25 Campaign Milestones and their impact
Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay
1000 posts: a personal milestone
So. 1000 posts. Four figures.
That’s no small achievement. It’s something to be proud of.
I’ve been casting about for suggestions on how to commemorate this milestone for the last few months, but the few suggestions I’ve received haven’t really been all that helpful – “Something reflective”, “Something forward-looking”, “Something quintessentially Campaign Mastery”.
Two or weeks before this words were first crafted, I came up with the notion of talking about campaign milestones, what they mean, and how achieving one transforms that campaign moving forward.
That ticks all of those boxes – reflective? Check.
Forward-looking? Check.
Quintessentially Campaign Mastery? Check number three.
I briefly contemplated a second part to this article, and that soon necessitated a third part to put the second part into context, and that started to get too big and complicated, and looked like it would overwhelm the first part – so that’s all be excerpted into an article for a week or two from now. That’s very Campaign Mastery, too!
What remains is still very large – twice the size of the usual Campaign Mastery post, and they are already plenty long – and that’s only appropriate for such a landmark article (I’ve admitted the blindingly obvious before – I don’t do “small” very well)!
As some of you may know, Sydney has just come out of 108 days of Lockdown due to Covid-19. Yesterday, face-to-face gaming resumed after almost three months absence. Next week, my superhero campaign should restart, and the week after, Dr Who, and the week after that, the Adventurer’s Club Pulp campaign. After the famine, a feast – at least until Christmas shuts everything down for about a month.
So this is a celebration of sorts – let’s get this party started!
Campaign Creation
I’ve divided the life of a campaign into five main stages. To some extent, the milestones within each stage are interchangeable in terms of sequence.
The first stage is, as you can see, Campaign Creation. Yes, you can create a campaign with none of these six milestones – but that campaign would be lacking any meaningful sense of cohesion. These are what essentially defines a campaign, and gives that campaign it’s uniqueness.
0. The Unscratched Itch
All campaigns start with an unscratched itch. It might be a hankering to get behind the GM Screen (which may actually be a metaphoric construct); it could be a desire to run a certain type or style of game; it’s possible that it’s the desire to run a campaign of a certain genre, or with a certain rules system; it can even be the desire to do something different from what you’ve done before, or curiosity about how a certain concept would play out.
I’ve played in, or GM’d, campaigns that fit each of these descriptions, and a few more besides. Like the time a discussion about chase game-mechanics led to the creation of a short-lived (3 game sessions) Wacky Races campaign with completely original rules – all of which fitted on a single page with room for the sense of whimsy and caprice to find expression.
It doesn’t matter what the specifics are. What matters is that this gives the GM his personal motivation for creating and running the campaign.
Without that motivation, the GM is running the campaign because someone has to, not because he (or she) particularly wants to. The result is that everything that he has to do to get the campaign ready will feel like work to a greater or lesser extent, and he only has his sense of responsibility to carry him through it.
Unless he can discover the fun to be had, his effort and enthusiasm will be increasingly compromised as the work progresses. I’ve seen GMs that have burned out without a single die being rolled – arguably, they should never have accepted the task in the first place.
There are ways of structuring the group dynamic so that there is less pressure on such GMs. A round-robbin arrangement, for example, means that the GM isn’t under as much time pressure to have a game ready to run, because there’s something else to fill the void.
Or you could decide to have a ‘board games day’ until the new campaign is ready to run.
There are numerous alternatives open to you if you need them. These possibilities only scratch the surface.
1. Campaign Concept
The first real milestone comes when the GM has an idea for a campaign. He or she might not have all the details worked out yet, the idea might be vague and undefined, but he now has a direction.
This gives the GM an answer to the question of what will scratch the itch. It begins to shape and restrict the nigh-infinite possibilities to fit the GM’s motivation, rendering it in a concrete proposal.
It also provides the key premises of the campaign, enabling further development to begin. Without it, a campaign might as well be constructed using random tables because it will have the same degree of unity and depth as one generated in that fashion.
2. Campaign Overview
You can’t really have an overview until you have a campaign concept, because this is a general statement of the direction the campaign is going to go, some notion of the overall storyline that will define the start and end-points of the campaign.
The creation of a campaign overview tends to bring into sharper focus any vagueness about the campaign concept.
This is as much about how adventures will be structured in relation to the broader campaign as it is about anything else. For example, you might decide that the adventures will be mostly standalone (episodic continuity) but that each will start with a briefing which relates the adventure to a broader picture, giving it context and continuity within that broader setting.
Or game sessions might be fully self-contained, to the point where NPCs will forget all interactions with the PCs from one adventure to the next. Or whatever.
3. Campaign Setting
This might be developed before the Campaign Overview; or in parallel with it. The Campaign Setting contains everything the GM needs to know about the environment and society against which the campaign will be set. While it may be specific, it should not contain specifics – but it probably does.
The Campaign Setting confines and narrows the adventures that will be possible. If an adventure is to take place despite this restriction, additional adventures may be needed to kick the campaign into an appropriate shape.
4. Campaign Background
The campaign background is impossible to write completely until the Campaign Setting and Campaign Overview are done, because it will tell prospective players what the need to know in order to generate PCs. It doesn’t include game or character mechanics; it’s conceptual in nature.
5. Campaign Briefing
The Campaign Briefing contains any game mechanics necessary to implement the Campaign Overview within the Campaign Setting that the players need to know before generating PCs.
Once all this has been done, you have a campaign – it’s just not ready to play yet.
Campaign Prep
The Campaign Creation phase starts vague and nebulous and gradually becomes specific in relation to what PCs know or need to know. The Campaign Prep phase starts getting specific on the GM side of the fence.
