In 1994, I was introduced to Vampire the Masquerade (2nd Edition) and loved the game. The group that I played with played weekly, then multiple times per week, then almost nightly for 3 solid years before slowly that pace down until I left the Navy. After leaving the Navy, I ran only Vampire games from 1997 to 2015 before finally branching out into other games (due to finding a group willing to branch out with me).
As you could read in my previous article, You Can’t Protest Against D&D and Continue to Play It, I outline that I refuse to play Dungeons and Dragons due to the company that owns the property. I won’t rehash that article here but it comes down to wanting to dip back into fantasy and my options for “big name” fantasy titles really boiled down to Fantasy AGE and Pathfinder. When I mentioned this to my current group and they heard the word Pathfinder, that became the defacto option.
After a bit of reading I went all in on Pathfinder.
First and foremost, I wanted to prevent myself from running into a conflict with my DnD protest, so Pathfinder 2e was the obvious choice. The OGL connects Pathfinder to DnD and while the initial release of 2e to Dnd, the Remaster project is removing all traces of the OGL from the system. While my group initially started with the base 2e system, we are migrating towards the Remastered materials at a pace that I consider acceptable.
Knowing this, let’s not linger on the bad stuff, let’s talk about the greatness that is Pathfinder.
Building the Never Ending Campaign
The first thing that I did that I have never done with my groups before was announce that I am not building in an ending to this campaign. With all of the actual plays this website has released and all of the games we have played in the past, I have built in “seasons” of limited runs to give us breaks to play other games to get a rotation of different systems going on so we can get some variety going. My changing this coincides with my attempt to turn my Discord server into a full blown RPG server AND to get more games running on the server at once.
Currently on the server, we have one of my Pathfinder players running Exalted 2e and I am running Pathfinder 2e (Remaster). Ideally, there would be many, many more games being run on the server. But back to Pathfinder.
I launched the idea of running a never ending campaign. The first move was to pick a place to work from, an origin point from where the players could work from for at least the earliest part of the game. This was the city of Ardport, which we chose a location using the globe on the Pathfinder Wiki and then I bought Inkarnate to make the actual map of the city. We are in Andorran, at the delta of two rivers joining.
Having to build a city from scratch was a lot more fun than I initially thought, especially since Inkarnate helped with their pregenerated building options. Even for Ardport being my very first map, I think the whole city turned out really well.
Once I had a city for the players to operate out of I needed a “tutorial” for the combat for them to interact with, so I created a mini-dungeon for them to be able to fight a bunch of monsters and find some loot. This was intended to be a one night affair and little did I realize this would turn out to take 4 full weeks of fighting their way through this place.
FOUR FULL WEEKS.
Learning that combat is a slower affair than what I am used to was something that I needed to learn as well as the players. I am also new at Pathfinder and that was a big eye opener. Everyone loves the 3 move economy but man does it tend to slow things down quite a bit.
I am developing my own RPG as well and while I want to have a multiple action economy as well, I am trying to prevent having such a lag as Pathfinder has.
Having everyone’s character sheets in one place was also something I really wanted, too. That task fell on this wonderful website I discovered (and purchased full access to immediately) called Pathbuilder2e. This sheet does everything for you, except make the choices you need to make for character creation. All the math is done for you, all the clues that you need to make choices you might have forgotten on a pen & paper sheet are prompted, and you are able to roll right off of the website because it gives you everything you need to make the rolls! As a GM, I am also able to put on buffs, conditions, see their damage taken, and know what is going on with the characters just by having their sheets open on my computer!
While I intended to have some experience points handed out after each session, after the 4 weeks in the tutorial dungeon, we collectively decided that milestone leveling was probably the way to go. The amount of combat in the dungeon they incurred leveled them up to 2 and their encounters since have had them level to 3. Sure, this seems like quick leveling but I have been slowing it down and I have a plan for their continued progress forward.
