Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay

999!

This is my 999th post at Campaign Mastery! Next week, four figures, a landmark achievement and one that I am quite proud of reaching!

Old Words

Today’s article is all about looking back, which is a natural thing to do when you approach any milestone. And yet, the connection with the currently-imminent landmark is something that only occurred to me in hindsight, not the inspiration behind this article. I’ll get to what the actual inspiration is at the end of this particular road.

Specifically, the is article is all about looking back to the beginnings of a campaign after you’ve been playing for a while.

Why?

Plans carefully laid at the start of a campaign have a habit of becoming increasingly disconnected from the reality as game-play evolves.

Reviewing your playbook not only permits you to update it to incorporate the reality, but lets you selectively reincorporate the little things that you’ve forgotten, in effect infusing the campaign that is with your original intentions, keeping the best and tossing the rest. I’ll get into some of the specific benefits as we deal with each part of the process.

New Directions

Ideas are often lost in the shuffle as the campaign, under the influence of players doing the unexpected, and the GM extemporizing and landing on his feet, finds unexpected and unplanned resolutions through unexpected pathways. No adventure survives contact with players!

The inevitable result is that the campaign drifts away from its roots as time passes. In some ways, that’s a good thing; it is evolving in response to the participation of the players, as though it were a living, breathing, thing – a campaign that remains exactly on track despite ten sessions of play is usually one that’s in trouble.

But it can mean that opportunities and intentions can go missing, and recapturing those is the aim of the process. And, by giving the GM a chance to take stock, it can present new opportunities and new directions in which the campaign can travel.

20/20 hindsight

Hindsight is sometimes said to be 20/20, meaning that we can see more clearly in retrospect that we can at the time. That’s often a case of being able to see not just the trees, but the forest.

It’s also true that we all get better at things through practice, and examining the conceptual underpinnings of a campaign can often exploit that increase in skill at a more fundamental level.

But hindsight reveals nothing if we never look back. And the only way a busy GM can take the time to look back is if they bake it into their schedule.

How Often

How long is a while? I’d peg this as something to do every ten days of real-time play. It isn’t something that has to be done in one quick burst, so spread it out over the next couple of game sessions.

• Campaign Beginning
• Game Sessions 1-9
• Game Session 10, Commence Review
• Game Session 11, Half-done
• Game Session 12, Complete review
• Game Sessions 13-21
• Game Session 22, Commence Review
• Game Session 23, Half-done
• Game Session 24, Complete 2nd review
  ….and so on.

Since game prep is one of the key determining factors in how often you play, this naturally anchors the intensity with which the task needs to be carried out to the time that’s available.

It’s worth appreciating how this schedule relates to real time. If you play once a week, that’s a quarterly review. If you play once a fortnight, that’s a biannual review. If you play once a month, that’s an annual review.

At least in theory. In practice, you’ll probably take twice as long and carry out the reviews half as often – biannually, annually, and biennial, respectively. That’s fine.

But, a word of warning: This proposed schedule breaks the overall review process into two parts of approximately equal size. The first part is static in size (i.e. time and effort required), while the second is proportional to the number of game sessions since your last review. So if you go twice as long between reviews, the first part will be only 1/3 of the total task, and the expectation is that it will probably take three ‘game sessions’ rather than two.

Complicating this scheduling even more is the need to prioritize what you need for your ongoing campaign and adventure development – no matter what, you have to be as ready to play as possible when that bell rings. The longer any process that is external to that requirement, like this one, takes, the more likely it is that something will happen to get in the way – that’s why I said that the time needed for the overall task would double.

The Process

The first part of the process has four stages:

1. Development Notes
2. Campaign Plan
3. Campaign Notes
4. Campaign Background

The second part has – nominally – just one:

5. Adventures / Game Sessions played since the last review began

…but that’s a very broad summary of what’s a very substantial task.

Campaigns Without

Not all campaigns will have all four or even all five elements. Whether or not they should is a decision to be considered some other time; the bottom line is that you can only review what material there is to review. These documents are all beneficial to a campaign, enough so that I would rarely consider running a campaign without any of them – but I have done so in the past, and developed them as an afterthought, usually in far less structured and comprehensive form.