Once again, there are six milestones that fall within this phase of campaign creation.
6. Key NPCs
You don’t need specifics like character classes and levels and key possessions at this point, but you do need a sense of who they are, their personalities, and how they fit into the scheme of things. The first hints of these details will be found in the Campaign Setting and Background, and it’s not uncommon for this milestone to come into view (i.e. for work to start) before those milestones are complete. However, this milestone can’t actually be reached (i.e, key NPCs created) until those milestones are achieved. This milestone is achieved when you have a sense of who the “players” in the campaign social and political landscape are going to be.
Although it’s not strictly required at this point, I make an effort to name the key players just so that I have a reference point to distinguish one from another. Those are always subject to change (or, more frequently, to translation); I might name a character Sage Revenant in these rough notes and later decide that he’s an Elf and so rename him according to the naming conventions assigned to the Elvish race. “La Serge, Depateur Shade” sounds credible, doesn’t it?
I’m particularly in favor of names that add to the personality color of the character, that can create expectations just from the way they sound. Unless I want the character to be a colorless cut-out, of course – but it’s exceptionally rare to need someone meeting that description at this point in the process.
7. Campaign Planning
The final thing that you need to do is a rough breakdown of the Campaign Overview. These are akin to “director’s notes” for the forthcoming “season” of a TV show – For example, “Things start warm and friendly (but adventurous) and slowly become darker and grimmer. Rumors start circulating of conspiracies in high places, perhaps even Treason. Characters start having enemies appear who know more than they should. Important people start to drop out of sight or disappear, replaced by “temporary appointees” or “acting” officials. All this comes into sharp focus when one of the PCs is made such an appointee and learns that the situation is even worse than is publicly appreciated. Other PCs have to protect the ‘appointed’ one, stop a couple of attacks on him, and get a clue to the identity of the mysterious puppeteer behind events, which they pursue until it leads to the final confrontation.”
Six adventures would make this feel a little rushed, ten would feel about right, more than twelve and events might develop too slowly for the players to really notice.
With this done, you will have a sense of what each adventure will be like, and how many of them there will be within the campaign.
8. Campaign Prep Complete
At some point, all seven of the preceding milestones will have been ticked off, and that brings the GM to an all-important eighth milestone: he feels ready to actually start the playing cycle of generating adventures and running them. Everything prior to this has been one-off, it only has to be done once for a campaign; those things that have to be done repeatedly, for every game session, still lie ahead of him.
The word “complete” is a little misleading, in the title – campaign prep is never complete, it’s just “complete enough” to be fit for purpose. Most GMs are adding to campaign canon – background, important NPCs, splashes of color here and there – right up to the last game session of the last adventure (some times more than others, to be fair). It’s also likely that all the other documentation has continued to evolve, gaining detail and nuance and clarity, as campaign prep has been underway. It’s time to lock most of that documentation down, and a confidence in doing so is another important trigger for the achievement of this milestone.
Of course, there’s one ingredient that may be missing: warm bodies. Time to rectify that (if the GM hasn’t done so already).
9. Invitations To Game
“I’ve got a new campaign, I think you’d have fun playing in it, would you like to join?”
— I’ll think about it–
“Great, I’ll shoot you off a copy of the player briefing materials and campaign background. Get back to me if there are any problems.”
— Yeah, whatever, dude.–
This is an important milestone, achieved when everyone that you want to invite has been invited.
Circumstances are going to be different for every gaming group – it could be as simple as an announcement to an already existing group, “next week we’ll be starting my new campaign, here’s what you need to know” – or it could be as complicated as synchronizing schedules with someone living and working in a different state or city. There will almost always be one player who (unexpectedly) joins the campaign or (unexpectedly) begs off.
I have known GMs who took six months to go from a campaign being “ready to play” to having enough self-confidence to actually offer it up for play. In fact, I know one person who has generated multiple campaigns but never had the confidence to take them public.
This is an important milestone because it represents the GM putting his work on public display.
10. The First Acceptance
This milestone may take place seconds, minutes, days, or even weeks later. I came up with the first draft of Fumanor five years before this milestone was reached – the first group of players to which it was offered were not interested, either because of the game system, or because they were in several of my other campaigns already, or didn’t like the sound of it, or the moon was the wrong variety of cheese, or whatever. That was fine, I created and ran a TORG campaign instead – with several of the players who had turned Fumanor down. Years later, a new crop of players has joined the group, and there’s a vacant slot in the timetable, so I offered Fumanor up again – enough of them accepted that it was off and running.
The first acceptance is usually a lot more eager than the rather lackluster response offered in the exchange described earlier, which was indifferent at best. Any GM having that conversation would consider that player, at best, a fifty-fifty chance of signing up. The more eager a player is, the more likely it is that the campaign will actually take place, so it’s a vindication of the work that the GM has put into creating it. What’s more, enthusiasm tends to be contagious – one eager player is likely to actively recruit more (even people that you’ve never met before).
11. Ready To Go
Most GMs will have a threshold in mind, a minimum number of sign-ups needed before the campaign will be officially “go”. Some campaigns that I run were designed for one player, some for two (specific individuals in all cases), some for a minimum of three (but that have been run with two in the past for long periods), and some for more. Fumanor needed at least 4 initially, and two giving an ongoing commitment.
