There is a new worldwide online narrative campaign taking off at Dice Sagas!
The first installment of Campaign Wars, the War of the Wood, has just started!
Players will be able to decide the fate of a conflict in a far corner of the Realms, with their games and submissions!
For the past year, Dice Sagas has been building up a community of narrative players and hobbyists, and pumping out lore videos featuring characters from players around the world, slowly building the story of the Interstice.
The Interstice is a pocket realm, a hidden location in the aetheric void of the Mortal Realms, which has been coalescing for millenia due to events like realmgate collapses and other aethyric folding accidents in space. Many individuals, across space and time, have found themselves traveling through a malfunctioning realmgate, only to land in the Interstice.
In other words, it is the perfect place for players to bring some of their Old World characters to the Mortal Realms.
It is a land riven with magical storms, suffused with the many winds of magic that give the realms substance.
In collaboration with The Great Weave (the master platform for narrative Age of Sigmar creations run by NEO Keegan West @HorizonsLackey), players have uploaded and shared their creations for others to see and build upon, and the Insterstice has grown with players’ stories and new explorers setting up house and shop in this wild unstable land.
But now, multiple players can collaborate or take sides, in a fast-paced story!
Campaign Wars is a worldwide campaign, involving a host of various new conflicts within the Interstice. War of the Wood is the first and current conflict of many within this series.
Campaign Wars takes place on specific parts in the Interstice realm map; and the campaign will be focusing on these areas of conflict.
HOW IT WORKS
First you will pick a side: the Averlorn Alliance or The Warherd.
Players will be able to use The Great Weave Quest submissions format, or polls on the Dice Sagas Discord server, to submit their votes and contributions to a particular story direction.
Submitting pictures of the models of your army and/or its general will already score points toward your faction. But there is more!
Within the Insterstice’s World Anvil map, you’ll see that the map has a hexagonal overlay. Hexes represent areas of potential conflict; some of these are already owned territories that have special rules if you decide to play a battle there. This is one of the main ways to participate: play a game of Age of Sigmar, Warcry or a Soulbound session, and report the result of your battle/mission to score points for your faction.
If you write up a narrative for your battle, or simply a short story even if you don’t play a game, you also score points.
You can also score points by sharing your hobby progress, on your models and projects.
After each campaign turn, the victorious side in each quest will be able to claim rewards, and players’ submissions may be featured in the story video that will update what has happened in the Interstice due to the players’ contributions.
Each campaign turn will last two weeks, and the campaign has now started, since the 20th November 2021.
We chatted with the organizing NEOs, Christian and Matt, about what players can expect from it.
Q: After more than a year of community lore videos and narrative battle reports, this campaign will take the Interstice storyline fully into interactive and fast-paced mode. Tells us a bit of what people can expect of what the stakes are for this regions of the pocket realm.
Christian: We’re now looking to explore the Interstice pocket realm more with the community, which has always been the main goal. People have seen battles and skirmishes across the lands and now we want to bring these battles and stories to everyone. This is a time to have their stories told and to involve their characters within the plots of the story.
Matt: Oh this has been a long time coming, I think, and we’re glad we can finally get it started. I’ve had this as a bit of a pipedream for some time, but didn’t really think we’d actually get here. So of course my hopes and expectations are at stake!
But more seriously, the stakes are whatever people make of it, as it is as much their story as it is ours. The territories that this war is taking place over aren’t just arbitrary kingdoms that we’ve made up a conflict for; it actually started as casual banter over one of our streams between two people in chat!
Christian: Two members of our community were goading each other (in a friendly manner) and it felt perfect to have these to start our first war campaign!
Matt: They started talking about the animosity that they feel towards each others’ army faction (in a fun way of course) and we just kind of ran with it! We could very well be witnessing the final days of an aelven sanctuary, or maybe the death knell for a herd of disenfranchised chaos goats. What happens next really depends on the choices of the players out there; I suppose that if the cards fell right, another unexpected outcome could occur instead, depending on where the players want to take things. Trying to work the kinks out of a diplomacy idea, but that will come later. Hopefully.
Christian: So we’ll be doing polls every two weeks and we’ll be releasing content based on events that have occurred and that the community have participated in. Depending upon the outcome it will fundamentally change the area and outcome of the landscape.
Q: How will setting their games and stories in certain regions of the map allow players to experience the world of the Interstice? How much agency will they have in shaping the fate of the hexes in the map?
Matt: I mean, it is one thing to watch or read about something happening in a world, but it’s an entirely different thing to have a hand at sculpting the world and its history. The Broken Realms books were cool in that they gave us interesting scenarios, big plays made by bigger players. They even gave us rules to play out the conflicts… but we could never actually affect the outcomes. No matter how handily you beat up Belakor’s forces, the outcome of the story doesn’t change.
