Living campaigns, or shared campaigns, are a gaming format within the table-top role-playing game community that provide the opportunity for play by an extended community within a

shared universe A shared universe or shared world is a fictional universe from a set of creative works where more than one writer (or other artist) independently contributes a work that can stand alone but fits into the joint development of the storyline, chara ...

. In contrast to traditional isolated role-playing games, living campaigns allow and encourage players to develop characters that can be played at games run by many different game masters, but which share a game world and

campaign setting A campaign setting is usually a fictional world which serves as a setting for a role-playing game or wargame campaign. A '' campaign'' is a series of individual adventures, and a ''campaign setting'' is the world in which such adventures and c ...

, as well as a plot line that is overseen by a central core of professional or volunteer editors and contributors. Many living campaigns serve a dual role of providing a creative outlet for highly involved volunteer contributors while also serving as a

marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

tool for the publisher of the game system that is the focus of the living campaign. While the earliest living campaigns were run by the now defunct

RPGA The RPGA (also called the Role Playing Game Association and the RPGA Network at various times), was initially part of the organized play arm of TSR, Inc and later of Wizards of the Coast. From 1980 to 2014, it organized and sanctioned role-playing ...

(Role Playing Gamer's Association), many groups around the world run active living campaigns which are independent or sponsored by other publishers.

Overview

Living campaigns are a shared campaign setting with a codified set of rules for the campaign that govern how to build and advance characters as well as how the campaign will handle rules elements of the setting. Campaign staff create, distribute, and manage new adventures in that campaign setting, and quite often administer a player database and promote various products. A living campaign lets players build and advance

characters Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

, develop their personalities, and forge relationships. Living campaign games are run at conventions, game days and other gatherings. The rules for character tracking allow a player to take their PC they created for the campaign to any of these gatherings and play it in the adventures offered. It is still common for adventures to be offered at conventions with premade characters that fit to the story, but Living campaigns allow for additional options. The original living campaign was the ''Living City'', set in the

Forgotten Realms ''Forgotten Realms'' is a campaign setting for the '' Dungeons & Dragons'' (''D&D'') fantasy role-playing game. Commonly referred to by players and game designers alike as "The Realms", it was created by game designer Ed Greenwood around 1967 as ...

city of Ravens Bluff, and created by the RPGA. The campaign ran in its original form in ''

Polyhedron In geometry, a polyhedron (plural polyhedra or polyhedrons; ) is a three-dimensional shape with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. A convex polyhedron is the convex hull of finitely many points, not all on ...

'' magazine starting in the mid-1980s, and continued until shortly after the advent of 3rd Edition

Dungeons & Dragons ''Dungeons & Dragons'' (commonly abbreviated as ''D&D'' or ''DnD'') is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. The game was first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TS ...

(D&D) in 2000. It then restarted under the auspices of the company Organized Play, but lasted only two years under that license and then reverted in 2003 to Wizards of the Coast. ''Living City'' proved to be a popular concept and "the number of Living City events actually surpassed the 'classic' RPGA tournaments — possibly as early as late 1993". In the first decade of the twenty-first century, RPGA created a variety of living campaigns. The largest was

Living Greyhawk Living Greyhawk ("LG") was a massively shared ''Dungeons & Dragons'' Living Campaigns, living campaign administered by RPGA that ran from 2000 to 2008. The campaign setting and storyline were based on Gary Gygax's Greyhawk, World of Greyhawk setti ...

, played by thousands of people around the world from 2000 to 2008.

Organized play programs

Shared campaigns have occurred for multiple role-playing games:

References

{{D&D topics Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings Eberron Forgotten Realms