[UA] Campaign Framework, again

[John C]

The UA: Good Things/Bad Things thread managed to combine with a story from 
the new Stephen King book and the recent thread about campaign structures to 
give me a pretty good idea -- the one that, I think, I’ll be using as the 
basic framework for the trial campaign that I’ll be launching soon.  It’s a 
bit of a cliché, of course, but what’s wrong with that?

Everything starts with the individual PCs having a close encounter with the 
Weird -- what UA2 calls a “trigger event”, I think.  There are three basic 
ways to handle this:

   1) Make it part of each character’s back story,

   2) Run the trigger event for the individual players in a series of 
one-on-one games,

   3) Or run the entire group through a scenario together -- like “Bill In 
Three Persons”, for example.

One and three strike me as being the easiest ways to go, but two as the best 
choice: you can better tailor the trigger event to the tastes of the 
particular player.

Whatever happens, the trigger event should screw up the characters’ lives a 
bit.  Problems with their family, or with their job...some kind of lasting 
aftereffects.

And then the Agent contacts them.  He’s a scary looking sort of fella 
(someone like Eponymous would not be amiss), contact them on behalf of his 
employer -- who, naturally, wants to remain anonymous.

The Agent makes them a very simple offer: his employer will pay them a 
significant amount of money  -- and provide full legal and material support, 
as required -- to investigate certain unusual occurrences.  What the group 
does is up to them; they can observe or interfere, whatever they thing best. 
  Whichever choice they make, though, their Employer will want a full and 
detailed report on the situation once everything is said and done.

There’s a couple of different ways to take this.  The simplest is to do an 
X-Files “Monster of the Week” kinda thing.  Alternatively, you could have 
investigation build on the previous one, with the players finding some sort 
of trail that leads them to a Master Plan and the Master Planners behind it 
all (something based on Alan Moore’s “Brujeria” would be neat).

Finding out who their employer really is would probably be a major concern 
of the players....whether the GM wants them to discover the answer or not is 
another story.  But sticking to canon, I can see them secretly working for 
Alex Abel, the Sleepers, of even the Comte himself (especially if “Bill” was 
their trigger event).  If you’re really into torturing your players, make 
their patron dead!  He kicked off this whole organization several years ago, 
and then dropped dead, but his agents don’t know this.  So they’re still out 
there recruiting, and sending reports on to the address that they were 
given...where they just sit, gathering dust, forever unread.




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