Campaign

From Shadowrun: Awakened

A campaign is a short string of missions, generally 3 to 6, that tells an extended story to accomplish an extended goal. A storyline is composed of many missions.

Game Rules Description

Sometimes a story is too large to fit into one mission. It may involve playing many sides against each other, requiring many jobs. It may required proving yourself to a Johnson before they let you into the big score. In the tabletop experience, groups rarely play every mission as an isolated event so allowing for an ongoing string of missions is critical to recreating Shadowrun's storytelling experience.

Campaigns will be able to store information about the results of preceding missions to allow for ongoing storytelling. For instance, if an important NPC dies in the first mission, it will be possible to omit him from all subsequent missions. If a particular mission objective is missed, then the Johnson may remind the player to be more careful next time. This special persistence between missions in a campaign allows for a lot more storytelling flexibility and depth.

Campaigns will hook into the world via a special entry-point mission. When this mission is acquired, then the campaign will have started and information will begin to be stored. Our intention is to allow players to play many campaigns concurrently, but there may need to be a limit on the number of campaigns a character has active at a time. Also, it must be possible to abandon a campaign, allowing them to avoid any related job offers in the future. Some campaigns, such as those where a specific enemy of the player character is doing bad things to the player character may be involuntary and/or not visible to the player.

Much like missions, there may be criteria a player must meet before a character is offered its introductory mission. This criteria can include any valid criteria for a mission, plus requirements relating to the conclusions of previous campaigns. This potential reliance on previous campaigns allows for storylines to be constructed of many campaigns.

Not all missions in a campaign are critical to advancing the story. It is like there will be an audience for additional, optional content for people who play long game sessions. Extra missions produced for them could expand upon plot areas in the game, offering modest rewards in return for more time spent interacting with the mission's characters. These minor missions should not contain any major plot points, but could contain expanded background information, clarifications about characters, or otherwise extended interactions with the elements of the story. In most cases, these minor missions are intended to be played as the second mission during a single long play session, it is not likely these will always be available unless the player is hardcore enough to need more content.

Technical Implementation

Campaigns are a collection of missions, played out in an order decided by another layer of logic. This logic will allow for a player to have paths through missions in a campaign, just like scenes through a mission. The persistent memory of campaigns will be stored per player character and will include a flexible system for storing campaign value, just like storing mission values.