Campaign One-Sheets

The RPG community has, thankfully, had over a month now to move on from the OGL crisis that we faced at the beginning of the year. Wizards of the Coast ended up doing the sensible thing and acted to maintain the integrity of the OGL 1.0a as well as taking the extra step of releasing the 5th Edition SRD 5.1 in to a Creative Commons License. 

During the month of January however, there was a lot of focus in the TTRPG community on other games and systems that the GM community specifically was interested in running. A lot of great games were suggested and explored even after the OGL issue was (mostly) resolved. Many of us are still interested in running these other games that we purchased during and after the fiasco, or that we had purchased prior to the start of 2023 and never got a chance to run.

Start up Costs

There are many challenges a GM faces when trying to play a new system. It can be finding and purchasing necessary game material. It can also be learning and understanding the system well enough to be confident in running it. But of all these one of the biggest challenges is convincing an existing player group to switch over, or finding a new group that is interested in playing that particular system. Players often balk at having to purchase new rules material for a different game that makes them unable to use the rules content they may have previously purchased for whatever system they were playing previously.

One of the ways that we as GMs can ease players into a new campaign, in a new system, is to provide them with a good summary and synopsis of the campaign. A one-sheet description will fit our needs perfectly.

The Campaign One-Sheet

I first learned about the idea of the Campaign One-Sheet from the Sly Flourish blog. Mike Shea, of Sly Flourish, is a wealth of GMing guidance and experience and he provided some examples of the kinds of One-Sheets he used for pitching his players on several Dungeons and Dragons campaigns he has run in the past. You can find those examples on the Sly Flourish blog here.

Like most GMs, I have a long list of other systems and adventures I would love to run. Since January of this year, I have begun distilling the ideas for these campaigns into a variety of notes, for me to use when running these games. More importantly however, and for the purposes of this article, I have also begun to create my own Campaign One-Sheets to provide my players with.

These One-Sheets give them some initial insight into the game I, as GM, want to run. There are sections on the setting and the probable arc of the campaign narrative. 

There is a section that describes what options are available and permitted for them to use when creating their characters. 

There's even a section describing what materials are required to play, including what the players may need to be responsible for and what I, as GM, am able to provide.

In A Campaign Far, Far Away....

One of the first campaigns I thought about running after wrapping up my one of my current 5th Edition games is a Star Wars Age of Rebellion (AoR) game. During the COVID-19 pandemic I purchased the AoR Core Rulebook to help support my Friendly Local Game Store. I own and have ran the Star Wars Edge of the Empire beginner box for the group in mind, and believe they would love a gritty, war story set in the Star Wars universe. This group has many individuals who believe Rogue One is one of the best Star Wars movies (the comment section is open below).

Since reading through the AoR Core book I have been putting together a campaign in my head using the content I have available for the system. The Core book contains an introductory adventure titled the "Perlemian Haul". A follow-up adventure to the one found in the AoR beginner box called "Operation: Shadowpoint is freely available on the EDGE Studios website. The last adventure, and the biggest arc of the campaign will be the hardback adventure, "Friends like These". I picked this one up sometime after the AoR Core book and loved the time pressure the events of that story operate under. 

You can learn more about that concept in this article.

With this campaign framework in mind, I have put together a Campaign One-Sheet to give to my players to educate them about the game I want to run and to help sell it to them. I want to show them that it will be a fun, but limited, experience. We won't be playing this game for multiple years. When it's over, there will be another One-Sheet or two, trying to pitch the next campaign and frankly next system we will be playing.

First of Many

The Age of Rebellion Campaign One-Sheet is provided freely to you here as an example of what your own campaign pitch document can look like. I found freely available fonts online that mimic the typical "Star Wars font" and this helps with immersion, right from the get go. This is a document the players may wish to come back to, or may need to come back to if a character should die, so it helps that it maintains a sort of thematic consistency with the rest of the campaign. You can find thousands of free fonts online at places like Font Space, Font Library.net, and Google Fonts to help add some personality and themes to your own One-Sheets.

As I develop more Campaign One-Sheets for other games I want to run I will continue to post them here so that you can see all the different ways we can potentially format these sheets, and so you can use them as guides for your own One-Sheets.

- The RPG Study