Campaign Links

One of the things I try to do when running games set in the same universe is to try to keep them consistent and have them occasionally interact with one another. This actually started way back when I was running a lot of Vampire games, where occasional characters introduced in a "Dark Ages" game might pop up in a modern-era "Masquerade" game.

More recently, I had intended to introduce a prophecy near the end of my "Star Wars: Imperial Fist" campaign and then just leave it hanging - only to finally deal with the resolution in a future Legacy-era campaign. But when "Imperial Fist" didn't quite work out, I dropped both the planned prophecy and the planned future campaign. A shame, but perhaps for the best.

The benefit of doing this is that it serves as something of an Easter egg for players who happened to play in both games. The connections won't actually matter, but they're a nice touch. This is especially useful if the end of the previous campaign changed the world in some way - in most cases, the game then ends, which means the player never actually sees the result of their victory. But by connecting the next campaign, they do. (The downside, of course, is that it's harder work than just resetting everything.)

As it happens, I now find myself building two sets of links simultaneously - once for the "Firefly: Lost Episodes" game and once for "Eberron: Dust to Dust".

The Eberron campaign links back to two previous campaigns. From the "On Tracks of Lightning" game we have the re-establishment of the lightning rail across the Mournland and the defeat of the Lord of Blades. From "The Eberron Code" we have the journey of the Cerulean Swan to the north and, later, the cleansing of the Silver Flame. (Awkwardly, the chronology of "Dust to Dust" starts somewhere near the end of Act Two of "The Eberron Code". I'm planning to move the timeline forward rather briskly though!)

For Firefly, the link mostly comes in the form of a character I'm about to introduce in a Lost Episode who I intend also to use in a flashback in the Christmas Game. But more on that when the time comes...