First off, let me link here a number of
CoD-related Patreon posts I've made recently:
State of Battlegrounds October '21 and the Future of Videogames
https://www.patreon.com/posts/58126033Curse of Strahd Is Now A Videogame
https://www.patreon.com/posts/58870997GOTY 2022 Early Access
https://www.patreon.com/posts/59347914The Insomnia 2021 Game of the Year Awards
https://www.patreon.com/posts/59635398All of these contain info and my views on Beneos's take on
Curse of Strahd, and how I intend to integrate it into
Battlegrounds. As I say multiple times in there, it's my 2022 GOTY so far.
Moving on, I have some more details on precisely how we will run it. Once the current campaigns are over, the players will be able to sign up for the
Kingmaker campaign. Any number of players can sign up from any number of groups. I am doing it this way so that even if some players from your group aren't interested in
Kingmaker, or have played the
Kingmaker videogame, you won't be constrained by their choices. And then the
Curse of Strahd campaign will be activated via
Kingmaker. I.e. the two of them go together. I won't tell you exactly what the conditions will be for remaining in
Kingmaker or for splitting off from it into
Curse of Strahd, so that we can maintain at least some suspense about Ravenloft. I would have rather no one knew about
Curse of Strahd and I just sprang it onto people, but since this is a criticism site and since I've had of necessity to talk a lot about
Curse of Strahd, you know a few more things about it than I would have liked. That's okay. Once Ravenloft is fully unlocked, all future adventures there will start entirely unexpectedly according to the rules in this essay:
Ravenloft and the Fine Line Between Choice versus Destiny
https://www.patreon.com/posts/52863351Everyone who doesn't want to play
Kingmaker, or who's played the videogame, will be put into one group and will play something else in the world. They'll basically choose a new campaign, or two if there's many of them.
What if there's less than four of them?
I might have a solution to that. Remember that TaleSpire-only part of Golarion that I am preparing? I recently said that it will be playable from 1 to 15+ people. So if there's fewer than four, they can play that. I will also of course make an announcement at the time to see if we can get any newcomers to jump in and bring the group up to four. We should be able to work it out no matter what happens. Worst case scenario I keep them playing one-shots in other systems/worlds until players from
Curse of Strahd die and can join them to complete their group. Or they can just take a break from
Battlegrounds until they have enough players for a group.
Note also that
Kingmaker goes up to 17th-level but
Curse of Strahd only to about 10th, so if the Ravenloft group manages to get back, they could potentially crash the
Kingmaker group's campaign in the middle, and all sorts of cool things might happen. So there might be PVP at the start AND at the middle of the megacampaign.