A month ago I wrote that I was now a "Game Master", as I finished the book and ran some sessions. I'm still going strong with that, although I have had the pleasure to be a player to some new GMs as well in the past few weeks.

My shared universe

Most of the sessions I run, I run within a spin-off of the Boardgayming Amsterdam community. At the moment of writing this is a Whatsapp-group with around 50 people, where the habit is to just post a poll, proposing a time, with the options "Player", "Host", "DM" and sometimes "Yes but not this date". People can then vote for the role they want to take in the session and create a new group with only those interested to actually plan the thing. The sessions are always in-person and mostly at someone's house.

The group started playing at first level because D. joined a "normal" Boardgayming event and proposed to DM some D&D games. I missed those first sessions, but later on when J. took over the role of "most active DM of the group" I joined a few sessions. And well, as I was interested and found the book, this was the easiest way for me to just try to DM myself, and that happened.

As a structure, D. invented a central hub to our adventures, which is the magical Hadini's Hotel, an infinite hotel created by a wizard, which has entrance doors in many many cities. When it was first described to me by J., what I saw was an endless tavern (in my minds eye one infinite room with tavern furniture, but with a ceiling), and Hadini was wearing a top hat. This turned out to be a bit like the whisper game: D. later described Hadini's Hotel as a hotel in art deco style ("like The Movies in Amsterdam") and Hadini as wearing a fez. The structure still worked though.

Formalizing Hadini

Thursday I read this post by P. from the RPG Night in Utrecht, a third one in his series on distributed campaigns. In his series, he talks about a few prerequisites: have a number of truths about the world, divide the campaign world into regions and give each GM complete authority over their region, and finally create some non-trivial but traversable boundary between those regions. Read the series for more.

Quite coincidentally, or maybe influenced by the earlier posts, I actually did some work to get this working for Hadini's Hotel this week. I had the idea for a while, but since we're kind of moving out of the summer break, I proposed to the other DMs to call this a new season and to create some structure. To be fair: the main problem I was trying to solve was character progression, as the whole group had been level 4 since March, as non of the active DMs (me included) felt like they had the authority to level up the PCs.

In coming up with some form of structure for leveling up, I also created a page that contained some truths about Hadini's Hotel. This was the moment I found out about the fez. The whole document can since Wednesday be found on the on-purpose old-fashionedly styled page over at Hadini.nl.

But is it really decentralized now?

The main purpose of Hadini's Hotel is to have a shared narrative starting point. Since the Hotel has doors in infinite other places and realms, we can use it to plug in any adventure to PCs who already know each other, or have never met at all. This is also it's biggest downfall though: getting the party outside of the Hotel can be a bit of an exercise.

Several players have reported their character to be "trapped" in the Hotel. Which makes no sense: they leave it for an adventure and two weeks later "oh no", we're in the Hotel again. Comparing this to P.'s notes, where he uses regions: PCs only move to another region if the player is switching to another GM. This means the player has a reason to give the character a reason to change to the other region. This also means that characters are never magically transported back to start (and thus also never against their own will).

The other thing is that there are very little shared truths. Only this week I've canonized a few important (or minor?) details about the Hotel and it's staff, keeping stuff intentionally vague in order to give new DMs stuff to play with, while still giving them some frame of reference to play off of. But the details that are agreed on now seldom influence the actual adventure.

So no, I don't think we're a decentralized campaign now. We're still a series of one-shots with returning characters.

Does it have to be?

Hadini's Hotel doesn't have to be anything, of course. But I notice I am longing for a bit of consistency between sessions, both as a DM and as a player. Running completely unrelated one-shots every time is just a lot of work, as very little work you do for that one session can be carried over to the next one. And players get the feeling they are stuck within the Hotel, especially if they keep being the same level for months.

With the level issue solved, I think Hadini's Hotel can be enough of a structure for me. I am thinking of creating a world on my own, and just use the Hotel as a bridge, but still keeping the principles of the distributed campaign in mind. This will give me some factions and world events to build on in between sessions, and it could be a starting point if someone else also wants to DM in the same world.

New players could also just create a character in this new world and never be at the Hotel. I'll just inform them that it's an option to also be native to some other world if they want to be, as the Hotel can take them here, and they would still have access to the one-shots provided by other DMs using the old structure. If I do accept PCs native to my world, it does mean I would not always start the adventure in the Hotel itself, but just resort to some hand-wavy "you have been hired" kind of thing.

The last thing I want to start playing with is the idea that at the end of the session, the goal for the next session is determined. This is an idea from P.'s post about his open table for Mausritter, and I think it could work for me too. I have ran a "proactive" one-shot that is turning into a two-shot for another group of friends, and I really like the preparation style of just updating the state of the world based on what happened at the table, and keeping track of actual character goals and coming up with twists and backstory for them. I want that in Hadiniverse too.

The first session of this new "season" is next Friday, and I guess I will keep you posted.