I made a massive update to the Overworld phase, both in content and rules. If you didn't already think I am a genius, I suspect you will after this update.
First off, remember that the
Rise of the Runelords campaign featured these notes in its description?
"Empire notes: The players are given a patch of land and a keep to manage in the battles against the Runelords."
dan was given this information in some Pathfinder forum, I think it was the official Paizo forum, but it's wrong. It probably applies to
RETURN of the Runelords, which is one of the sequels. So I removed this note.
More importantly, I scrubbed the
Runelords entry of all spoilers from the adventure selection map of the Inner Sea Region, to bring it in line with the overworld description. But even MOAR importantly, I listed four campaigns at the bottom that are unlocked by beating
Runelords:
Second Darkness,
Jade Regent,
Shattered Star, and
Return of the Runelords. All these take place, along with
Curse of the Crimson Throne that's also currently in progress, in the Varisia region. It features six campaigns in total, plus who knows how many standalone adventures. It is the first region of Golarion to be introduced, and thus the most detailed.
Now all these unlockable campaigns will appear in the adventure selection map if the D&D2 group beats the original
Runelords. Note that some of these might have previous ones as prerequisites, and I won't know this until I've looked into them, but either way none of them can be played unless the original
Runelords is successfully completed. So the map is currently correct, though if you do beat
Runelords you may find that not all of its unlockables appear immediately, in the case that some of them have others as prerequisites. The overworld will always be a work in progress in this manner, subject to countless minor and major revisions, simply because it's humanly impossible to go through the tens of thousands of Pathfinder pages and map out all the connections beforehand.
But now we get to the real juicy part. If the original
Runelords campaign is failed, the Varisia region becomes a hellhole. The campaign includes detailed consequences and now I've read them. Thus all the sequel campaigns become unplayable and will never appear on the map. Depending on how quickly this failure occurs, and how far along in
Curse of the Crimson Throne group D&D1 is at that point, it's quite possible that the consequences of D&D2's failure will come crashing down on D&D1's heads, ruining their campaign along with the entire region. I am not sure if this holds vice versa, i.e. if the
Crimson Throne group can destroy the region too by its failure, but I should know next week.
So if the region becomes a hellhole, anywhere from four to five campaigns are ruined, not counting the original
Runelords which will be ruined too. That's why I am introducing dan's character, the ranger Kelos, as literary device. He will have connections with both Varisia groups, and can be used to bring them together, if the need arises. That said, let's say that the
Runelords group wants to ask for help. They can't just ask it at any random point in the campaign, just because they got scared of a monster or an upcoming battle. Why should the other group abandon its campaign to help them out, if the danger is only to a single group of adventurers, who are moreover strangers? Their own campaign has consequences too! So the
Runelords group will have to first discover the gravity of the threat to the region, before they can convince the
Crimson Throne group that it's worth jeopardizing their own campaign, or even abandoning and failing it, in order to help them out. And dan's character will remain around to connect them if it gets to that. Having said that, dan's character could well die from the very first session of the
Runelords campaign, at which point we'll have to look for another solution in the future to make the connection, if it proves needed.
The beautiful part about all this—if all these interconnected groups and campaigns were not already beautiful enough—is that, if the region indeed becomes a hellhole, our world will not skip a beat. You'll just have to raise an army in the City-building phase and then enter the 4X phase to clear out Varisia, at which point all the locked campaigns will be unlocked. It will take years, but it can happen. You just roll new characters, and you go be pirates in The Shackles, or tomb raiders in Osirion, or lost adventurers in icy Irrisen, or holy crusaders in The Worldwound, and you come back with an army when you have one, and we play the whole Varisia invasion like a Warhammer miniature campaign in TaleSpire. It's such a steep challenge that all groups could join forces for it; you just need ONE group to raise the army, and the others join as officers.
So you see, a typical DM running the
Runelords campaign with normal Pathfinder rules would be loathe to allow Varisia to be overrun, because he'd lose all those campaigns and would have no means of handling the situation based on rules. He'd have to make shit up one way or another: either by unreasonably helping his group to beat the campaign, or after failure by manifesting some force to avert the consequences, both of which are inferior, anti-immersive options. But due to our super-rich overworld, that doesn't care if ONE region of ONE planet gets overrun, and our super-deep Empire phase that can handle anything, and even loves wrenches thrown in the works because it thrives on them, we can handle absolutely anything that can happen, and it'll be tremendously interesting to us—to ALL of us, both players and DMs—to see what WILL happen.
Game of Thrones is weaksauce compared to what I am describing. No region of
Game of Thrones was overrun or destroyed, and the whole thing was resolved by plot-armor and a little girl thrusting a knife.
Welcome to Alex Kierkegaard's D&D Battlegrounds.
P.S. Btw, you might say that the above gives out spoilers, and you'd be right. But I had two choices here. Either I keep you in the dark about how the Overworld and Empire phases work, and about all the possibilities for them and group interaction; OR I spoil some stuff in order to demonstrate to you the full range of possibilities of the game and world you signed up for. I won't be spoiling things FOREVER, but I do need to do some spoiling at the start to explain to you how things will work.