Canterbury Campaigns

Canterbury Campaigns.


Like the Westmarches campaign, Canterbury campaigns are another style of play with a few basic principles. It is named after the Canterbury Tales, where a colourful group of pilgrims tell strange tales on a long journey. It is designed to allow multiple DM’s to run sessions without worrying about party or setting consistency.

It essentially takes a Keep on the Borderland-style home town and puts makes it mobile - the home base is the party itself and the inn is a campfire. It is often lamented that it's hard to make travel interesting. In a Canterbury campaign, the whole thing is travel, but is made interesting by having travel as the setting into which adventures are placed.

  1. Characters start in a Home Base, a town on the edge of the Wilderness. It offers rest, information and supplies, but little else. This forces the party on the path to adventure as quickly as possible but gives them a safe spot to get attached to.
  2. The Wilderness contains a Final Destination, a very dangerous dungeon that has something to attract both treasure-hunters and do-gooders. This gives the party a single, unified goal which keeps them together, regardless of the kinds of characters it includes.
  3. Each session is an adventure on the path to the Final Destination. The adventures should match the level of difficulty that the party can face at their current levels. The party may remain consistent, or other adventurers may join along the way with little need for explanation. This allows for flexibility for players, characters and GM's.
  4. After a certain number of adventures, when all characters have had the chance to reach a high enough level to face the Final Destination (about 21 distinct adventures - 3 sessions per level to level 7), the journey ends. This forces the party to confront to their end goal. It also gives them a very clear objective along their journey: gain as much power as possible so that you are prepared for the Final Destination.
Another interesting side-effect is a sense of destiny. The Final Destination may be known to all people, so everyone they meet along the path will tell of good and ill omens for their journey. Because the DM(s) have control over where the party is headed, they can foreshadow the nature of the Final Destination.

The Canterbury works as a traditional fantasy setting, with adventuring trekking on foot and horseback across the rugged wilds, but it can take other forms. A pirate-themed campaign might have swashbucklers hopping from one island to the next, earning and spending booty freely along their way to El Dorado. A space-themed setting could have the same thing with planets. An interesting version could be a train. At the start of every session, the train runs out of fuel and the party has to get out to find/buy more by adventuring -- or perhaps it is a ghost train with predetermined stops that it cannot waver from. The train could be headed to Hades, the North Pole or Vladivostok.

The most important thing is that the Final Destination is the party's explicit goal and that they are given the opportunity to gain enough XP to face it.

Other Considerations

If a character dies along the way, the player can create a new character with 5d20% of the dead character’s XP. Alternatively, if their character can be retrieved from the dungeon, they can be revived through rest with 5d20% of their XP. If the whole party is killed, perhaps they escaped off-screen, barely surviving with 5d20% of their XP.

It is vital in a campaign like this that the party has a cart to carry their treasure. They may have several sessions in which they don't come across a haven to sell their treasure and resupply. Also, the image of a weary adventuring party following a treasure-laden cart pulled by a donkey on foot is magical to me.

Examples

In Over the Garden Wall, Grey and Wirt are the Party. The Unknown is the Wilderness that they are traversing through. Adelaide of the Pasture is their Final Destination. We don't question the world-building or wider setting, all we care about is the adventure that the GM has arbitrarily decided to place in front of the party. They gain experience until they are ready to face the Final Destination.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild is another example. Hyrule is the Wilderness and Hyrule Castle is the Final Destination. While this setting necessarily has more detail in the wider setting, Hyrule Castle is the perfect Final Destination. It looms high in the landscape, enticing Link in. But he will only approach the castle when he has gained enough power. His entire mission is based around amassing power for the Final Destination.

In Conan the Barbarian, Conan often starts his adventure in a random town or wilderness. I don't think there's always an explanation as to how or why he got there. Similarly, in a Canterbury campaign, the party starts in a random section of their path -- maybe it is a wooded part, a mountainous part, a swampy part -- maybe there is a town, a tavern, a dungeon or a cool tree.

In The Lord of the Rings, the greatest Canterbury campaign of all, the whole thing is a journey to Mordor. The Fellowship arrive when they are ready and have faced the trials and tribulations that gave them the experience, equipment and understanding they needed. There was no question about where they were going, only a question of whether they would manage to arrive in one piece.

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