Sometimes, there will be too much interest; most GMs will have some idea of the maximum number of players that they can accommodate simultaneously as a GM. My limit is 6, and I prefer a ceiling of 5. My superhero campaign has four players at the moment, and it’s a comfortable number. Adventurer’s Club Pulp currently has 5, but has had seven or eight at times in the past – that was manageable with two GMs to share the workload, but there wasn’t really enough spotlight to go around that many players. If we were able to play more frequently, it might have been doable. But one regular dropped out to study at university, one dropped out because an opportunity came up to play something that he was more interested in, I switched from player to co-GM, and that brought us down to five.
If oversubscribed, you may need to run a ‘reserves’ list or a ‘waiting list’. At it’s height, my superhero campaign had nine players and a waiting list with 21 names on it. Too many players, really, but things were heading for an epic plotline so I felt justified in permitting an epic number of players. If you can tolerate such numbers, over time, one of two things happens: the numbers scale themselves back to something more manageable, or you learn how to cope well refereeing a zoo.
You can’t say know to someone who wants to spend a couple of hours traveling just to be in your game.
As soon as the number of players reaches the critical threshold, but doesn’t exceed the maximum, this milestone is achieved, and the campaign takes on a life of its own.
Campaign Reality
Generate adventure and trappings, play adventure, rinse, repeat. Again, and again, and again. That’s what the GM has signed up for when his campaign becomes “real”.
That’s not to say that there aren’t significant milestones along the way – there are. In fact, I’ve listed five milestones that range from near-certainty to absolute inevitability. The actual sequence in which they are experienced is extremely variable.
This is also the period when the GM has to get used to the requirements of GMing this particular campaign. Every campaign is a little different in terms of the prep-time required – some greater, some less, some with more ongoing effort shoehorned into the campaign prep and some with more ongoing needs. The GM may need to evolve his methods of performing game prep, or rearrange his schedule. There’s an ongoing evolution-and-response in techniques and attitudes that is occurring throughout this period. Sometimes, I recommend that GMs allow an extra 20% prep time in this phase simply because less of it will be second-nature to him or her and the methodology will not yet be really efficient.
12. The First Adventure Begins
There’s no doubt that this is a significant milestone in any campaign. It’s almost inevitable that at the end of it, the GM will feel that his prep was inadequate, or focused on the wrong things. It’s a near-certainty that at some point, the GM will have had to scramble to cover something that he hadn’t realized he needed to prep for, usually a PC doing something he didn’t expect, but perhaps should have. The better the GM knows the players and their default style, the less likely this is to occur – down to about a 50-50 chance of it not happening with respect to any particular player, at best.
This is also the GMs first experience at GMing these particular PCs and there are a multitude of lessons to be learned from that experience, too. Hopefully, he has managed things well enough to have a variety of characters (though I did once dream up a campaign for 4-5 players, all operating rogues – but with different sub-classes – so they were all the same but different). As he grows to know them better, the GM has to become adept at giving each character his moment in the spotlight, and start generating adventures that derive purely from character backstories – in the process, integrating the players’ creations into the game world and causing the campaign to evolve in consequence.
And finally, this is the players’ first attempt at becoming a cohesive unit. It’s exceptionally rare for this to ‘click’ on a first attempt – I’ve seen it take up to a year of monthly play. Usually, three or four game sessions starts to create a ‘party dynamic’ and the group begins to meld together to become more than the sum of its parts.
So this milestone signals a slight shift in the focus of the GM; from this point onwards, he’s not dealing with some abstract fancy, he’s dealing with the real and practical problems of an ongoing campaign. A shift in mindset is not only required, it’s essential.
This always reminds me of why Australian engineers were always popular hires for motor-racing teams through the sixties and seventies, and into the eighties. If they didn’t have something, they made it; if they couldn’t make it, they bodged something together to replace it (that often worked better than the original part) – at least, that was their reputation. This was a modern-day reflection of the legendary “bush mechanics” of days past; when the nearest spare parts are 300 miles or more away (and the internet hasn’t been invented yet), you either make it yourself or learn to do without. It might take fifty or a hundred tries (but it usually won’t) before you get it right, but you can usually come up with something “good enough” far more quickly. The more thoroughly you understand the operating principles and basic engineering, the shorter the path between need and solution. It was that ‘can-do’ attitude, combined with sufficient competence to get the job done, that the motorsport teams were enamored of.
And it’s that attitude and approach that the GM now needs to bring to the table; he can no longer afford to take weeks to fiddle with details until he has everything ‘just so’, he needs to get into the mindset of determining what is going to be ‘good enough’ and then moving on to the next problem. If he has spare time at the end, he can go back and refine his ‘good enough’ solutions to make them ‘even better’. It’s this basic process that I outlined in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity and further defined in To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?
In a nutshell: The relative value of game prep is the time required to generate it to a suitable standard multiplied by the likelihood that it will be used. These relative values let you subdivide your prep time for optimum results. You don’t actually have to calculate the values, you can do it all in your head using instinct and experience. The reality is not quite so simple, of course, for various reasons – prep isn’t all or nothing, and some prep has residual value (a gift to the campaign that keeps on giving), both of which complicate this nice, simple, prioritization, but the general principle applies. The rule of thumb is that you prioritize the different parts of getting your game prep to a bare minimum standard. When everything is at that level, you can devote any remaining prep time to improving specific parts of your prep to a higher standard, based on the amount of reward you will get for the effort. This will differ from one GM to the next, because everyone has their strong points and weak points, and expending more prep on areas in which you are weak gives a better return on ‘invested time’ than spending prep time on something that you do well without a lot of prep.
So the GM’s priorities and thinking have to change when this milestone is achieved. In fact, they will change, whether the GM likes it or not.
