Campaign Ideas & Designs

I've been considering what to do for a campaign, which may actually get finished.   Long experience has taught me that planning a campaign, considering a campaign, and designing a campaign are without a doubt the surest ways to never actually play a campaign!  

As a result, this is something of a different approach from me, which I;ve decided to post on the blog.  I'll be attempting a campaign in small scale, aiming to get as much fun and drama out of as little book-keeping as possible, to let me play some small DBA games with a link between them.  

I've decided to go for Alexander the Great, for a combination of reasons - I have the memory of playing around with a primitive campaign of it I made myself about twenty-odd years ago, so there is a nostalgic value; I possess figures, mainly unpainted, which could be used; I have various books on it for inspiration, and I recently read and enjoyed the classic Mary Renault book 'The Persian Boy'.  

From this, I decided to design a campaign I could play easily to cover the Macedonian conquest of Asia.  Armed with lots of confused but eager thoughts, I decided to have a night of brainstorming my ideas - here's the result:

I sat down with a drink and nibbles at the dining room table, got a huge sheet of A2 paper, and basically spent an evening scribbling down every idea I could think of, all around a big node-to-node map of regions in the Persian Empire.  Practically all of them are uneven, and of uncertain use, they probably run counter to each other, and many will be simply incompatible, but: I have them written down to the stage where I can knock them into order.  

The aim is to produce a basic system for linking some DBA battles, to see if Alexander can conquer the Persian Empire, how far he can expand, and if he can establish a stable dynasty after he's gone or if the whole thing will collapse into fighting sub-kingdoms.  I've at least got my big themes for the campaign, and a notion of what I want to represent, even if I'm not quite sure how to do it.  Rather than stop here and forever ponder if a vague idea would ever be any good, I'm resolved to start playing it out as a test, and blog my thoughts about the results: bad ideas will get ditched or rewritten, and good ones will be kept and refined.  One way or another, the result will be that I get a campaign played out!