RPG Blog Carnival: Mining Genres for a Campaign (part 01)

This month's RPG Blog Carnival is about campaign creation. Since my blog occasionally tackles different entries into campaigns that never quite get run, I figured it was a good fit -- it'll help me revisit a lot of started-but-not-finished ideas for campaigns.

And believe me, there are a lot.

My first stop: genre mining.

Genre Mining

Even if you're very familiar with a particular genre, you'll find that -- as a GM -- you want to get in touch with what aspects of the genre you want to appear in your games. Likewise, you'll want to find out (or perhaps just assess in your mind) what your players may be expecting in your genre-inspired game.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel -- there are certainly a number of books from HERO and GURPS that tackle entire genres and the difficulties of translating them into games. I loved both GURPS Space and Star Hero not only as spectacular genre sourcebooks, often dealing with many Science Fiction subgenres and tropes along with the difficulties of implementing them in RPGS.

However, the exercise of writing down your own take may be worth your while, particularly if you see some unique concerns with regard to your proposed schedule of play, play style, and number of players.

This last bit actually came to the fore when I began thinking about an espionage campaign. Here are all the posts that I did on the issue of the 'adventuring party' size in an espionage game:

• Genre Mining: Solos & Super-spies
• Genre Mining: The Differentiated Duo
• Genre Mining: A Team of Specialists

Next: Mining a sub-genre