13. Thinking In Character
The second milestone in this phase of the campaign life-cycle occurs when a player starts thinking in character for the first time, that is to say, becomes so comfortable stepping into their character’s shoes that they do so naturally and without effort.
Suddenly, there is a new filter over their perceptions of characters, and events, and dangers, and rewards, and relationships. The character has ‘gelled’ into a specific individual within their mind.
That creates a new imperative for the GM: his planning has been built around (at best) an approximation of what the character would be like, and needs to be updated to match the new reality. What’s more, the character becomes more predictable in broad terms, provided that the GM can penetrate the player’s mind and understand the character. That takes a lot of doing, and sometimes is never complete, but every approximation brings the GM closer to writing for the character, and not to a generalized abstraction of the character.
The better the GM understands this manifested personality, the better his adventures will be, and the better his NPCs interactions with the PC will be, and the better he will be able to run the character if the player can’t make it for some reason – so there are a whole host of benefits to achieving that understanding.
If the GM is doing his job right, this will represent a shift in his thinking and a subtle shift in his priorities – he no longer needs to devote as much time to understanding that character.
14. The First Surprise
Inevitably, at some point, the GM will be surprised by a character development or desire. This milestone tells the GM that the campaign has now taken on a life of its own, and is growing in unexpected directions. From this point on, the GM can take less for granted; characters may no longer operate in the most logical way, but will respond with a rationale deriving from their personalities and perceptions of events.
It’s questionable whether or not this milestone will occur before or after the 13th mile-marker described above; a surprise can occur because the player is still groping with an integrated personality for the PC or sense of their capabilities and ‘go to’ preferences, or it can happen because the player has achieved that personality integration and the GM is still trying to get a handle on it.
From this point onward, the GM has to at least consider unlikely choices on the part of the characters, causing some prep to be both necessary and wasted. That means that the GM has less luxury for detailed prep and needs to more closely plan his prep activities.
15. Character Unity
This milestone represents the characters working as a unit for the first time, making plans based around each other’s capabilities and personalities. Some players never reach this point; others seem reluctant to step into such a leadership role, perhaps fearing that they will steal too much of the spotlight from the other PCs, or that the GM will react to such a possibility by diminishing the amount of spotlight that they are actually getting. Others wear it uncomfortably, but are successful at it; and a few excel at it.
The team leader in the Zenith-3 campaign, Blair, is one of those for whom this doesn’t come naturally (in his own words, his character didn’t un-volunteer quickly enough and had leadership thrust upon her). As part of the current plotline, she has relinquished command in favor of another PC, whose player is more of a natural in the leadership role, but who has been more reluctant to take on that responsibility, creating an interesting dynamic within the PCs relationships.
At the same time, the role of field commander (who makes the strategic and not the policy decisions) has also been transferred from a PC (whose player wasn’t great at it, but who tried hard) to an NPC, creating a fresh challenge for me as GM: I have to be careful to separate GM knowledge from character knowledge, and avoid making the character’s decisions right all the time – but, at the same time, have to maintain his hard-earned reputation for insights and out-of-the-box synergistic thinking. I don’t want the PCs doing things the way this character suggests because the GM is suggesting them through this NPCs voice; I want them doing things that way because the NPC is right more often than he’s wrong, and has a tactical instinct and training.
At the same time, the two structures exist in parallel – any decisions that have a potential impact beyond a specific scope have to be referred back to the main commander, so she doesn’t get to take a complete holiday from the responsibilities of command. The practical upshot is that the really difficult policy problems land back at the original leader’s feet.
In general terms, this milestone represents a significant increase in the capability levels of the PCs. It’s a signal to the GM that he needs to step up to the plate with more substantial and interesting challenges, because the old ones will become too easy. At the same time, there needs to be a few of ‘the old standard’ just so that the players get a sense of how far their characters have come.
This milestone is a key indicator that the campaign is graduating from its beginning period into maturity.
16. The First Spotlight
But there’s one more milestone to go before that transition is complete: an adventure that derives completely from the intersection between PC persona as expressed in play and the campaign background. In other words, a spotlight session that derives from the way a character is actually being played, and not from their abilities or backstory. This can only precede milestone 14 through blind luck, because there is no focal characterization prior to that milestone; but it can easily slot in between milestone 14 and milestone 15.
This is an important step in the campaign’s life cycle because it signals to the players that the GM is modifying the campaign in response to player input – their characters are making a difference, in other words. Ideally, this adventure will be prepared and produced to the same standard as the usual, and, in fact- aside from the meta-game perspective of the players – should be indistinguishable from one of the GM’s own adventures.
This milestone acknowledges that the players are (at the very least) shareholders in the campaign (perhaps with a smaller share than the GM, depending on the campaign specifics) and may even be full co-owners. This is a significant relinquishing of total control by the GM, however tenuous his loosening of the reigns might appear, representing (and requiring) yet another evolutionary step in the way that he thinks about the campaign.
When both this milestone and the 15th milestone are achieved, the campaign can be considered a mature one, in which the GM furnishes winds and waves but the players steer the ship.
The Mature Campaign
In the mature campaign, a number of changes take place. More than any other stage of the campaign life-cycle, these can occur in any sequence. Some may even predate the achievement of ‘mature’ status, that’s how variable they are in timing and sequence. Some may never occur in a given campaign – but the longer the campaign lasts, the more inevitable they become.
A critical change that occurs at some point in this campaign phase is that it transitions from an unstable, semi-chaotic state to a predictable, regular, stable event. That, of course, is recognized by one of the milestones below, because it marks a dividing line in the campaign in many respects.
