot more straight forward, but the idea of letting the players decide how they want to approach these scenarios fulfills a design goal I have. Creating flexibility and a play space where you can be really adaptable with your decisions while still having some approachable and understandable things you can rely on.
Back to campaigns. For me, the thing about campaigns is the through line. I prefer to have a few elements that make a campaign feel connected. I can see three things:
- The characters and their ongoing stories.
- The campaigns, “What’s Going On”, and how it impacts the setting.
- The people and places the characters encounter repeatedly.
I’m sure there’s more elements that connect campaigns together, feel free to let me know, but as a designer I can only provide the “What’s Going On” part, give potential in the people and places the character encounter, and maybe suggest things for characters ongoing stories. In my experience those tend to rise from play and discussion at the table. I might try and hard code some potential character background hooks into the Whispers of Erlig, because it’s kind of an interesting design space to me, but they’ll need to have some flexibility along with advice for modifying them and how that can affect the campaign.
I guess this is really all to say I’m still working on it, learning how these things should be structured, and figuring it out as I go. I guess that’s game design.