So I had this idea to run two campaigns in the same world.

So I had this idea to run two campaigns in the same world.

So I had this idea to run two campaigns in the same world.

Two groups of players play separate campaigns that actually affect the same world. They will only know what happens from their perspective, but will see the effects of the other groups play. At no time will they actually know who is an NPC and who is a human player. Perhaps, they will eventually even run into each other at some point. 

Do you think this is doable with DW rules? It would be interesting to see the groups end up meeting and actually playing as one group at some point, combining the two into one campaign at some point.

23 thoughts on “So I had this idea to run two campaigns in the same world.”

  1. Totally do-able, the most fun thing to do with this is to have one party trying to track down the other, constantly coming across taverns they wrecked in bar fights or dungeons they have picked clean of treasure. You could even have one session where the two parties finally meet and have to fight. Whether you tell the parties that the people they are following/people following them is actually your other group is up to you.

  2. I’ve actually tried this out, but none of the parties ever met. One party was, and still is, in a PbP game (which Vinney is playing in actually), while the other party was involved in three, live games via Hangouts. They were on opposite ends of the same world, and both helped create the same map, but there was never any crossover.

    It would be awesome to see the exploits of one party affect the other, even if they don’t ever meet. That didn’t really happen in the games I ran, unfortunately.

    Marcus Bendall Having each party track the other one down sounds totally fun! What do you do when the two parties meet, though, and you’re running separate games? Combine them into one big game?

  3. Oh wait, I actually had three separate parties in one world/setting. Still, they were all spread out too far and too short-lived to affect each other much.

  4. When they came up with facets of the campaign that were more basic (I.e. How magic works or major groups that everyone would know) how would you handle? Love the idea.

  5. Actually Phil Mitchell that’s an interesting point. You could tell each party that there’s another party in the world who came up with ______, and say that’s been established, or you could run both games as parallel worlds. Maybe one party figures out how to cross over into the other party’s plane. That’d be really fun!

  6. This other time, I actually pitched to my friend that we run two interlinked tables of AW and DW, with the premise being that WoW became Skynet. One table would be people in the real world, the other would be characters in the game world. Still kinda want to try that sometime.

  7. Vinney Cavallo Not sure who that was addressed to, but if you’re wondering about our game, I’m describing Sagas of Mahr-En. Most of the northern locations on that map were created by two other parties.

  8. Yes, as long as you do the grand world building together or just different continents with some basics set it will be easy to let characters fill in lands they are from & other group hearing rumors & might want to record games as easy to mix it all up.

  9. Phil Mitchell That’s exactly what would be paramount to the games. Let’s say the games occur bi-weekly, so you have one group play each weekend, alternating. When one group plays, certain events will trigger effects in the world itself. So, yes, if magic is determined to work a certain way, it would affect both parties. It would be the job of the GM to continually connect the information between groups so that it drives each group to work off of the information.

    Let’s say that one group destroys an island in one area of a water-type world. The GM could, and should, affect the rest of the world. You could easily create fronts this way. Imagine that the island’s destruction creates a tidal wave over the area that the other group is playing. Perfect impending doom due to the destrucuion of the afore mentioned island! It really needs to be the GM that makes this work.

  10. Damian Jankowski When I read the pitch, I tought you meant that the two groups would shape the reality of the word in contrasting ways, in a Torg style reality mix (old game about alien realities invading our world and changing the way things are)

  11. Damian Jankowski sounds like over time you’d need a shared document or wiki to help manage the various and sundry details. Moreover, I would think you’d want to push the crossover so that NPCs crossed over and events impacted each group as much as possible – kind of the point of the campaign really.

  12. I’m currently doing this, with both of my games taking place in the same city. I’m letting my PCs add things to the map of this very large city and parties have visited each others locations and seen evidence of another group of adventurers. They have not met, and both groups think that the other is just a rival group of NPCs.

  13. They do not know. One is a campaign I run at work over lunch with coworkers, and the other I run at home with my wife and friends. Although you’d think someone would wonder about the locations or factions added to the map that their group didn’t add and aren’t in my handwriting, no one has yet mentioned it. I honestly didn’t plan this, but when I started the second campaign, I figured I’d just reuse the map.

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