17. The First Revision
To a very large extent, up to the point of this milestone, the GM has been able to operate using his initial campaign-prep documentation, adding to it as necessary. This milestone occurs when, for the first time, he or she has to deliberately revise something that was previously canon.
This is fraught with danger and difficulty, because the players will have used “what was” as a driver of their decision-making. If the GM can orchestrate the change such that there is no retrospective change in PC knowledge, delivering a campaign-significant plot twist and accompanying revelation to the PCs about the nature of some element of the game world, there’s usually no problem, provided that the campaign history can be made compatible with the new reality; the presumption is that it was always this way, the inhabitants of the game world (including the PCs) simply didn’t know it before.
My Shards Of Divinity campaign took place before the separation of Elves into Drow and Non-Drow. This altered the racial profile of Elves significantly. Their first dungeon turned out to be a prison in which the nigh-immortal Prince who had been seduced by Lolth was held captive and powerless. Before his incarceration in magical suspension, he had been creating hidden camps of his adherents in various places – think terrorist training camps, some underground in the literal sense, most underground in the sense of them being secret. One of his followers, an Aquatic Elf, was infatuated with the Prince, to whom she had been betrothed; she had grown jealous (and suspicious) of Lolth and had betrayed the Princes’ dalliance to the Elvish King, who had directed his mages to create the prison and force his rebellious son into it. What he did not realize was that there were Drow Adherents amongst those mages, who modified the spell cast on the Prince so that all Drow Loyalists would also be cast into stasis by the Great Spell – to abide, hidden in their lairs, until their Prince reawakened. The PCs learned all of this only after accidentally re-awakening said Prince. Even the word, “Drow” meant ‘Secret’ in the Elvish Language, or possibly “Subversive”, or “Stealthy”. The word had been banned after the Great Schism.
This forced the PCs to re-evaluate everything they knew about Elves and about the Drow revolution. They now saw a continuity of personalities with the most fanatical at one extreme and the most liberal at the other; the spell had affected everyone past a specific cut-off mark but that had been generations ago, more than enough time for a few dissident voices to grow into a new Drow undercurrent, who had stealthily manipulated events to send the PCs on the particular quest by putting information about the location into their hands so as to awaken their lost leader. It meant that there was a little Elvishness in the Drow, and a little Drowishness in the Elves (plus some more rabid extremists). It gave the players a sense that they were at Ground Zero of great events that (as players) they were well aware of – but that the true story was a lot dirtier and grittier than the sanitized versions that would be written into the future history books (or their narrative equivalents).
Here’s the thing: from the very beginning, I had the notion that there was something imprisoned in the Pyramid (which was the shape of the dungeon – it was an ‘above-ground’ dungeon), and that this discovery would lead to significant consequences within the game world. I had some notion of what had happened to the Drow – they were a subversive sub-culture within the Elvish population – but everything else above was devised after the PCs, bummed about the lack of loot in the dungeon (who hides goodies in a purpose-built prison?) decided to wake the sleeping elf on the throne by breaking the enchantment that held him in unending Stasis. Part of it was off-the-cuff (enough to create a cliff-hanger ending to the game session), and the rest was created between game sessions.
This was a very early example of The First Revision, but because it was completely compatible with the background that they had been given, it was accepted by the players with only a brief blinking of their eyes as the revelations mounted and were assimilated.
More difficulties can arise when you can’t wrap the new information in a shroud of ignorance that justifies the background information given to the players. There is too great a disparity in potential impacts and specifics to offer much guidance on how to handle it – but the GM should be aware that he is jerking part of the ground out beneath the players feet, and behave accordingly. Hopefully, he has marshaled convincing justifications for making the change, and offers some sort of sweetener for anyone with a legitimate grievance over the changes.
Most problematic of all is when the change means that a central pillar of the campaign’s game-play vanishes, when some part of the adventures to date no longer makes sense. There are two possible solutions to this: (1) rewrite the past to accommodate the changes and communicate those changes to the players; (2) introduce a plotline that leads to the change being effective from now on, rewriting the campaign reality and making the PCs instrumental in the process. If you can trust the players not to mess it up, not go off on some tangent or get “creative”, (2) is the better solution in many cases. I save (1) for only the most extreme situations where (2) is not a viable option for some reason. And if the problem isn’t significant enough to warrant such a solution? Then neither is the change – live with the existing material or the contradiction, or devise some reason why it’s a lot more important than it initially appears.
18. The First Departure
Inevitably, you will have a player decide to drop out. Sometimes this happens in dramatic circumstances; in other cases, the player might be courteous enough to give you enough notice that you can work their departure into the plotline. If the character is too central to future planned events, you may need to consider making them an NPC or seeking the current players’ permission to give the character to a new player – then start working through your waiting list. If you can incorporate some capacity for the new owner to revise the character and make it his own, without impacting on the character’s past, so much the better.
In some cases, the death of the character will be the impetus for the departure. I’ve had players tell me, in the past, that while they had enjoyed playing their deceased character, they weren’t wrapped in the campaign setting and didn’t think any replacements could be as much fun, so they were bowing out. I’ve also had one PC who deliberately sought out a Heroic Death in furtherance of a Cause that the character believed in – the player saw an opportunity, and went for it. Sir Licheam earned his place amongst the heroes of his homeland the hard but Noble way!
How the GM copes when someone he thought was a bedrock part of the campaign chooses to depart is a critical test of his abilities – fail the test in the worst possible way, and you can not only lose the player, you can lose the friendship. Every alternative outcome is an improvement on this dire situation. The best solutions retain the friendship, permit the player to depart with his dignity intact, leave no hard feelings, and preserve the integrity of the campaign as an ongoing game. I’m pleased to say that I’ve gotten it right more often than I’ve gotten it wrong – to the point where a departing player has returned shortly afterwards with a new character (it’s not fair to take the revised character off the new owner unless both are willing).