If your campaign doesn’t have one of these, you can either skip reviewing it, or – if you decide that you really should have one – spend the ‘review time’ creating one retroactively, so that at the next review you will have a baseline to measure against.

Campaigns Underway

The longer your campaign has been running, the more beneficial this process can potentially be, because there has been greater scope for things to be forgotten or overlooked and for the campaign to have drifted.

It might be that you need to allocate a much larger time to the review process, or that you need to skim a little more and then focus on those elements that will prove beneficial. Almost certainly, you will need to adapt the process, and will probably find that some specifics have escaped you and are probably gone forever.

If this is your first review and the campaign has been ongoing for some time, take as long as it takes; just be methodolical, and remember that the longer you take, the more there will be to do at your next review.

Let’s say that the first review covers 100 game sessions and takes eleven sessions (one for part 1 and ten sets of game sessions taken 10 at a time). That means that it will be complete around the time of game session 111, and that as soon as you finish, it will be time to start the next review.

But that review only has to cover 11 game sessions – though, being more recent, these will often contain more details. So, let’s say that it takes twice as long as it normally would. That’s one session for the first part and three more for the second (rounding up)- which means that by game session 115, you will be all caught up.

At game session 120, you can then proceed as normal.

The lesson is not to be afraid to adapt this process for your own usage. It might be that you can draw a line in the metaphoric sand and say “Background materials and as far back as this – anything else won’t be relevant”. I don’t recommend such a practice, but if that’s what you need to do to make the process work for you, so be it!

1. Development Notes

Every campaign starts as a loose collection of ideas, often compiled over a period of time, and then winnowed out when the time comes to actually start campaign development in earnest. Every few years, I skim my way through those notes – you never know when you’ll uncover a forgotten idea whose time has come. That habit becomes formalized, more regular, and more frequent under this process.

These ideas can be classified into several categories, and get treated differently as a result.

There are:

• Ideas that have been incorporated into the current campaign – these get ticked if I’m using a hardcopy or color coded if working digitally. Color-coding just means that I change the font color of that piece of text.
• Ideas that are supposedly incorporated into the current campaign but have not been especially prominent in that campaign, or have not been executed to your satisfaction. These get a purple or black dot if manual processing is taking place or get color-coded purple otherwise.
• Ideas that have been explicitly earmarked for use in a different campaign – these get highlighted.
• Ideas that don’t integrate well with the first category of ideas or that were otherwise deemed unsatisfactory or undesirable at the time. These get a red cross manually or color-coded red digitally.
• Ideas that are adrift, neither in nor out. These get a blue dot manually or color coded blue digitally.

At the start of a review, I’ll color code everything plain black with no highlighting so that I’m forced to evaluate each idea afresh. That’s important because these classifications can change from review to review – that’s part of the point of doing all this.

With the ideas that are already supposed to be in your campaign, you are looking at how well they have been executed, and how influential they have been. These are relative measures, so you need a standard – I have two and use both. The first is relative to the other ideas that have been incorporated; the second is relative to the potential of the idea for creating interesting situations and plotlines in the campaign as it actually is. Occasionally, these reviews will spark new ideas, which get jotted down appropriately, but it’s more important just to keep them in mind.

The ideas that have been excluded or that haven’t worked can also be important; you need to be sure that there have been no oversights or conceptual holes in the campaign development. These present a choice – you can either think about new ways of expressing and developing them, or you can think about revising/replacing them.

And then, finally, there are the ideas that are just sitting there, unused. Quite often, these will connect with plot holes and problems that were never anticipated at the time the campaign was devised.

Reviewing the original notes, ultimately, provides context for other parts of the process. Everything else you get out it is a bonus – but there will usually be an unexpected dividend at some point from this review. At the very least, they can help give direction when you need to make ad-hoc decisions in the future.

There are a couple of other things that I look for that are important enough to highlight here:

Directions Lost

Original intentions are revealed in their purest form in the campaign notes. Sometimes, events have headed in entirely different directions.

