New Beginnings: Phase 3: Reinvigoration

Can you see where I’m going with these yet?
There are times when we all have to make a fresh start. This series is going to examine the process in detail. The table of contents was in the introduction (part 0).
In Phase 2, short-term measures were used to buy time while doing some fairly tedious work in performing the last rites over large parts of the previous campaign / old campaign, and while those short-term measures should form part of your ongoing repertoire of tips and tricks, they aren’t enough to refill your primary burnout tank – let alone the smaller sub-tank that gets used for gaming stresses.
Reinvigoration, or rejuvenation of you as a GM and of your enthusiasm for the task, is the next step. You may need only a little of this or a lot of it. It’s a process that can be described quite briefly – so this will be a relatively short article – but one that is just as important, and just as lengthy, as any of the other parts.
For reasons that should be fairly clear by now, if you are seeking to rejuvenate an existing campaign, you should consider it to still be a new campaign – it’s just one that inherits more baggage than usual from the previous campaign (but probably less than you expected if you followed the full detox routine presented in Phase 3).
There are essentially two stages to this phase. The first is to get you to unwind and recharge, and the second is to then gradually ramp up your excitement over the prospects that the new campaign has to offer by doing some preliminary structural and conceptual work, teasing yourself with ideas and creating opportunities that you can exploit in the development process to make the new campaign absolutely Killer*.
* Actually, an old-time Australian would say “Bonza”, and a young Australian would probably use “[profanity] Sick”.
Unwind & Recharge
Step one is to unwind to the maximum extent that your non-game schedule allows by doing something that is both fun and completely non-game-related in the time that you would otherwise have spent doing game prep. Depending on how successful your last campaign was, you may need to skip one session, or you may need to take a full week off. Don’t even read gamer blogs (but bookmark posts on the ones you normally read so that you can catch up). Watch a DVD. Go swimming, or surfing, or skiing. Cook an elaborate meal for a change. Avoid reading anything genre- or reference-related. Take a break – but don’t make it so long a break that you start developing new habits; this happens at a different pace for everyone, so I can’t advise on it.
Step Two is to catch up on those Gaming Blogs. Read something that you have found inspirational in the past, something that never fails to get your imagination churning – something that doesn’t require a lot of deep cognition. Watch a genre-relevant DVD or two. Gradually edge from what you were doing to relax into similar activities that are ever-more-closely connected to gaming. Spend as much time doing this as you did Unwinding.
Step Three is to perform one or two exercises that fire up the gray matter and boost morale for gaming at the same time. There aren’t as many of these as you might think (and you probably don’t think there are very many), but there are a few:
- Re-read an adventure from an old campaign that went fantastically well.
- List ten positive words on a sheet of paper – preferably different ones each time you perform this exercise – and then, thinking about each, one at a time, marry each positive word the first aspect of gaming that comes to mind when you think of that word. Then draw a big smiley face over the whole page, making sure that it comes into contact with all the words you’ve written.
- Read a book that is both genre-relevant and an old favorite, and fun. Preferably something that has made you laugh, smile, or guffaw in the past.
- Watch a non-genre TV show that you find funny – then describe that show to yourself in-genre as though it were the outline for a standalone adventure.
Spend as much time on these activities as you did Unwinding.
At the end of that time, you’re ready to start work – and, if you’re anything like me, by now you will be itching to do so.
I can “just relax” for no more than three to four days before the itch (or perhaps that should be “compulsion”) to write starts getting to me. I can prolong that for another 2 or 3 days by reading gaming blogs and articles and doing the other activities in Step 2, but the urge is a LOT stronger by the end of that step. All during Step Three, I have to stop myself from taking notes or starting to write something that’s been inspired by the Step Three activities. By the end of Step Three, I’m ready to write longhand, if I have to. All sorts of ideas will have occurred to me and most of them will have been forgotten despite my intense desire not to. Even the dull work of vetting baggage for dumping purposes will seem interesting. And that’s exactly the right state to be in.
Note that if you aren’t able to give yourself enough time to unwind and recharge, you will find yourself running out of steam at some later point in the process. That’s fine; simply come back and repeat this step. You may lose some forward momentum, but you will gain enthusiasm for what you’re doing, and that’s more valuable.
Think about that for a moment: what would you rather have: an enthusiasm for the campaign you’re about to start, come the first session of play, or meeting some arbitrary deadline feeling tired and uninspired? What would your players prefer? Seems pretty obvious when put that way, doesn’t it?
