Here are some ideas on how to have a little continuity that links games together, and even facilitates a faster set up for future games. Feel free to add more.
- Don't lynch pin anything on the PCs (being named in prophieses or primary owners of an artifact.)
- Use organizations (like Cryptic Alliances) as an "adventuring guild" network to summon up new PCs and call away the "missing" characters. Different alliances offer different themes and missions.
- Name the game after a vehicle or business that transports PC around, like a ship, RV or a merchant caravan. The focus is then the road trip and all it entails, bandits, weather and profit
- Build a detailed community of NPCs who know the PCs. The game is then all about helping the community.
- Create a paramilitary organization. Each new session is now a mission. PC show up, get briefed and go kick mutant behind.
- Pull new PCs from the "background" A member of the ship's crew, an Alliance member, or young warrior from the community
- Create an antogonist who's the connection between PCs. A vicious warlord, a recent disaster, a mutant headhunter.
Use organizations (like Cryptic Alliances) as an "adventuring guild" network to summon up new PCs and call away the "missing" characters.
My plan was to include a small sentient dimensional rift that inexplicably follows the characters around, occasionally tearing one or two (missing players) into alternate dimensions.
When the players next show up, I briefly recount their 6-year campaign against the Mind Lords of Earth-946, culminating in the activation of the Deviant Mass Engine.
For which they received exactly the same amount of experience as the party received last session.
- 1 year, 1 session: Game sessions only happen during the summer months, with winters beign too harsh for people to do much more than hunker down and eat stored grain.
- Absent Players/ New Players: Recovering from bad fortune during those winters (deceased farm hands, a new litter/nest of mutant babies, plow pulling mules dying from hyperthermia) means that some PC will have to stay on the farm instead of going out on artifact quest. Others had a good winter and come join the tradition.
- The Years Roll On: Keep track of the years, when mutants get too old, retire them and have an heir carry on the family honor and glory
- RPG Opportunities: Finding and courting a wife, family fueds, and working with the neighbors are all RPG and NPC interactions to be had
- For those who don't show up: Build some random tables for a few encounters that grant some XP so they don't get too far behind.
This would be a great campaign to work some sort of long-term goal, like curing the land of radiation, going back in time to prevent the Big Mistake, or something like that.
If you don't slow down XP gain, or add additional levels, your game should end after about 10 sessions and 10 years of in-game play.
- Do build a world that has several roughly-equal groups in it. Of course my tribe is still cooler than your tribe (cue college team fight song here) but we'll all work together against the big bad nasty outsiders.
- Keep good notes of what the PCs do for L9 and L10. When the new group starts at L1, describe the old PCs passing through on their final mission(s)!
- Do create some areas that are Taboo, not deadly, so nobody goes there. This provides a way to bring in new peoples/characters/threats/&c. Do place a few Taboo zones near the edge of the map.