We'd been playing the FASA Star Trek game for some time. It was one of the first role-playing games I played along with Traveller and a Dungeons and Dragons campaign (boxed sets). We may have started playing it by being inter-galactic terrorists, becoming the Federation's Al-Qaeda and working our way up their most wanted list, but we rapidly moved towards emulating the genre TV show format. The goal was to deliver a proper Star Trek campaign at the table. We did this over the course of a couple of campaigns, but the one that nailed it was a movie era (classic Trek) campaign known as Star Trek: Endeavour.

It followed all the TV show conventions that the Slaying Days campaign would follow around a decade later. We played a couple of seasons and each season had an episode listing of 8-12 episodes, with a brief 2-3 line summary of each. It worked great as we could look forward to the cool sounding ones. We had two-part episodes, pre-credit sequences, named actors that played the characters, sweeps week affairs, though we didn't call them that at the time. We obviously had end of season cliffhangers as well. Since one of the players was a bit of a musician, we even had our own re-mixed theme tune. We also tried to follow the dramatic model of a TV show, with the episodes being about player character issues. I know one thread that ran through the second series was my character's encounters with his Klingon nemesis as he hounded the USS Endeavour.

One other interesting facet of the Star Trek: Endeavour campaign was the influence it had on the group's social contract (though we never called it that, of course). While we'd had a good social contract from the beginning, the Star Trek: Endeavour campaign proved how good it was and tweaked it slightly. You see, a Star Trek campaign fails for many groups, or it did at the time. They failed because the experience demanded strong genre emulation (accept the Star Trek tropes 100%) and players willing to find dramatic opportunities in a command structure (rather than collapse under its weight). The group succeeded at both, which was good.

There is also something iconic about Star Trek. The second series ended with a conspiracy in Star Fleet being discovered and a face-off between the Endeavour, an experimental Federation vessel and a massive alien ship. We never did find out what happened next.

4. Celtic Campaign

The Celtic Campaign was short. It wasn't intended to be short; it was supposed to be a grand campaign delivered in numerous 'books'. Basically, my time with this group was coming to an end. As a group of friends we had gamed together, gone to conventions and the extremes of genre fandom together but I'd decided something, or more appropriately someone, was more important and the group dynamics had got too complex. The campaign didn't have to end on my exit, but I believe it did (along with regular gaming).

The campaign may not have burned for long; it certainly burned brightly.

As well as being the last campaign of that gaming group, it was also the last campaign of a specific type (possibly the only one): lots of GM effort on setting, with players writing backgrounds much longer than a page of A4 (not that the critical content couldn't be condensed down to one A4 page, but it was part of the experience). Basically, the GM was multi-talented (he was the guy who did the theme tune for the Star Trek: Endeavour campaign), he could also research quickly, write very detailed sourcebooks and draw maps and floor plans like a cartographer and architect. He could also do pretty good drawings of characters. His usefulness to the gaming group was immense (he designed a plan of the space station command deck and a whole starship for my Star Trek: Utopia Station mini-series). He had written two sourcebooks regarding a Celtic-based fantasy world, right down to things like weapons and jewellery. He also created a world map and numerous regional maps of amazing quality.

The best way to describe the campaign is like this: it was the Lord of the Rings films in role-playing form. It's not that it was a copy of the books, but that the quality of the overall work was similar to the films. Think of the sets, the costumes, the overall feeling of authenticity and reality despite it being a fantasy creation. If you think of that and then add the grand heroic drama you have the Celtic Campaign. Exactly like the Lord of the Rings films that would appear six years later, even doing something simple like walking into a local King's Mead Hall was an event full of atmosphere and tension. It made a big, vast, deep, rich and vibrant setting actually work and add to the experience.

The scene that still resonates was our heroes' stand at an old fort. We had been sent to retrieve something but had been betrayed (by that local King in the mead hall), and found ourselves cut off by a goblin horde, the only option being a lone ruin on a hill. We got to do everything. Stand on the wall and vow not to surrender. Have heroic battles on the wall and down into the courtyard as they broke through. It was all done with a great drawing of the location and a vague use of miniatures. It was pure heroism beaten only by the later scene in which we kicked down the door of the mead hall and strode into the political rats nest and laid everything out. It was our own miniature version of Helm's Deep and the un-masking of Saruman (not that there was an ancient Wizard involved, but it was the same in feel).