You are preparing for something that is going to shape a large part of your social life for the next six months or more. If you’re run-down at the start, you’ll never make it to the finish line.
Theme
What is the Main Theme of your New Campaign going to be? Every campaign has one, whether we impose it or leave it to develop of its own accord – but deciding on one in advance at least lets you control the initial direction of the Campaign.
I went into Themes in some detail in Been There, Done That, Doing It Again – The Sequel Campaign Part Two of Two: Sprouts and Saplings so I won’t go over it again here. Look for the second major section, starting about a fifth of the way down the page – currently next to the “Tags” section in the right-hand nav part of the page, though that might not always be the case.
Three Moods
In your campaign development folder or file, create a page with just the word “Fundamentals” at the top. Underneath it, list three moods that the adventures are going to return to, again and again. These three moods will influence the tone of the campaign, the adventures that take place, and the way the PCs are going to fit into the campaign. At least one of these should be a negative emotion, and at least one, a positive one.
This is something I’ve only come up with recently. These moods will form indirect themes, recurring emotional nuances that in turn will point to adventure content. They may touch on villain motivations, on PC motivations – they will be used for all sorts of things before this process is concluded. For now it’s enough to say “These are the three moods that I want the campaign to deliver repeatedly.” (NB: nuance can be important – there is a big difference between ‘hope’ and ‘optimism’, for example.
Three Surprises
Next, list three surprises that you want to form part of the new campaign. These don’t have to be plot twists, and they should be entirely separate from the lists of campaign elements that have been produced so far. They may be pleasant or unpleasant, from the PCs’ perspectives, but should probably be a mix of the three. You should also choose surprises that you intend (at this point) to spring early in the new campaign.
Three Things The PCs will hate but the players will love
A bit harder still. These might be NPCs, or treasures in the wrong hands, or plot developments, or uncomfortable relationships or betrayals, or the unexpected defeat of an enemy who looked super-dangerous or the return of a dead mentor who insists on treating them like small children, or a mole somewhere in the Court, or… well, you get the idea.
Three Things the Players will want to do
Even harder, because the Players have not yet developed their PCs. Which means that you are going to have to base this decision almost completely on the players’ personalities, unless you are retrofitting an existing campaign, in which case this might be a little more predictable. To some extent, this may be about expectations – positive ones if you are looking to follow a successful campaign, or negative ones if the players have a complaint of some kind. Again, the emphasis should be on the start of the campaign; if possible, you are going to build these into the very first adventure.
Preliminary Game Session Structure
There are lots of ways to structure an adventure or a game session. Pick one to be your preferred model. You might start with XP from the previous game session, then a synopsis of the campaign (boiled down to a single paragraph), or a synopsis of last time, or the resolution of a cliffhanger, then a briefing, then mission planning – as I said, there are lots of choices. One GM I’ve spoken to likes to start each game session with a rumor. It might come from an NPC, it might come from something overheard, it might come from the wind. Truth content can be anywhere from zero to saturation. The rumor might be misleading or the genuine article. It’s just something designed to get the players talking in character about the world they live in.
Rulebook Reference Skim
I end this phase of creation with a skim of the rulebooks. I’m not looking for specific information. Rather, I’m looking to list the places that I need to look in order to find the specific information that I’ve identified in the baggage dump and ideas stages – the reference material that I’m going to need in order to carry out Phase four: Campaign Development.
But even beyond that, this is an opportunity to get the general layout of the rulebooks clear in my head after an enforced break.
With some campaigns, the game system itself might not have been chosen at this point. That’s fine – skim over all the candidates and make up your mind which rules best fit the themes and genre.
With the decks cleared, it’s time to start getting creative!
And that will happen in the next part of the series – but before I get into that, I think it reasonable that I write an article for those readers who may not be into this series. It will continue after that brief break…
- New Beginnings: Introduction
- New Beginnings: Phase 1: Inspiration
- New Beginnings: Phase 2: Baggage Dump
- New Beginnings: Phase 3: Reinvigoration
- New Beginnings: Phase 4: Development
- New Beginnings: Phase 5: Surroundings & Environment
- New Beginnings: Phase 6: Mindset & Underpinnings
- New Beginnings: Phase 7: Skeleton
- New Beginnings: Phase 8: Enfleshing
- New Beginnings: Phase 9: Completion
- New Beginnings: Phase X: Beginning
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February 14th, 2015 at 5:59 pm
[…] New Beginnings: Phase 3: Reinvigoration […]