The seeds of the campaign that IS are buried somewhere in the development notes, whether you realized it or not – by definition, since you managed to get from there to here, wherever your campaign currently is.

Comparing the two and identifying the differences helps isolate what you and your players really want from the campaign – an invaluable contribution to the task of achieving that.

Ultimately, whenever the campaign doesn’t match the original concept, you have to ask “why?” and “is it an improvement?” – and then act on those evaluations as appropriate.

Paths Not Taken

Think about this for a moment. Your development notes contain, let’s say, ten ideas (it’s usually many more, but roll with me on this).

Three of those actually made it all the way to become central pillars of the campaign as you conceived it.

ONE of those survived the campaigns interaction with the PCs; the other two are there in the background, but muted. Instead, other ad-hoc choices have become featured – ideas that probably weren’t even on your list of ten in the first place.

It’s always useful to look through those discarded thoughts looking for elements that can be used to bolster and reinforce and develop the ad-hoc campaign ideas.

Which of your unused ideas do they most closely resemble (if any)? Are there plot seeds that were discarded as irrelevant to the three intended pillars of the campaign that might now become relevant/useful?

2. Campaign Plan

At it’s simplest, a Campaign Plan breaks a larger overall story (the campaign) down into planned plotlines and adventures. Everything else is all about making it more efficient to use in game prep.

Some GMs don’t like to look that far ahead; they might keep vague ideas of how it will all end in the back of their heads, but they will only look two or three or whatever adventures ahead.

There are many, many variations. Some parts of the campaign might be well-mapped, while others are almost completely responsive to player decisions and intentions.

So, what does a review of a campaign plan encompass?

The Unnoticed Left Turns

Where has the campaign diverged from the plan? I’ve mentioned this before, but any campaign that follows the plan too closely is in trouble; a good campaign should be full of deviations, some minor, some major.

The campaign plan structure that I’m using for my Zenith-3 campaign consists of campaign plot arcs that stretch between many different adventures. There are some for each character, some for specific locations, some for the whole group, and some for a specific occasion.

Each of these is broken up into events or plot milestones – specific in-game events. These are then scheduled so that the individual plot threads express themselves at a natural pace, weaving all those plot threads together into a broader tapestry.

When I add all these together, fill in any blanks to ensure that all the PCs have something to be doing, and wrap it all around a central plotline or focal point, I end up with an individual adventure.

I’ve written about this structure in greater detail several times before, in far greater detail, but that’s enough to be going on with.

Whenever there is an unexpected left turn in the campaign, the events that comprise relevant plot arcs may need revision or replacing, because the story that WAS there no longer matches the reality on the ground. The alternative is to insert a new event that restores the original plot direction – not always possible, but always something to consider.

That’s what this aspect of the review is all about – revising the campaign plan to take into account the changes that have taken place in-game. In other words, this takes player input from the game-play and integrates it (and their future plans) into your future plans, ensuring that the campaign plan remains fit for purpose.

Forks In the Road

One of the purposes of the review is to actually Revise the campaign plan.

Elements of the Campaign Plan fall into three fairly familiar-looking categories:

• Those that are still in play, essential to the campaign;
• Those that will be adapted to serve a new purpose
• The irrelevant.

As soon as you campaign diverges from the plan (and they always do), some of your planned plots cease to be relevant – which means that one of two things should happen: either they get adapted because the plot sounds like it will be fun, or they should be strip-mined for ideas and replaced with new plans that reflect the reality of where the campaign has been, and where the players want it to go in the future.

3. Campaign Notes

Campaign notes are the non-historical briefing that gets given to the players so that they can generate characters that will fit into the campaign.

What usually happens is that some of these notes become central to the campaign and its characters, some become relevant but peripheral, and some just get forgotten or abandoned. The latter include ideas that were bad from the get-go (but not recognized as such) and ideas that were not properly developed from the campaign notes.

As usual, the classification mandates different treatment. I start with the forgotten/abandoned material.

