So I'm thinking ahead to next fall. Currently, after discussions with club president Peter Cowles, it sounds as if we're planning to split off our activity into a third night (Thursday), with distinct activities each night: RPG sessions on Thursday, anime movies on Friday, and board games on Saturday. There's a part of me that likes the idea of clearing Saturday for board games, since it presents some possibility of letting me try some historical battles (ship battles using miniatures, or my impossible dream scenario of a huge WW2 campaign).
However, this segregation of activities probably will present a deathblow to the idea of an integrated RPG-and-wargame campaign of the sort I want to run. My guess is that this is true not just because the nights will attract different player types, but also because the RPG night is going to be dominated by Pathfinder players, and doing another PFRPG campaign is the path of least resistance.At the moment, I'm anticipating reverting the Green Pass campaign back to the kind of "simulated" campaign I was doing with Walley last fall. Players will no longer be tracking strategic level production or doing the associated paperwork (which caused confusion for a number of players), but just doing occasional battles using point-buys and pregenerated characters. I'll continue to draw scenarios and personae dramatis (the various lords and heroes generated by this spring's players) from the campaign documents I've developed, so that they'll extend the existing history. I can probably still run the anticipated finale battle I had planned at some point, with the scenario being arranged around some private roleplaying sessions I've been doing at home with my wife in the capital city of Durnovar. The RPG content I had planned (including a beautifully lethal and massive crypt complex stuffed with ghouls in Balewood!) is probably going to be orphaned.
On question I've had for a while is whether there's any way to integrate other campaigns into my own. I've tried to describe the campaign setting of Proxima as a crossover-friendly (and slightly "gonzo") world where refugees from other magical worlds (including a thinly-fictionalized Earth) can rub shoulders with one another. The TARDIS spell from a couple weeks ago was one example of how to rationalize a crossover mechanic as an in-character domain-level action.
A more difficult question is how to convert characters in a post-3.0 system (d20 OGL, or Pathfinder) into the pre-3.0 system of ACKS. The substantial buffs to abilities, feats, skills, and special class perks would make any character from a post 3.0 world function at the equivalent of 3-4 levels higher than an equivalent classic-era character. Many abilities in one system simply have no equivalent in the other. One of the major complications with the development of the 3.0 era (and 4.0, for that matter!) was the complete eradication of back-compatibility. This is especially galling for someone like me, with a huge library of plug-and-run modules from the 80s (a few of which I've borrowed to flesh out Proxima!), but virtually no content for modern game systems. One of the appealing features of running ACKS has been its strong emphasis on compatibility with 80s-era gaming that feels comfortable and familiar to me.
In any event, I'd very much like to have everyone in the current campaign send me a full list of all their heroes, castles, and lands (with associated statistics), so that I can keep running the world in a way that integrates player-generated content with the stuff I've been creating on the DM side of things (the various villains, dungeons, and chaotic-aligned realms). I'm hoping that even if the RPG night runs a Pathfinder campaign, we can still find ways to overlap some of our activities, and I can develop more of my intended history using point-buy battles using some of the existing heroes as generals and commanders.
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