This campaign only got a handful of sessions and represented an end point, as an active gaming group dissolved. It took until the new millennium for the current gaming group to form, representing a gaming gap of six years.

3. Darkmere

The Darkmere campaign is unique when compared to the others in the list. It's unique because it's not a campaign played around the table with dice. It was a role-playing campaign, but it was played using the computer game Neverwinter Nights, which provides facilities to play DM'ed games, and hence becomes a medium for playing campaigns across the internet.

The campaign was interesting because we were also pushing the envelope of how games were structured within Neverwinter Nights. Traditionally the player-base was of a specific type, moulded by a specific way of playing Dungeons and Dragons. You role-play in the downtime, often banal character-based acting that never altered, and then got on with being a professional adventurer (like a special forces operative) when fighting, delving into dungeons or whatever. No talks about the nature of heroism and fate in the middle of Moria for this crowd. The Darkmere campaign broke that down, and made it all about character issues, and moved the model away from a sort of simulative and gamist combination to one that was more focused on storytelling. This even changed the way the module was used, such as locations in the module moving more towards being locations for scenes, with players being ported to them for the scene to happen, etc. It also moved the focus to dramatic scenes of conflict rather than a series of tactical challenges. It was a painful transition in some cases, the players changed completely over the course of the transition through series one (series two had me being the only consistent player after helping kick-starting changes on joining during series one).

It was worth it.

Ultimately the campaign was just great. It followed a geographically restricted model, with the whole campaign taking place in Darkmere and its environs. It also took on a relationship map approach, with numerous forces with a number of agendas trying to destroy the village of Darkmere due to a mystical power at its centre. The most amazing thing about the campaign, considering the medium, is it had some powerful scenes in as characters faced off against enemies, made fateful pacts and engaged in risky trickery. It also had love and loss. Some of these scenes played out as epic combats and events took place in the engine at the same time. They really were dramatic, exciting, heroic and well framed and executed scenes all 'in engine' so to speak. As a campaign, it had a very high proportion of 'scene pay off'.

Despite the medium having some disadvantages, such as the graphical engine replacing 100% imagination (though that had some advantages as well), and the slow speed of progressions of individual sessions, one of the strengths of the medium was it was a written one. If you are a pretty good (and fast) writer then Neverwinter Nights, when done right, can play out like a dramatic, interactive script that is written in the moment, with dramatic events weighing in, and no one knows exactly where it is going. That is great.

2. Crescent Sea

The Crescent Sea campaign has an emotional investment attached to it beyond just the campaign itself. It's sort of a time and a place thing. The release of Dungeons & Dragons 3E was a trigger event, that final little push, for a group of people who'd come together by various means to form a group based on actually playing. The goal was to shed people who only talked about playing and actually get on with it. Basically, it was the forming of the current gaming group, members have changed around the edges, but a core quartet has always remained the same.

The single, biggest strength of the Crescent Sea campaign was the fact it had significant player authorship. It started quite simply, with four characters arriving on a ship at the port of Freeport (the only bit on the map, assuming we even had a map at that point). That simple beginning saw a blank world map get slowly created from player backgrounds and future authoring over the course of the campaign. Players authored whole elements into their background to support future or current stories. Destinies formed between characters due to authored 'past'. It was an almost perfect example of 'No Myth of Reality' principles at work, bolstered by a strong social contract and each player adding to the always bubbling pot of creativity. All that energy created epic rivalries and love triangles that spanned time, an encroaching darkness that would engulf the world, epic quests to save the day, fateful decisions and a conclusion that delivered with characters taking on the big bad guys in an epic conflict that spanned the globe (through allies the heroes had made as the bubbling pot of creativity spurned the individual sessions).

