Brainstorming

Picked up my brother at the MSP airport on Saturday. On the drive home, we got talking about starting some new online campaigns, be they RPG or strategy boardgames. He has a great idea for adapting Twilight Imperium for email play. A great game of space politics and exploration, but a challenge to slog through a complete game at the table. Setting it up to play via email, at a rate of one turn per week, could work great. I wouldn't be surprised if it has been attempted and documented somewhere on the net. My bro is gonna work on the idea. I'm eager to see what he comes up with.

Our next idea for a one-turn-per-week campaign is covenant-centric Ars Magica. Rather than focusing on the stories of individual characters, this campaign would focus on the development of the covenants as a whole. The Ars Magica season-based advancement system is well-suited for this type of long term, long range play. Each weekly turn would represent a season of magical research and accumulation of covenant resources.

When there is a conflict that would normally called for an adventure, it would be handled abstractly with a series of skill, spell, or combat rolls. Examples of conflicts: covenant vs. covenant, covenant vs. church, covenant vs. local lord, covenant vs.faerie court, etc. The covenant creation rules are designed to produce relatively balanced covenants, with built-in strengths and weaknesses to spur conflicts that interest that covenant's player. Then, the real fun begins when the player's covenants conflict with each other.

This Ars Magica idea needs much further development. Add a comment if you have any ideas for it. What setting would appeal to you? The British Isles? The New World?

Next idea: Divine Right email campaign. I love the map and flavor of this fantasy wargame. The one time I played it I had great fun despite my severe strategic blunder of leaving my king open to a brigand attack. Divine Right has unique but relatively simple rules and is best when played multiplayer. I also stumbled upon this post at Jeff's tonight that describes how the game's setting, Minaria, would make for a fine RPG setting. Maybe it would be fun to integrate short D&D quests into a Divine Right email campaign.