Never Let a Coincidence Go to Waste!

The pub incident may prove useful to some of you who may find the idea of  running a narrative campaign* daunting.

Accidents will happen

By that I mean it can be difficult to try and come up with a story with which to link your games. So here is one way to go about it.

Just lay on your first game. Any pretext will do for that one. Boris the Slovenly covets Ragnar the Repugnant's Golden Stool for example.

Often, and this applies to solo, co-op and traditional gaming,you can forge a connection between events that happened during the game and run with them.

In the Battle of Naughty Rhyme there were two actually unconnected events that can be connected to give some back story to future games.

1. The Pub caught fire (random event).

2. The Wee Folk rolled over the 21st. without breaking a sweat. (luck of the dice).

Putting those two unrelated events together we now have a narrative: The Wee Folk, believing the pub fire to have been a deliberate act of orc barbarity, were berserk with rage and nothing could stand before them.

Now here is fodder for any number of future scenarios. If the rules being used cater for such one could say that the wee folk now "hate" the orcs, or that the orcs now "fear" the wee folk. Or to make it even for those so inclined the "hate" can be mutual.

In short, never let a coincidence go to waste when playing a narrative campaign!

* A "narrative campaign" is a series of games related to one another simply by a storyline as opposed to, for example, a "map campaign" where games result from movement on a strategic map. "The 98", from which the pub incident spawned, is actually a map campaign. In contrast the adventures of Giglamps are strung together only by the narrative of his actions. As followers of Giggers will already know, a narrative campaign can even weave map campaigns and one off games into the same thread.