Campaign-burning

Perhaps we should look at this a little.

Indeed, BW thrives when the players are working at odds in some regards, but you don't want PCs to be 100% diametrically opposed.

Ideally, some PCs want the same thing from the Big Picture, a different set of PCs want the same thing out of the Starting Situation, and a different still set of PCs have Beliefs that align for Personal reasons.

This is a good guideline for where you should have Players create there first 3 Beliefs around:

1. The Big Picture Belief

2. The Starting Situation Belief

3. The Personal Belief (aka sometimes as "The Fate Mine")

You want a tangled web of agreement and disagreement throughout the 3 Beliefs across all of your players.

No single player should be "fully aligned" with any other single player. Nor should any single player be full aligned against any single other player.

Make sense?

These singular disagreements we spread across everyone whom are otherwise well aligned is that grist for the mill.

So that being said, I didn't necessarily want to push the game in a distinctly adversarial direction, so I would think that we would be advisers, lieutenants, and things like that, under the local chief. Except, of course, that we've got the succession crisis.

Maybe the ideal thing to do would be to start it, boom, at the moment of the old Chief's death. First thing we learn is that he's dead.

From there we're trying to scramble to make sure that things stay under control, we try to get things to move forward with succession, but at the same time we've got envoys from other clans to deal with and keep under control.

So what kind of advisers would you have in a clan like this?

Religious leader(s), Military commander(s). Steward(s) to deal with social issues, Banker(s). What am I missing?

I wasn't trying to imply you were. Just wanted to use the opportunity to explore that aspect of BW.

Trying to bare in mind that this is all meant to be instructional on how to run a BW game. Sometimes it's been unclear to me if everyone else is remembering that :P
I think this could be a really interesting starting point. Good idea, Linsolv.

Any other thoughts?

That sounds great to me.

Is there anything we're missing, emsquared?

Let's just put a little finer point on the Starting Situation.

You touched on this with your earlier question, Linsolv.
But the goal of that question is: What can we do to ensure everyone has "action items", right off the bat?

This should really start dipping into Character Burning (character concepts, potential Beliefs) too, but what are the issues at hand with he death of the Chief?

1. Contentious Succession
2. Pro/Anti-Queen Factions
3. The Horse Fleet Plague

Other angles? How (who) can we come at these angles? Do we want the vary top-players (those in line to ascend to the Chiefdom) as PCs, or do we want to be just a step or two below that? For that matter, we wouldn't all have to be Advisors/Court Members, you could play Personal
Servant or Personal Guard or Mistress type PC in a campaign like this and have a lot of fun, I think. You don't necessarily have to be in a position of power, just power-adjacent. Able to touch that power...

What do you all got?

Now that I'm thinking about it, this makes a lot of sense to do. People who are already at the top, or as top as it gets, are going to be trying to stabilize things, sure. But is stability necessarily what we want as players, or what you want as a GM?

Whereas sorta second-tier guys, what they would want out of this situation is change, because change means opportunity; opportunity can only be bad for top guys, but for middle guys, it's a roll of the dice, worst case.

I don't really want to keep posting whenever I have an idea, guys. I'm not looking to run the whole thread myself lol.

Well, I think we're pretty much there, for Campaign Burning.

Let's move over to the Character Burning thread, start focusing in that.