It’s important to realize that we’re not just talking about relevance right now, but over the totality of the campaign, as defined by the campaign plan. What hasn’t mattered in the campaign to date might become centrally important at a planned future time, towards which you are building – the puppet-master placing his building blocks exactly where he needs them to be.

At the same time, just because something isn’t relevant right now usually doesn’t mean that it can be ignored; on the contrary, it imposes constraints on what can be done by characters right now, whether the players realize it or not. Players can stumble over these building blocks at any time – the problem comes when they recognize it as potentially being a problem in the future and decide to remove it before that happens. This creates a “fork in the road”, and the campaign has gone in the wrong direction in terms of following the plan. Sometimes, the result can be more attractive scenery along the way but you can still end up in almost the same place; at other times, you need to come up with a way to replace that lost building block with something more subtle, or find a way to make the players think they have achieved this goal when, in reality, they haven’t.

Another way of looking at this stage of the review is looking for additional consequences of the material you have and evaluating whether or not they are desirable – and if they are, how you can best bring them to light. Be wary of changing something that a player is relying on with his character, though – you may need to prepare two different interpretations (one with the consequence and one which removes it) – and then let your player(s) choose between them. You should also never take an ability away without replacing it with something equally effective!

All that being said, if your review opens up a new direction in which the character can grow and develop, it can be an opportunity not to be neglected.

In addition, there are three things that I’m on the lookout for when reviewing Campaign Notes that need to be singled out:

Lost Treasures

Character elements that have been forgotten – decision time: is this actually necessary? Can it be expunged or replaced? Or is it a neglected gold-mine whose time has finally come?

The more of your character notes that actually impacts the campaign and what the characters do within it, the more distinctive and unique you campaign becomes. And if it doesn’t work out the way you want, you can always add a plotline that restores the status quo.

Another approach is to make a temporary change through circumstances that are not intended to last, as a sort of trial run – and incorporate an option for making it permanent. Many years ago, now, one of the PCs was temporarily transformed into a gargoyle, with razor-sharp claws. For a character who had always looked like a knight in shining armor, this was a radical change to say the least – but it was profoundly liberating for the character. While the original intent was to have the transformation undone at the end of that adventure, when the player handed the character over to a new owner, that owner decided that he liked the change, and the difference in expectations that people placed on the character. Publicly, the story was that the old character had left and been replaced with the new one – and a lot of baggage was lifted from the new character’s shoulders, and a whole new set of abilities were opened up. Instead of just being a tough guy, he became a shape-changer with great strength and the capacity to swallow things as though he were a living black hole. Eventually, that player was forced to step aside, and the character became the property of a third player. With a psych profile that explained everything that had happened to the character, a slow process of rehabilitation began; that process is now essentially complete, but the consequences of it are still rumbling through the campaign, and will reverberate for some time to come. A bland character has become rich, complex, and engaging. In essence, each owner has made the character his own.

Either way, lost gold can resurface in the campaign – but it has to make a difference, or it might as well not be there. That’s part of your obligations as GM.

Ice-cream Headaches

Sometimes, material that has been forgotten within the campaign notes creates a plot hole – something that should have happened, but didn’t, or something that shouldn’t have been possible, but happened anyway. Another of the GM’s jobs is to decide what to do about these and how to do it. I’ve devoted a series to the handling of such plot holes of various scales (I still have one more part to complete), the Elephant In The Grey Room series. Soon, I promise!

Terra Incognita

None of us are perfect, and we are all capable of oversights, of taking our eyes off the ball and missing golden opportunities because they were not recognized. As a result, parts of the campaign notes will have become critical to the characters and the campaign while other parts will just be sitting there.

Sometimes those neglected ideas connect with the parts of your future plans that you have just revised. They can enhance or contradict them, or simply offer a navigational path to the adventures, making the previously irrelevant relevant. And sometimes, they can be the source of a whole new batch of ideas with which to season your campaign ‘stew’.

I like to always have adventure ideas on standby in case something takes more development time than expected – something that I can pull out of my back pocket with minimal prep. This is one of the resources that can provide those ideas.

And sometimes, focusing on these neglected areas can open the campaign up to all kinds of new directions.