Equally significant should be the change in attitude/approach that the GM has towards his game; something that he thought was settled has just gone “poof” and vanished in a cloud of smoke. The lingering question of whether or not something more could have been done to salvage the situation should provoke a little soul-searching and a review of what the GM is doing and how he is doing it – just because only one player has decided to call it quits, that doesn’t mean that others aren’t discontented to a lesser degree. In fact, ideally, you will notice warning signs and make changes before things develop to that extent – a subject that I intend to explore in next week’s article.
19. The First Buy-In
From the lowest of the lows to the highest of the highs – a player shows up and asks to join the campaign. I’ve had this happen a number of times – it hasn’t always ended well. I wrote about just such an occasion in one of my early articles here at Campaign Mastery — Moral Qualms on the Richter Scale — but it wasn’t the only one. One of my most painful experiences behind the GM screen was when I had to tell a handicapped player that the other players were insisting that he depart the campaign because he was ruining their fun to the point where ultimatums were issued. I still think that I could have handled that better – if I had unlimited time at my disposal, I might have been able to offer him a solo campaign, for example; my circumstances at the time didn’t allow for it – and I will always regret the way it worked out; I hope that he found a group to play in where his problems could have been accommodated. He worked harder at his gaming than anyone I’ve met before or since, and in the right group, he would have been an asset.
But sometimes, the stars align and the new player becomes a mainstay of the campaign. I’ve had that happen on several occasions, too.
A word of caution, too – following one of the departures described in the previous section, it came to light that two of the players who had bought-into the campaign had done so with the deliberate intent of sabotaging it because they were tired of not having enough good players for the campaigns they wanted to run. I had the best players and the game to be in, at the time, so that campaign became their target. It almost worked – in the end, only he and his collaborator departed, having ruined the adventure for everyone. I was eventually persuaded not to let them “win” and to write up the adventure as a work of fiction, a process that took many weeks; i actually presented that write-up here at Campaign Mastery — If I Should Die Before I Wake: A Zenith-3 Synopsis — and it’s worth noting that the player in question has admitted to being mentally ill at the time, and making questionable decisions. He has been forgiven (as has his collaborator), but both remain unwelcome in my games – not that this is a bother to either of them.
There are genuine player buy-ins, but as with any other human activity, people can be complicated and sometimes, the motive can be an ulterior one. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you can reform human nature because your campaign is so compelling; it’s not going to happen. Appreciate the upvote when someone wants to join, and get on with doing the things that brought them hither.
20. The Stable Campaign
This is a very subtle milestone, often only recognized in retrospect. When it is applied to TV shows, the show is described as “appointment TV” – viewers have gotten into the habit of switching over to that show on that day at that time, it’s just what they do. To a large extent, appointment TV is far more resilient than other shows; it’s slower to grow its audience (if they were interested, they would already be watching) but they are slower to depart when there’s a dip in quality or other disliked development, for example a star leaving. Most viewers of appointment TV will give the show a season to replace the lost magic, whatever it was, and enough will enjoy the result that they will continue to tune in – so even then it will be slower than most to lose its audience.
Like such programming, an RPG campaign can become a routine habit, and so long as nothing changes, it will simply keep going for game-session after game-session. Inevitably, something will happen to upset that routine; but it is when you and/or your players first think of the campaign that way, as an old comfortable shoe, that this milestone has been achieved (and was almost certainly achieved a while back with no-one noticing at the time).
Achievement of a stable campaign can have profound influence over a GM’s thinking, and not always to their advantage. Some become so wary of upsetting the apple cart that they become more conservative, and the campaign more boring; such campaigns are ripening for a sudden collapse, or for a panicky reinvention by the GM when he perceives such an collapse to be imminent. In such circumstances, GMs (like most people) often go too far and throw the baby out with the bathwater – triggering a campaign collapse for exactly the opposite reason. Other GMs worry about the campaign becoming boring, and grow more adventurous immediately – this is less risky but brings that risk to the table with every game session. What you want to do is to reinvent the campaign without changing anything, and that’s phenomenally difficult to achieve. I’ll talk more on that subject in next week’s article, too. Ultimately, you have to remember the reasons why your campaign has become stable – players who enjoy what you’re doing enough to turn up, game session after game session. Avoid growing any more or less adventurous in your game planning, and enjoy the ride. After a while, almost all the game prep will be done already for any given adventure, and you can start reclaiming some of your lost free time – or start putting it into the development of a new campaign!
21. Campaign Evolution
Another subtle milestone. Any campaign that’s been played for a while has evolved, little by little, bit by bit, as all sides input into it. Eventually, something will happen to invite a retrospective look at the campaign – the triggers for this can be many – and you will suddenly realize that it bears very little resemblance, beyond the superficial, to what you expected it to be.
GMs react to this realization in different ways; some start trying to steer things back toward their original course, ignoring the fact that the biggest source of drift is satisfying the players. Others shrug their shoulders and say a metaphoric “Que Sera, Sera”. The best go back to their campaign plans and revisit the question of how those should change, given the newly-appreciated status quo is so different from the expectations upon which that plan was founded.
This milestone, then, should trigger a revision of GM planning, and that in turn can (and probably will, and probably should) lead to changes within the campaign – perhaps even changes great enough to altar the stability of the campaign.
The evolution of the campaign tends to occur through a steady drift; it’s certainly a mature-campaign phenomenon, but is also often a stable-campaign phenomenon.
