About the Dramatic Universe Campaign

Many campaigns revolve around empires that are seeking to raise themselves to greatness, usually at the expense of their neighbors. They may do this in a "4X" (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) style, with varying amounts of detail and paperwork. They may use a published campaign, which dispenses with much of the detail and paperwork in favor of a limited situation or scope. Or they may use something with similar levels of scope, detail, and paperwork as a 4X campaign, but with some of the "X"s removed.

This is not that sort of campaign.

This campaign focuses not on the goals of the heads of state or the admirals, but on the captains. Instead of fighting a war, with territory marked out in controlled sectors and colonies of varying levels of productivity, the campaign is the storyboard of a television series. Anytime there is an odd subspace anomaly or dangerous space monster, you can always assume that both parties will show up to investigate at the same time.

What is a Campaign?

A campaign is a system of mechanics that resolves a strategic (macro) set of circumstances, that are then resolved using a different system of mechanics that is geared for tactical (micro) circumstances. As applied here, the campaign creates a set of situations over several in-game years that starships (often the same starships) must find some sort of victory within. Each situation generated by this campaign are then resolved using the Star Fleet Battles game system, which is used to simulate the actions of a few starships when they encounter other starships (or space monsters, or colonies, or space anomolies).

The advantage of a campaign system, besides generating interesting situations for the micro-level game, is that each starship develops a story about them. They become involved in an important event in history. They are damaged in action and sent back to port for repairs and refitting. They die gloriously in defense of the republic. Thier deeds are remembered because of the places they have been and the things they have done.