4. Campaign Background

The campaign background is the history that was (hopefully) expressed in the mechanics of the Campaign Notes. This is never complete, just as no one book can ever give the definitive history of the world – or even of one country or city. There’s always a new perspective or interpretation to consider!

Most GMs, at some point, fall into the trap of thinking their campaign backgrounds are sacrosanct; they build their campaigns around those backgrounds, use them to generate plotlines and adventures, and employ them as the connective tissue that links players to characters, characters to personalities, and characters to campaign.

It can always be an eye-opening journey to re-read your campaign background and note (a) what can be proven to have happened that way; (b) what parts of the background the ongoing campaign can provide substantiating evidence toward; (c) what parts of the background will gain substantiating evidence from future planned events within the campaign; and (d) what’s left. Everything in the latter category was an ‘official interpretation’, an ‘educated best guess’ – and NONE of it should necessarily be assumed to be Canon. In addition, there’s a subcategory within (a) of everything for which the official story seems incomplete, or which has a potential consequence that hasn’t been explored.

The trick is always to make these revelations relevant to the ongoing campaign in some way – briefly, for some time, or from the point of revelation onward..

Revisiting the background with this perspective can open new doors within the campaign.

The Muted Palette

Quite often, many of the background elements that have been emplaced within the campaign become muted and gray as characters are played, gradually hewing toward the central sourcebooks by virtue of the inbuilt game mechanics. No matter how distinct “Elves” may have been in your concepts, they gradually trend towards becoming generic “Elves” in play, with just one or two highlights of distinctiveness remaining, at best. Some of the neglected content has been ignored for good reason, but some of it can be absolute gold.

Future plans that can highlight some of the neglected uniqueness can go a long way toward evading the pastel palette problem.

Forgotten Textures

The place to put any “look-and-feel” guidance is in the campaign background, because that’s a more narrative structure. Once in place there, however, it can be easily forgotten and neglected. Sometimes, this can be accommodated as “we do things differently these days” (implying a ‘lost chapter’ of the background in which the change occurred), occasionally it is so distinctly different from the interpretations actually used in play that you have no choice but to take that approach; and sometimes this forgotten texture is just lying there, waiting for you. “A vortex of arcane energies swarm like streaks through the air and suddenly coalesce into a ball of fire that erupts toward the enemy” is nice narrative texture – but should then be employed whenever a mage casts a spell unless that description is contraindicated by the nature of the spell.

Extract or note these down, then use them henceforth! Your color text will become more consistent and internally believable as a result. Perhaps as important, the way you envisage these events transpiring in the course of play will also change, which will help you in interpreting them into game mechanics in a consistent way. Players like that, because it enables them to make decisions and have more confidence about what the GM will permit their characters to do..

An example from the Zenith-3 campaign – because the different metapowers (Magic, Psionics, and Martial Arts) are designed to be intentionally incompatible, the players assumed that they could not interact. An NPC with a brilliance for adaptive systems integration questioned that assumption and found it to be not necessarily true – and his innovative ways of combining these abilities toward a singular objective has become one of his trademark contributions to the campaign. For example, one of the abilities can be used to transform the environment in which one of the other abilities is operating, enabling consequences to emerge that would otherwise have been too difficult to orchestrate. Using his abilities, for example, he was able to employ a force-field created by a team-mate to act as a portal past an enemy’s otherwise impenetrable force-field, migrating one of the PCs someplace they were otherwise unable to go. Another time, he demonstrated that if a construct is created using one of the the metapowers that remains stable once that metapower is ceased, the other metapowers can operate on it with impunity..These take what would have merely been flavor text and make them integral tactical considerations, vastly expanding the team’s collective repertoire – but broadening the palette of what abilities their enemies can direct at them even more substantially.

5. Old Adventures

Finally, periodic reviews of old adventures can be extremely valuable. So much so that fully half of the review process (under the optimum schedule – and more, if not) consists of such reviews.