22. Techno Revolution
Keep at things long enough, and technology will change the way you do things, which in turn will change the nature of the campaign that you’re running (even if it doesn’t impact the content of the campaign). Back when I was starting out, there was no internet, and no chance of being able to buy a computer even if there was such a thing. There was no google, and no Wikipedia. Research was a matter of listing possible relevant subjects, going to the library, and pawing through relevant reference books (and before I turned 5, even that wasn’t an option). When I started my first campaign, PCs were just barely starting to break through into the business world and the Apple-II was the state of the computing art.
My first computer was something called the Aquarius – an all-plastic computer from Mattel. I didn’t have the optional cassette drive, so any program had to be input from scratch. It had a whole 4K of ram, about 3.8 of which was actually usable. I had learned programming on a mainframe (a PDP-11, from memory) in a 1-week summer school at the University of NSW, and honed my capabilities on Apple-II PCs at school in my final year before graduation. But what the Aquarius forced you to learn was brutal efficiency; every instruction took only one byte of the memory, so you could have a program that was about 3800 ‘words’ long – but any text string that was intended to make sense of the results was one-for-one. Amongst other things, I wrote a stock market simulator on that machine and probed fractals and code-making and breaking.
Like a lot of people, Commodore computers were the real start of my computer ownership, as I bought a second-hand unit through the newspaper classifieds. I’d been using a friend’s C-64 for a while, but this was even better – it was a Commodore-128! – and I did some extremely advanced things with it through the years – writing my own printer driver, word processor and relational database, for example – for gaming purposes (a TORG spell creation system). I also wrote a sophisticated automated NPC generator which did everything from stats to skills to personalities – I created 10,000 NPCs in a night with that one, and still use one of them from time to time.
I then traded up to a windows-based laptop that was on loan so that I could create a new font for a friend, part of an ambitious project to map every possible character onto different code pages (others had the same idea, which is now known as Unicode and is almost universal). That’s how I can enter an unlikely character like “œ” and have it display – no offense intended to anyone whose language uses what was a random choice!) Of course, I was free to use this machine for my own purposes as well, and those purposes were gaming – though the lack of a printer held me back somewhat.
From there, I moved up to my own windows-based PC. It was no longer portable, but that was all right because I had a very fast 2000-dpi laser printer. And I had internet – this was when I was involved in the first attempt to bring broadband to the Australian masses. Still no google, though – but research became a whole lot easier. This was the time of the browser wars – Alta-vista vs Internet Explorer. I floated back and forth between the two while I was learning HTML (the language from which basic websites are made, and which I still use in writing posts here at Campaign Mastery).
These days, I’m back on a laptop because my replacement for the replacement for that original computer started suffering from Hard Disk problems that ultimately cost me almost everything on it – I had backups, but the data couldn’t be entirely recovered from them, and for some of the material I had relied on a DOS-based file splitter to spread the archives over multiple CD-ROM disks – one that wouldn’t recombine them properly even though it had worked fine when I tested it. A lot of my old work got lost around that time.
Not all of it, though – I still use the Win-98 calculator (faster to load, more user-friendly in scientific mode), and still nut out complicated table structures using Frontpage Express, and in general, still use about a dozen of the programs gathered in my Win98 days.
The whole point being that with every change in technology, the approach that I had to employ to translate my creativity into playable game changed. If I had to, I could go back to old-old-old-school pen and paper, but it would be slower and the results would not be as good – I’m a lot faster as a typist, even without fully mastering touch-typing. Each time the technology changes, what I can develop and present to the players as a game experience also changes, and the campaigns inevitably morph as a result into something slightly different.
In the course of 2020, I learned the art of creating animated Gifs. Because of the work involved, it’s not something that I can do all the time, but it’s there when I need it.
Last week, a reader contacted me and offered yet another example: he had constructed an RPG soundboard that he wanted to make available to readers. You can find it at tabletopy.com and it looks impressive (hint – scroll down on each page to see more sounds). The menu is repeated at the bottom of each page for your convenience, as well. (If you can’t hear anything, turn your volume levels up). Unlike some soundboards that I’ve seen, this lets you layer and stack sound effects and vary the volume of each individually, and they will persist even when moving to another page of the site. Some of them will undoubtedly be useful beyond fantasy, though that’s the genre for which they are primarily aimed – the crowd sound, for example. This is yet another change in the technology available to me – I’ve experimented a little in this direction in the past, but found the delay between launching a sound, and it actually starting to play, killed the effectiveness. The tabletopy soundboard is MUCH faster – so something that I considered off the table is now suddenly back in my palette of resources.
My campaigns will change a little, as a result. What will the next change be?
Every technological change is therefore a campaign milestone. It doesn’t even have to be your technology that changes – if a technical change alters the way a player uses his character, for example having an image of their character that they can display at will without searching for it, or can search through the rules or their character sheet for exactly what they are looking for, that change will impact the way that player interfaces with the game, and you will have to adapt your campaign to the change.
Campaign Twilight
At some point, the campaign will end. This could occur unexpectedly, even accidentally, or it could be deliberate. The moment the GM decides to begin working toward a conclusion of the campaign (perhaps inspired by one of the articles on staging a big finish here at Campaign Mastery), the campaign enters its twilight. That means that it could be in that stage for a long time before the players become aware that things are headed for a showdown.
23. The End In Sight
This is actually two different milestones, but only one will apply – whichever one comes later.
