Worlds Building: The Nexus Campaign

Some gamemasters spend decades running campaigns in the same homebrew world. Other GMs have interests that change from campaign to campaign, and they also change both rule systems and genres on a regular basis. For GMs who want the feel of a lived in campaign created through their worlds building efforts, but don’t spend all their time in one place, there is another option. The nexus campaign.

A nexus campaign is set in a hub of worlds a GM creates to connect and grow all the RPG campaigns he runs over a lifetime of gaming. Think Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere or Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. By connecting different worlds, the GM keeps a growing record of lived in worlds that he can choose to revisit or simply draw inspiration from for future world building efforts.

In a nexus campaign, not every campaign has to directly connect to another. Some are completely cut off from all other campaigns except the nexus campaign. This arrangement keeps magic from creeping into a Star Trek campaign for example. However, a Star Trek campaign and a Middle Earth campaign can both be observed, recorded, and even visited from the nexus campaign.

Here’s an example of a nexus campaign.

Nexus Campaign Example: Dunn Wood

Charles Dunwoody sits at a nexus point called Dunn Wood, where various dimensions that break known laws of science converge. He built a castle there among the trees and scribbles day and night of the panoply of wonders he sees. Many visions come to naught or are so frightful they must be thrown away and forgotten. But a few persist and either shine on as adventures or blaze their way into fully formed campaigns.

Legend has it that Dunn Wood is the name of both the surrounding forest and the castle itself. A vagabond and scholar named Chas Dunn discovered the forest and built the castle in a time long ago. Dunn Wood is now home to me. I use it to run table top RPG campaigns and to tell stories.

Dunn Wood is a nexus of campaigns. Before I claimed Dunn Wood as my own my previous campaigns tended to get lost and scattered with a few notable exceptions. Dunn Wood helps me focus and organize so those exceptions become the rule and even a one shot campaign that is never returned to adds value to the overall nexus of campaigns and is not forgotten.

The Campaigns: D20, Fighting Fantasy, and Free League  

While I do enjoy trying a variety of RPGs, I would like to settle into a few that I can occasionally return to and build on the campaigns that came before. I’m not young anymore (I’m not old either; I’m somewhere in between) but hopefully I have a few decades left to build Dunn Wood into something truly memorable for both me and all the players who travel to those campaigns connected to it.

After all these decades and playing dozens of RPGs I’ve settled on three broad systems I want to focus on. This will help my players master rules and not spread their attention in all directions. And it gives me a base to build future campaigns on if I decide to return to a previously run campaign.

These systems are D20, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, and Free League. More on each one follows.

D20

For many GMs, this will be Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. I’m more interested in D20 Modern and the setting of Prime Directive – D20 Modern and Dolmenwood.

Prime Directive gives me a Star Trek setting without all the accumulated story. I can start in the year 120 and build on from that point in time.

A campaign could kick off in the moon port of Mad Jack’s Hole, a pirate den on the edge of Klingon space. This location could beckon all kinds of anti-heroes and rogues looking to make some credits and live in comfort on the edge of civilization.

PCs might start with a lead on leasing a free trader, and deck plans for this ship are in the book. If they can get the lease, they can start trying to make some credits and avoiding Klingon entanglements. If that campaign is a hit, a future campaign may take place a few years in the future from that point and feature an actual Federation crew exploring the unknown. They might even run into an anti-hero or two along the trek.

Dolmenwood is a complete setting using a version of the rules for Old-School Essentials. It provides a Grimms’ fairy tale setting complete with politics and weirdness. It drops later this year. It is a hex crawl and is perfect for campaigns exploring different parts of the forest and interactions with its inhabitants.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy

Advanced Fighting Fantasy uses 2d6 rolling against a target number or opposed. It is British fantasy dungeon crawling and world building at its best. The city of Blacksand is a great location to start, and the dungeons of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain are not too far away.

This ruleset in various books covers dungeon, wilderness, and sailing adventures as well as providing two city books. The system has 750 monsters, various adventures, a book of treasure and magic items, and many rule options for the GM to choose from.

Troika! uses a similar ruleset and has an even more weird vibe. Basically sci-fi, weirdness, and drugs blended with all the fantasy.   

Free League

Free League’s dice system of Year Zero uses either a pool or increasing die size usually trying to roll one 6. A large number of systems use a version of this system.

Building Better Worlds – Alien RPG is a campaign that reduces the number of alien encounters and ratches up all the dangers of blue collar work in outer space and on hostile planets. Each campaign could explore a new set of planets as mankind reaches farther into distant stars—and distant troubles.

The One Ring provides the sprawling vastness of Middle-earth to explore, mostly focused in the northwest during the Third Age. With Moria – Through the Doors of Durin on the way, months of game play await. It doesn’t use the Year Zero system but its own version of a dice pool system.

What Happens Next?

The goal of a nexus campaign is to organize and keep the information from each campaign: the basics of who the PCs are, the adventures, and the world building. If a return is made to that world, the previous details inform the next campaign. Each world will need its own collected works: all the details on the world and setting and the adventures.

While this style of play is the norm for some and seems simple, I have had difficulty keeping track through the years of the dozens (hundreds?) of campaigns I’ve run.

With a game like Prime Directive, I can set out with a longer goal in mind than one campaign. Start in year 120 and move each campaign forward on the timeline.

With Advanced Fighting Fantasy, it is more like traditional fantasy. Start with Blacksand and the Warlock of Firetop Mountain and then build a world from those starting locations. Have each later campaign build on the previous one.

Again, the idea of doing this style of long term world building is understandable. But the long term execution takes some work and understanding. The nexus is simply a way to organize everything from different world building projects into a coherent whole.

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