Personally, the campaign was also an experiment on premise-based play. The story of my character was whether him living up to his destiny in the grand scheme of things would mean he lost the love of his life, a childhood sweetheart who had become an enemy (in a Batman and Catwoman style). That story was why the character existed. The point being to see how that story would work out, only the question was there, the answer was to be discovered. It was great because it was an open playing field, at one point there was even the possibility that my character might die and the romantic interest would become my character depending on the sequence of events and the roll of the dice. This story did conclude with the grand, final battle playing out in the background, which was good.

The Crescent Sea campaign was that good the 'setting' has become a place we don't go to again, because it wasn't so much a setting, it was possibly just a piece of creative madness, full of inconsistencies, no doubt a complete lack of originality, which created something that lost its purpose when the story ended. It was great though.

1. Slaying Days

It was inevitable that the Slaying Days campaign would resonate strongly, and stood every chance of being on the list. The simple reason being it was set to use all the conventions I really like: a TV show model, a focus on the dramatic issues and decisions of the characters, cliffhangers, seasonal story arcs, episodes, sweeps week, the lot. Just like Star Trek: The Next Generation kick-started the approach to genre shows that later shows like The X-Files and Buffy et al refined, this was a chance to play in an improved version of that style in a campaign.

Slaying Days was really good. We concentrated on setting up the correct dramatic crucible. We did our usual thing of creating an evocative setting while keeping it largely based on colour rather than getting bogged down in details. The Slaying Days setting was interfaced through sets, as their geographical location didn't matter; they were just places to locate scenes in. We had the characters' living spaces, the most notable being Bethany's flat (the 'Slayer' analogue of the show) and the infamous pink inflatable chair (which a player edited in and it seemed to hang around). Then we had the quartet of computer geeks and their gaming den; the inter-dimensional tea shop owned by someone who I now always imagine to be like Edna Mode off The Incredibles (I don't know why); and the various evocative locations in the 'Inspector Morse-style University' and surroundings.

Ultimately, it was the episodes which generated really good storylines. A few of them generated by typical TV show problems like actors being ill or not available. We had a player wanting to change characters, and a player missing a session, generate an issue that became an emotional core of the series right through to a heroic sacrifice at the end. We also honed the dramatic TV show model to deliver even better sessions (for me anyway, I was building on the last attempt a decade ago). We had supernatural forces directly attacking the issues of characters resulting in real, dramatic decisions. We had at least one episode which was so fast-paced it was like an episode of 24, hitting Bethany with issue after issue, situation after situation and decision after decision (friends, enemies, drama, and no doubt something crashing through her flat's bay window). We tweaked the format, the most notable case being the Reality TV episodes which had a demonic TV show profile the heroes of Westhampton (as the Big Bad approached) allowing a fourth wall to be broken in numerous ways, including soliloquies to camera. It was funny, dramatic and exciting at the same time. I'd never consider nominating my 'overall best' role-playing session but the Reality TV episode of Slaying Days would be a nomination. The whole season was also very witty, in a good way, and genre defining. It also lived up to the heroism of its source material, at least for me, playing the 'Slayer' analogue of the show I got to walk up to the Big Bads of the season and give them the verbal followed by some great scenery destroying smack downs (and have the life angst to match).

It was just really, really good.

There was one facet of Slaying Days that remained exactly the same as its 'predecessor' a decade previous: it ended at series two with the promise of future events, the great Angel of Darkness having been split into shards, after the heroic sacrifice of one character, but season three never got aired.

Conclusion

Looking at the list it's interesting to note that the systems involved, Slaying Days aside, are particularly old school. In some cases, a particularly fiendish 80's flavour of old school, with systems like FASA Star Trek and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2E. In fact, Dungeons and Dragons accounts for three of the entries, albeit one being a computer-based medium. What this attests to is the power of the social contract to trump the system or be the source of a few tweaks or additions that makes the overall game work.

The final observation is that all these campaigns have an element of improvement about them. They weren't satisfied with the status quo. In their own way, each of them was about delivering a gaming experience in a better and improved way through experimentation and trust. This is important.