The first is when a clear pathway to the campaign’s conclusion becomes apparent to the GM. There may have been several game sessions in which he is maneuvering ‘chess pieces’ around the metaphoric game board to make that conclusion both possible and satisfying, in fact that is usually the case. When I was looking to finish up the Zenith-3 campaign on Earth-Halo (so-called because the laws of physics were slightly different and that manifested in a glowing halo around the earth, stunting their astronomy, which had consequent knock-on effects), I had a direct path to ending the campaign but it felt forced and would not have been very satisfactory. So it took a while to maneuver events to the point where a satisfactory epic conclusion became possible. Those plans were then tossed out because the players wanted to take the next phase of the campaign in a different direction to the one I had planned – so I was forced to run a fill-in adventure or two that started new plot threads and put that planned finish off the table while I integrated what they wanted with what I had intended to provide. It took another two years of game play to build back to the point where the Earth-Halo campaign could end, and the Earth-Regency campaign could begin.
The second one is when the players become aware that things are coming to a head, and the campaign as they have known it is likely to come to an end sometime soon. I think the case of the Earth-halo campaign, it was the penultimate adventure when they became aware that things were going over the top. It would have been obvious sooner, but I ran an adventure based on a Star Trek: TNG episode that stuck them in a recurring loop of time in which they (and the planet) were destroyed by a Dalek ship exploding in the wrong place at the wrong time. They started to figure out what was happening, and found ways to bootstrap that information into a future loop, and gradually found their way to the cause of the explosion (something they now did!) which enabled them to change the critical events. The good news was that this averted the loop in time, the bad news was that the Daleks now knew about Earth having a technologically-advanced race (the PCs came from Earth and had a starship, so this wasn’t a difficult deduction for them to make). Having undone the events that created the time loop, they found themselves at its beginning once again, this time with events playing out without the consequences of the cosmic explosion. This was an adventure or two prior to that penultimate adventure, and was a deliberate red herring – I was quite sure that they wouldn’t expect the big finish so quickly after blowing everything up and killing them all, half a dozen times.
24. The Final Adventure
This is the biggest milestone of them all. It starts at the beginning of the final adventure within the campaign, and ends with the final words from the GM – which may or may not be the traditional “The End”. It marks the ultimate change of focus with respect to this campaign on the part of the GM – he stops paying much attention to it at all. Unless, of course, he’s deliberately left behind some plot seeds that can sprout into a sequel campaign (a two-part article, there’s a link at the bottom of part 1 to take you to part 2).
After all, if the campaign was satisfying, the conclusion was thrilling, why wouldn’t you want to keep going? From the moment a campaign becomes Stable, I start scattering plot seeds as I go. Some of these will be the foundation of ad-hoc fill-in adventures in the main campaign, but most will remain fallow until the time is right to turn them into a new campaign. This enables me to reuse a lot of the campaign and adventure prep from the old campaign, saving huge amounts of time and effort. After all, your goal has to be to try and make the sequel even better than the original, right? Even if you don’t succeed, that’s the surest method of actually achieving parity between the two.
But it might be that you want the campaign to end with no sequel. I fully expect the current superhero campaign to be my last – I have absolutely no superhero ideas that have not been incorporated into it, and by the time we’re finished (at the current rate), I’ll be 76 years old, and one of my players will be in his mid-eighties! If I can arrange it, I’d like for the end to come in late September of 2041, even though that means letting that rough schedule slip by a couple of years – because that would be the campaign’s 60th anniversary, and that seems a rather appropriate way to mark the milestone. It could work out that way – I fully expect the final adventure of the campaign to take at least a year to play out, and it could easily be two. But it will end when it ends.
Just Like Starting Over
And, usually, when one campaign ends, it’s time to start thinking about the next one. Actually, it’s a long way past time – that’s why I recommend starting to gather preliminary thoughts and ideas as soon as your current campaign stabilizes.
Take the Zener Gate campaign – this always had a planned ending. At the moment, that ending is 5 adventures or so away – with the average being one-to-two game sessions per adventure. Right now, by choosing to watch instead of acting to ensure that history unfolded the way they want it to, the PCs have let a Chinese assassin kill the general who was instrumental in getting the program that recruited them for time travel up and running, and it is now directly controlled by Eric Trump, and all their history and achievements in the campaign to date – preventing WWIII, preventing war with the Martians who invented Time Travel, and so on – have been knocked into a cocked hat. Instead of them working for the survival and betterment of mankind, temporal agents will be busy doing what they were supposed to do: rewriting history to make it more “Trump-Friendly”. Opposing them will be the Chinese, who are working to make the world more “Chinese success-prone”. So they now have ground-zero seating at the venue of a time war. The way the game physics works is that every second time-jump has to be random – they chose their current location to infiltrate the Pentagon and measure the consequences of their stuff-up, so their next one will be random (i.e. at the GM’s whim) and then they can try and undo the mess that they have created.
If it weren’t for Lockdown stealing three months out of the gaming schedule, they would have completed this attempt to repair time by now – they already have a handle on how to do so – and we would be down to three adventures remaining in the campaign, a projected end date of early in 2022.
Always one to follow my own advice, I started thinking about what to replace it with more than a year ago. The decision was taken to resume the Warcry campaign despite the loss – now many years ago – of one of the key players.
All campaigns end. How they end – and what they consist of prior to that ending – is up to you. The one thing that is certain is that there will be historical milestones to look back upon – some recognized at the time for what they were, and some visible only in hindsight. These are the markers of a successful campaign, one that has seen adversity and overcome it, and made itself memorable to such an extent that it likely to be referenced in player and GM anecdote for years to come.
And that, my friends, seems a wonderfully up-beat and forward-looking note on which to end this, the one thousandth post to feature my by-line in singular isolation. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far!
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