Here, we’re giving people the chance to have their battles and efforts contribute to a change. To have their heroes actually do heroic actions that can make a mark on the history of the land. Be it through valour or deceit, your actions can go down in the history of our little inter-realm.
Christian: So depending on locations they’ll be modifications to the battle itself. This could be -1 to hit when shooting due to fighting within a forest or on a 6+ you negate a wound if you’re fighting within a land of life. These are just examples and entirely up to the players whether they wish to utilise them.
We also have a group of players playing Soulbound [the Age of Sigmar roleplaying game] within the Interstice and their adventures can change the landscape too. It’s not only battles either. Players can participate in any hobby and place their vote to their cause. We want this to be including and as we know not everyone can get games in, or have only interest in painting. So this allows them to feel part of the community and have their say.
Matt: As the story goes on, we’ll see territory shifts as you would expect. But beyond that, I’ll be giving players/factions options that could radically change the playing field/landscape. I’ll try not to say too much now as things are still in the writing and creative process, but I think Michael Bay would approve.
Q: How much can a player’s submissions affect the story? We all like our characters to be larger than life and take the spotlight here and there. How can players best craft their submissions to help your story process?
Matt: Well, I’d like to say you can write whatever you want, but obviously we have to have some limits to offer balance and a coherent story. Tell us about their exploits and we can spotlight it, but if you can give us more neutral or open ended writings, we can better shape the story with it. Telling us that Robin the Brave Freeguild Guard tore through Archaon with his pike and proceeded to behead several greater daemons with his teeth might sound cool, but unfortunately won’t make it into the final cut (probably). Instead let us know about the difficult battle they fought, why they fought, the sacrifices they made and their perspective of the ordeal. What did they gain from this experience and what was the price they had to pay?
Christian: As this is our first campaign we will learn as we go. But one sure way is to have their characters submitted to The Great Weave under the Interstice pocket realm. We already have many awesome entries and looking forward to seeing many more. The more detailed background and effort you put into it, will mean more power points for your vote.
Q: What kind of team dynamics and strategic actions will players be able to experience during this campaign?
Christian: So within our discord and on YouTube you’ll see talk and debate around actions and how can your character get involved. This is where we’ll be liaising with the community which can help direct next actions.
Matt: We’ll be having little private sections on the Discord server for our separate allegiances. Players can pledge their allegiance to one side or the other and join these private sections (alternatively, stay neutral and contribute to whichever side you want on a whim). In these private discord channels, communicate, coordinate and plan actions and where you want to put your submissions towards. If there is a particular quest that your team feels is more significant, best be to coordinate together so you can have an orchestrated effort to win that one.
Along with the normal campaign actions available, there will be occasional faction side-quests or actions to take that the other side won’t be privy to. People can put their submission and contributions towards those to fulfill those goals in lieu of putting contributions towards the normal quest-actions. Of course, that runs the risk of losing in the regular campaign actions but it might be worth it for your secret action to work!
For the sake of fun and fair play, please don’t be sharing faction secrets and plans to the other side.
Q: What would you like to say to players out there, to motivate them to join in and hang out with the rest of the Dice Sagas narrative AoS community?
Christian: Well we have an awesome community so far and it can only get better.
Matt: We don’t bite? Not until my Soulblight army is painted at least.
Christian: People who know me know I’m very relaxed and always looking to get people involved to have their say. To this end we also do hobby hangouts [on Youtube] which enables people to hang with us and hobby. Also to ask any questions whilst we’re live. We also encourage people to show off their work too within our discord as it doesn’t matter how great you are at painting, we love seeing it.
Matt: Come join us; we’re happy to have anyone join in the development of our corner of the realmspheres. Narrative gamers, competitive gamers, painters and collectors; anyone can join the story and carve out a piece of history for your personal army.
Christian: There’s plenty more things to get involved with too, like board games. I’ve started venturing into the board game arena and although early days we’ve got some great items coming up. Overall we’re very approachable and encourage a positive energy within discord and all media’s.
I hope to see you there!
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Thank you, Matt and Chris, and Keegan for setting up the collaboration framework!
We will be following the event online, so please post lots of pictures on social media!
You can find the Campaign Rules page here for more details.
Find Dice Sagas on:
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Discord
The Great Weave – Campaign Wars page
Introduction to the Interstice Pocket Realm
What do you think about this event?
Do you have any questions for the NEOs, and how they have built such a big online group of narrative players?
Leave your comments below!
Narrative Event Organizer Network 