It’s rare for adventures to transpire exactly as planned – the players do something unexpected and the GM finds a way to accommodate and respond. This is the principle at the heart of one of Johnn’s best pieces of advice here at Campaign Mastery, Say Yes But Get There Quick.

There are several things to look for in these old adventures.

Unplanned Excursions

You’ve already looked into these, but that was in the context of the bigger picture, the overall campaign. But there are little bits here and there – scenes that never got played out, snatches of dialogue, descriptions and locations that were never needed. Every unplanned excursion within an adventure, even if the GM got things back on track to a satisfactory resolution at the end, yields such material – and some of it can be recycled, if you remember that it’s there.

Past Mistakes & Strokes Of ‘Brilliance’

Everyone’s imperfect and make mistakes. The GM is no different. When we’re skilled or lucky, we can hide these from the players so that they don’t get in the way of their sense of immersion and fun. On other occasions, the mistake is so large that we have to offer a Mea Culpa.

Some of the worst mistakes that can occur are the result of the GM parachuting a “Brilliant idea” into his adventure at the 13th hour, without subjecting it to adequate thought or development. Some of the GM’s greatest successes can come from the same source, to be fair.

By definition, none of these are part of the original adventure as it was planned. They are ALL inadequately documented – so it’s worth taking a few moments to correct that error.

In the process, you will discover plot holes that result. You have two choices: ignore these, or fill them. I’ve done a series on dealing with plot holes of different scales in a practical way, here at Campaign Mastery – but if you don’t look for the holes, you can’t fill them.

So document your ad-hoc changes, check your logic with the full power of hindsight, and then apply the advice in The Elephant In The Grey Room series.

The Devil is in the Details

Often, details will have been changed or constructed ad-hoc as necessary. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been able to take a character from being a minor NPC into one of the central pillars of the campaign – and its always twice as hard if the details are forgotten. So it’s worth taking the time to document any new or changed NPCs and look over their potential.

The same thing goes for locations, which will often recur within the campaign.

Finally, there are details that may have been overlooked.
♦ The PCs leaving an NPC tied up, who never reappears in the adventure,
♦ a PC giving an NPC their phone number;
♦ a PC causing trouble for an NPC by trying to pay with a 1000gp gemstone and expecting the NPC to be able to make change.

These little details can all become central parts of a new or future planned adventure idea.

♦ The PCs may have assumed that the NPC was taken into custody – an assumption you can stab them in the back with by having him escape and begin plotting a suitable revenge for his humiliation.
♦ The player may have forgotten flirting with the NPC waitress – it was just a bit of character color at the time – but it may have been a big deal to the NPC. What if they called but got rebuffed? What if they call and begin a new romantic entanglement with the PC?
♦ What did the NPC have to do to get that change? Taking that much liquidity of a business can be toxic to its future. Or perhaps there’s something special about the gem that no-one recognized at the time – but that now becomes centrally important to a plotline.

You can’t always hang a plot on these little details, but many of them have the potential for doing so – and players love it when campaigns become self=referential in this way, because it makes them feel like their characters are part of the campaign, driving its development with their choices.

Players very “generously” provide plot kindling to the GM quite regularly – but if the GM doesn’t take note of the details, they will become forgotten. Re-reading the past adventure serves as a reminder of the relevant details.

Loose Ends and Unexpected Consequences

The final thing to note are loose ends – often things that seemed complete at the time. Unexpected Consequences that logically should have occurred but that haven’t, yet, are an obvious source of new game material (often, you will need some way to justify the delay).

I was actually reflecting on the current epic adventure in my superhero campaign – which started a long time ago, now (back in 2019!) – and the many plot threads and elements that have been woven into it, the close to 100 significant or potentially significant NPCs that have been introduced and could pop up again at any time that seems interesting – when I thought of writing this article. So this is a case of my telling you about something I do as part of my Campaign Management that I haven’t discussed previously.

Plundering The Past

Your past creative efforts contain a wealth of material for you to build on. No campaign fully exploits everything that it has to offer – but having the rest on tap can take a campaign to the next level in this respect. So Plunder the past, not only for lessons in how to improve as a GM, but for inspiration and new ideas and forgotten treasures.