What are your good practices for setting new campaign?

What are your good practices for setting new campaign?

What are your good practices for setting new campaign?

By comparison, UW doesn’t have much private property or other setup like Apocalypse World has. I’ve recently started a new game in AW and just pure setup of Maestro’D and Hard Holder creates so many moving pieces on board, friends, clients, gangs, enemies etc. I find it a bit lacking in UW.

What we have are setting and factions, but I like tangible faces and places.

My idea to which I ask you feedback and thoughts is:

Firstly to have a physical or virtual piece of paper and start drawing the region of space where game will take place.

To ask every player not only to assign a debt to a faction, but also describe how he came to be in debt to that faction, did he blow up factory of that faction, did he scam them for money, did he crossed an important persona.

To create existing members and places of that faction instead of owing anonymous faceless entity.

Then to have everyone create a place in the near by space, a crazy space station, a unique planet, a base on the moon. We can then assign those places to factions.

Of course half of it will not be used, but other half I hope will be an evocative awesome place to visit, where players would like to be excited to go and visit / mess around.

Lastly to create a conflict, a situation that is happening and highly destabilize the situation in the area – alien invasion, cue in one of the major factions. Players have to be interested in interacting with the situation, maybe they are partially responsible for it.

Thoughts and ideas?

How do you make your UW games going?

12 thoughts on “What are your good practices for setting new campaign?”

  1. This is pretty much exactly what I do. I find out what their debts mean, who they’ve interacted with before, assign nearby locations to Factions, and throw them into some tangled web based on what the players have told me about the Factions. I think you’re on the right track.

  5. The one thing that Uncharted Worlds doesn’t have that I think is crucially important to these types of games is some sort of bonds. Yeah, it has the cramped quarters move, but that’s already after the team is together and on their ship.

    I always try and have the players establish connections to one another at the start of the game, so we understand WHY they’re working together.

  6. I enjoy using the Factions and the PCs most significant Faction debt to frame the broad strokes of their relationships.

    Stuff like… “Bob, you’re wanted by the Heralds for crimes against the High Prophet? Cool! Well, Suzy over there is the exiled Chief Advocate of the High Prophet and was probably responsible for some of the bad shit in your life… so, Suzy, what slip-up of yours has hinted at this to Bob?”

    Use the Factions to set up context, and then let the specific nuances of their relationships spool out in play. Here’s how the PCs probably relate to one another, because of this great background everyone at the table has developed… now we’ll dig in and see how they embody and push back against all of that in a million tiny ways.

  7. I like taking the factions and giving each of them an agenda and an axe to grind. Which invariably places the characters right in the crossfire to make or break plans (or just dodge bullets if they don’t want to pick a side.) Or, as in the last story arc I ran, they were not supposed to survive and now they are an agent of chaos that needs to be eliminated or protected (depending on which faction you view it from.)

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