Day Twelve: RPG with well supported campaigns
I'm assuming here that we're talking about games where the publisher also produces good quality campaign material to support the role playing game.
I'd like to say Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. After all, every year WotC bring out a hefty hardback campaign. These have provided additional details for the default world of The Forgotten Realms and have often provided additional rules and systems to cover specific environments or styles of play. Examples include Rime of the Frostmaiden (sandbox), Storm King's Thunder (point crawl) and Tomb of Annihilation (jungle set hexcrawl).
Yes, I'd like to say D&D 5E, but sadly, the recent campaigns just don't measure up*.
They all contain great moments, but are often padded out with fairly ordinary stuff. They can also suffer from awful railroading; not a good lesson for the GM looking for guidance on designing their own campaign.
You'd have to go back to the original Dragonlance series to find a reasonable example of a published D&D campaign, and that never quite worked for me (its me, not Dragonlance, but I found it too 'soap-opera-ish for my liking, and it also suffers from railroading).
So instead I'm going for Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu (again). Particularly the classic Masks of Nyarlathotep.
This campaign has been around since 1984. I remember owning it when it was a box with seperate booklets for each chapter. I've still got the 1996 version, but not the recent mega version, nor, sadly, the props package that comes with it.
It's considered the exemplar of a roleplaying campaign (though Eternal Lies, apparently, comes close) because it offers a huge degree of freedom in which order the chapters are handled beyond the first. There is a reasonable amount of redundancy in the clues (almost the Three Clue Rule at work) and it is truly world-spanning.
If you want to know more, check out the Wikipedia page.
If you are a Call of Cthulhu player and you've never played in it, (and you've got many months of game time available), badger your Keeper to run it for you, or better still, take up the revered mantle of Keeper of Arcane Knowledge yourself and run it for a bunch of victims mates.
I will warn you though, that, written in the 80s, some of the attitudes seem outdated now (rather like some of HPLs).
Good Keepers should be able to overcome that though, and it's well worth the effort.
*Honourable mention though to the BECMI Wrath of the Immortals campaign. Written as a swan song for the BECMI version of Mystara before everything went second edition, this was more a series of set pieces that were the framework of a far ranging campaign. There are some great moments in it, and I tangentially used some of them in my 4E campaign, but there are too many gaps that require many levels of adventuring to fill in to properly class as a full campaign.
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