Structuring the Campaign
Now that we have established the characters and have established Ardport, there have been several questable things that can be done for small gains that can be made if the group doesn’t want anything too heavy hitting. These include ideas I have found online, such as a Magical Text Recovery system from all the libraries in the world (that will pay for the retrieval of magical texts that are lost, stolen, or missing), as well as the Adventurer’s Guild hosting wanted posters for some villains or monsters in the area.
The idea behind these things is that they can get used to seeing wanted posters in every Adventurer’s Guild so that they can always make a “quick” buck or two if they need some action, or they can snoop around in their adventuring and happen across some strange text that might be available for some coin to the libraries.
I made sure to make ALL libraries part of this because that way, like a video game, they can turn these texts into any of them and get paid rather than just Ardport’s library. The idea is that I want Ardport to be a place they can always come back to but not some place they should feel tethered to unnecessarily.
On a side note, I was initially worried about coming up with titles for these magical texts, but I happened across a random magical text name generator (which is for DnD but it’s really just a fantasy magical text title generator, really). The website is DnDSpeak and is specifically their Random Book Generator part of the site. Serendipitously, the site also gives a gold piece amount for each book (which I’m only using as a sort of guide) and a page count, as well as what the book has for contents. Far more than I could have asked for, which was just the name of the book.
Google and the Internet is a wonderful place for resources for TTRPG resources. If you embark on something like this, make sure you are Googling for the resources you need and make sure you check out more than one source because sometimes what you need isn’t the first one.
I have every book for Pathfinder 2e Remastered to run the game, and to organize things for campaign needs I have been using Obsidian, which is a resource I have been using for notes and other things for years now. If you are a Game Master and you aren’t using Obsidian, you need to start looking into it. Specifically in this case, I have been using Josh Plunkett’s Vault (available for purchase or free if you subscribe to his Patreon). This vault is designed for DnD campaigns, but if you know what you are doing, you can convert it to being used for Pathfinder with some tweaking. I have tweaked it to work for Pathfinder and have been organizing things so that I can start keeping track of what has been going on… as of session 7, which is the next session as of this writing.
The Golarion that we are playing on is not the canon planet. I have chosen that because there is other stuff going on that will alter Pathfinder canon in ways I can’t recover from if I try to weave it into my larger story, so I decided right off the bat to just ignore canon. None of the players are interested in the cosmology (at least yet), so there is no interest in the solar system, the galaxy, or some such other points of interest. They literally are concerned with power gaining and what’s right in front of them, which sometimes is sad but also easy to plan for in the long run.
What Comes Next
I’ve been all in on this since we decided to play Pathfinder. I have immersed myself in the world, the lore, and I look forward every week to running the game. There hasn’t been a game I’ve run where I’ve been THIS excited on a weekly basis to run a game. With no end in sight, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
The plan is now to start working the campaign into a 3 plot system: an A plot, B plot, and C plot. The A plot will be the campaign’s BIG arc, meaning the largest goal to solve for the group before the major phase of play can end and we can begin a new phase. The B plot is a smaller arc that is designed to interfere with the A plot periodically but can end whenever the players decide to end that plot. Once plot B ends, it’s over. The C plot is the session plot, or the smallest of the plots. The C plot is the “get the macguffin” and return to home base plot so that we can do the next C plot next session. Sometimes that C plot might be 2 or 3 sessions but it will always be the short term goals.
I am in the midst of setting up the 3 plots, obviously starting with the first A plot, for the biggest arc of our first real campaign arc. Once I get the A and B plots set up, I can start just running C plots at them and see where things go from there.
On the side, though, I started pre-planning on a new Vampire the Masquerade campaign idea that has been stewing in the background. It is an epic idea that infuses elements of games I have run before into one (games like the archaeological/mystery game Weird AGE) and will challenge the idea of what the players think about what is established Vampire canon (as Vampire canon will be tossed out if the players end up making changes that alter the present). This game is, in movie terms, in pre-production at the moment so there is nothing to detail at the moment… plus my excitement for Pathfinder has my full attention at the moment, so Vampire is truly not he back burner.
Thanks for reading and see you soon.
