RPG-A-DAY 2015 Day 15: Longest Campaign Played...A 10-Year-Long V&V Game

15. LONGEST CAMPAIGN PLAYED...

I had a verrry long-running Villains & Vigilantes campaign that ran through both my high school and college years. By my figurin', it was a campaign that ran nearly 10 years.

The campaign started in 1982 when I picked up the V&V boxed set at The Panzer Hut -- the local FLGS at the time. I was a sophomore in high school at the time, and my group had been playing a lot of AD&D. As a change of pace, we decided to get some superhero action going, so we rolled up characters and started with the classic Crisis at Crusader Citadel. When the smoke cleared, our team of Grav-Man, Metamorph, The Arachnid Kid, and Brainwave (yours truly) had rescued the Crusaders and established our own supergroup -- The Guardians.

With the establishment of a supergroup, we had a rotating membership of other supers (ie, players) who would drop in and out of the campaign depending on availability and interest. Some of the team members I can recall were Grav-Man, Seeker, Metamorph, Brainwave, Gadget, The Arachnid Kid, Sparrowhawk, and Apparition. (And I've mentioned Puzzler in previous posts.) We played through nearly every V&V module released. During the height of the Satanic Panic, we even played an in-campaign V&V game for a class project to show what "role-playing" actually was. That's right...we played V&V during school as a class presentation FOR CREDIT.

Eventually, we went our separate ways post-high-school. However, in college, I found a new group of RPGers. I suggested V&V, and they were game for it. Even though they started with new characters and a new base, as the GM, I created their campaign to dovetail into the world I had already created in high school. Events that happened to them were continuations of events that happened in my HS game. And on those rare occasions when the HS group got together, their games neatly dovetailed into the college campaign world. This went on until around 1992 when the campaign kind of petered out.

Sadly, I was never able to work out how to get both groups together for one big final Secret Wars-type mega-crossover. But it would've been awesome.