It turns out The Silver Bayonet is a little more popular in my club than expected. I have four tables to setup for our first game day later this month and I’ve now finished painting up two warbands (final photos to come after I get some snow effects for them).

I’ve put more thought into the campaign as I now have eight or so players to start. I feel it needs to be short, just five to eight games. In personal experience, that’s about the right length of time for a campaign. I unashamedly steal the concept from TooFatLardies: your campaign is a chapter in a character’s story, not the whole novel!

To that end I’ve aimed to keep the framework simple, but flexible. I struggled at first to come up with narrative reasons for everyone to intercept–after all, there’s around six countries represented among our players. In the end the simplest solution is best: just give one large point of intrigue everyone is there to investigate.

I settled onto my portal idea early, so fleshing out the concept and making it the focus of the campaign made sense. Why are you here? Well, there’s gates that teleport you across the world! Someone has to map these things! Or perhaps you’re just trying to find the useful ones, or maybe you’re trying to solve how to disable them, or even going place to place and successfully doing so!

I’m happy with this starting point. It’s flexible enough to feature many character motives and terrain settings, while being simple enough to run with. It also fits this image I have of The Silver Bayonet: it’s a monster-of-the-week show from the 90’s. To that end, our campaign won’t solve some grand mystery or disable all of the gates. I aim to encourage my players to find their direction for their own stories and solve how they wrap up, but I do have a few fun mission concepts to throw at them along the way.

More on those another time as I solidify them. Below, for the pleasure of anyone bored enough or just needing a setting, is my starting blurb for the campaign. Enjoy, or skip it. The idea is indeed as simple as it seems.

The Gatewalkers

The year is 1811—Napoleon’s thorn remains firmly in his side in Iberia, Madison has yet to blunder into the war of 1812, and Muhammad Ali is only a few years into his reign over Egypt. The world is starting to become aware of a gathering darkness as the Harvestmen coalesce into power and creatures of legend start to become more aggressive world over.

Alongside these monsters come a little known, rare form of artifact: gates. These gates come in all forms and sizes. Some are massive works of stone that sprout up overnight, while others are borne forth by the local flora twisting into new forms. These gates, when walked through, connect to other gates world over. A gate hidden inside the Pyramid of Giza may link to the woods of Virginia, while another gate hidden inside the coves of the beaches of Sardinia may lead to another realm entirely.

No one understands where the gates came from or what purpose they may serve their hidden masters, but one thing is for certain: the ability to cross the world in an instant is not to be underestimated.

Few know of how Thomas Jefferson, nearly dead to disease while in office, was saved by medicine brought over from the Orient through a gate. Even fewer know of the gate used to move a British Silver Bayonet unit into Almeida to help break the siege in 1810—the very conflict in which the French discovered the existence of gates.

Remember: step through quickly, blink twice, and ready your weapon immediately. Gatewalking isn’t for the feint of heart, and you never know what you’ll find on the other side.