Two Patrols, One Campaign
‘ve played with an online story band called the Myth Weavers . We live all over North America, so we play over Skype. We had some chronic problems getting everyone together, and by the time that worked itself out, we’d lost the momentum on our Primetime Adventures game . Still, I missed playing with those guys; we had a lot of common goals, common vision, and shared language, which made gaming with them easy and rewarding (admittedly, when it happened).
With all the things I want to explore in this campaign relating to bioregionalism and the animist perspective, it seems natural that I’d think of the Myth Weavers. Though I have to admit, the idea didn’t come to me until I started reading up on the Burning Wheel forums, and saw threads with people describing their experience playing over Skype. I wanted to run with both groups, and in both cases, I wanted to use the Black Forest rather than Petersen’s Territories. So, in a flash of either genius or madness, I came up with the idea of running two separate patrols in the same campaign.
We’ll have one overlapping player in both patrols but I already told her she’d have to play a different character in each one, and she has no problem with that. I don’t think I’d ever try running some super-session over Skype where the two patrols meet. Instead, they’d deal with different problems in the same place. They’ll hear about each other, of course. One patrol will have to clean up the mess that the other leaves behind, and vice versa. They might even have to communicate with one another. If Giuli wanted to switch one character for the other, introducing the Myth Weaver patrol to the character from her face-to-face patrol, and vice versa, and we had the occasion to do so, I’d go for that. As we move towards big points in the story, I’d like to have threats that the two patrols have to confront from different angles simultaneously. But overall, each patrol will operate independently, which will avoid the trouble of a massive Skype session with a possible total of nine people. I groan just thinking of that as a call, much less a game.
I love to have stories explore a setting from many different angles. I’ve typically run my Dungeons & Dragons games in the Forgotten Realms setting, not for any great love of the Forgotten Realms in particular, but to create heroes for whom my old adventures simply weave into the overall back story. I’ll essentially have two different patrols, on two different campaigns, happening at the same time, in the same setting. I’ve never done it at the same time before. Especially with two different groups of players, in two different media, I have high hopes for this.
I’ll record the Myth Weavers sessions and publish them as part of our actual play podcast.
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