Making Your World Come Alive: Running Background Campaigns by Keith L Burns is a role playing game supplement published by Thaloranth Publishing for use with Legends of Thaloranth.
The supplement is available as an 11 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. One page is the front cover and one the Table of Contents.
The Introduction starts by saying that perhaps the players have managed to buy a farm, which has a monthly income, but now what. Instead of having the farm as a passive income generator, have it touched by events in the nation in which it’s set, via a background campaign. It suggests the Tournament Campaign as the ideal way of doing so, and what’s happening during the three years the campaign runs. The larger events of the campaign can be experienced through the farm, with details on how the farm itself can be affected by them.
It says that you don’t need to run the full campaign, or even care about tournaments, only understand that’s happening in the background and translate those events to effects they will have on your players’ farm. This will also work with any other campaign development running in the background, and these events can affect how the farm generates income. The Tournament Campaign and the Domains of Valor: Getting Started supplements are recommended to start and how to use them.
What About Other Domains looks at how this can be used in other things than a farm; ranches, inns and workshops being the examples given. It explains that the same events have different effects depending on the domain and finished off by looking at how to use the technique.
Making Your World Come Alive: Running Background Campaigns in Review
The PDF is bookmarked with the two major sections linked. The Table of Contents is to the same level of depth and is hyperlinked. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are no illustrations. Presentation is adequate.
Though this supplement is specifically written for the Legends of Thaloranth supplement the Tournament Campaign, some of the principles can be transferred to other settings and systems. The overall goal is to show how campaign-affecting events can affect the characters, if they have some kind of property or business. Though in many games, this won’t be the case, for those where the characters do have such, there are some things that can be mined from this to be used with them. Making Your World Come Alive: Running Background Campaigns can be found by clicking here.
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