Rivercrawl

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The game structure of the Great River Campaign is a combination of West Marches hexcrawl, pointcrawl, and dungeon crawl, run with the World Without Number system.

The Goal of the Game

In this campaign, all player'characters are explorers traveling up the Great River to map its waters and search for valuable treasures and magical knowledge left behind by earlier civilizations that inhabited these lands in much more ancient times. The current civilization of the Murya that has settled the marshes at the end of the Great River in recent centuries is still young and highly dependent on old bronze weapons and armor as sources of metal, and the magical writings of peoples with much greater knowledge of arcane mysteries.

Progress is measured in the value of treasures that characters discover and successfull bring with them on their return back to civilization. The recovery of treasures is the primary mechanic to gain experience, though characters also gain small amounts from succesfully facing and overcoming the many dangerous creatures that make their homes deeper in the wilderness and ancient ruins. Character levels primarily represent how much experience charactwrs have with overcoming the challenges of the wilderness and surviving the many supernatural dangers. These experiences give characters advantages in combat that no training can provide, and deeper insights into the supernatural than can be taught, making explorers outstanding warriors and arcane scholars, equal to great warlords and old sorcerers.

The Great River has only been partly been mapped by the people who have settled on the banks of the Lower River, and the surrounding forests are full pf large ruins of which many have not been disturbed for thousands of years. By going deep into the wilderness and returning with tales of their discoveries and hauls of treasure, explorers play a very important part in the society of the river people.

Player Characters

Unlike in most other campaigns, there are no fixed parties of adventurers. Instead, all player characters belong to a wider community of explorers. While their numbers are small, they are comstantly interchanging tales of their discoveries, which makes it a small world in which everyone knows about everyone. With the sheer number of ruins known on the banks of the Great River, there is no scarcity of treasures to be found, and most explorers are constantly trading their knowledge and information back and forth to help them survive the many new and strange dangers that await all of them.

There is a certain amount of trust or at the very least respect among the explorers, and they band together in new and different groups every season, often even more frequently than that. Parties are formed on a per adventure basis as the planned expeditions require. Player's can even have two or more characters to use on different adventures with different circumstances, or simply to make it possible to play in adventures while other caracters are currently tied up until their ongoing adventures continue.

In addition to that, player characters can also have retainers, of which players can always bring one along on adventurss to increase tbe capabilities of the party.

The Adventure Structure

The Great River Campaign has a quite clearly outlined structure to help with enabling adventures with regularly changing characters snd players, but also to create gameplay sotuations and procedures not commonly found in most campaigns. Primarily, adventures are dungeon crawls, but this always also includes often extensive journeyes through the wilderness to reach a specific site and safely make it back to civilization loaded with heavy treasures. Dungeon crawling and wilderness exploration in this context is less about fighting monsters and based on the idea of a treasure hunt.