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Potter's Bay Campaign Setup

I'm putting together a campaign centered around Potter's Bay, so I'm gathering the various materials I expect to use for that. First of all, I'm going to run it with Whitehack 4e. There are various reasons for this, but two bear mentioning. First, this is likely to be a pickup game with strangers, and I think Whitehack includes some various accommodations that will help the normies and the trad-pilled among them, without being distasteful for the horrible ideologue running it. Second, I want to really lean into a few specific parts of Whitehack as a way of reinforcing the setting. In this case, "affiliation groups."

See, I'd like the Empire of Potter's Bay to be highly bureaucratic in the most 18th-century way I can manage. As such, there's a "Royal Institute" or an "Imperial Society" for just about anything and any group you can name. I've been putting together a list of examples as they occur to me (current list below), but my hope is that players will be excited to invent and interact with increasingly specific and silly groups. And letting them write them on the character sheet is a particular bonus.

Some Potter's Bay Affiliation Groups

Lamplighters’ Guild, Stevedores’ Union, The Royal Bank, The Surveyors’ Guild, The King’s Church, The Builders’ Union, The Imperial Department of Insurance, The Drivers’ Guild, The Royal Navy, The Royal Society for the Aid of Travelers, The Imperial University, The Street Urchins’ Guild, The Confederacy of Pirates, The War Widows’ Fund, The Royal Society of Butlers, The Royal Records Division, The Surveyors’ Alliance, The Antiquarians’ Guild, The Technologist’s Conference, The Printer’s Institute, The Old Church, The Imperial Gamblers’ Society, The Agricultural Workers’ Union, The Crown Post, The Fishermen’s Guild, The Metalworker’s Local, The Royal Institute of Medicine and Barbering, The Imperial Institute of Astrology, The Society of Smithies, The Crown Butchers’ Alliance, The Conference of Hunters and Trappers, The Potter’s Bay Morris Dancers, Publicans United

To further play into the bureaucratic dimension of the setting, I'm planning to use the "Records Request Form" from Scribbles and Horrors, basically as presented there. I've also devised a "Records Reportage Form" in a similar style, but for characters to submit remarkable happenings to the Royal Records Division—who keep detailed records of all things—in exchange for XP. There are some restrictions on this, of course. For instance, the reporting character must have first-hand knowledge of the events reported, and there's an implication that Imperial records-keepers will fact-check the things reported. The intention here is to give players a diegetic reason to make session reports and such, and also to give me the opportunity to have government bureaucrats show up to be annoying from time to time. The XP award will vary depending on the remarkableness of the accomplishments submitted, basically a semi-diegetic way of doing "quest experience" or whatever. The second way to gain XP is to buy training from the local branch of the Imperial University or one of the character's affiliated groups, basically as described in Whitehack 4e. And, of course, for killing monsters and such.

I've also decided that each character will have a trunk or chest to keep their belongings in, and a separate sheet for recording what items are currently in their trunk (which stays in their current place of residence) rather than on their person. This is maybe a bit more persnickety about inventory management than what I typically do for games, but again, I think it fits the particular tenor I'd like for this campaign specifically. In a similar spirit, I'm providing them each with a bank balance sheet—literally a ledger page—for tracking the funds they currently have in the Royal Bank.

So far, in total, the "player packet" I'm providing players at the start of the first session includes:

Because Whitehack is weird about both magic and treasure, I'm considering my options there. I'll probably use Wonder & Wickedness instead of Whitehack's miracles, which is my normal move. If I need to, I can dip into Marvels & Malisons and The Book of Gaub as well, though I don't like those ones as much. For treasure, I'm considering using Luke's & Treasure to hint at some set of ancient civilizations that once occupied this place. I think the Euro-barbarian tone of & Treasure will feel sufficiently alien among the colonial New England vibes of the setting.

As for dungeons, I'm putting Dungeon Full of Monsters in the mountains nearby, and using the factions and such from that book to seed encounter tables in Potter's Bay itself. I think the tone of Dungeon Full of Monsters fits Potter's Bay perfectly, even if I find some large part of the superstructure of that book needlessly fussy, and I've run it a couple of times before. And I'll probably drop My Dungeons and some tombs and such around, as needed.

Here's a picture of my very cool campaign binder:

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