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Last time I outlined the first half (roughly) of a process for the introduction of a system of organization for plotting to an existing campaign.

I hope everyone’s already familiar with what was in Webs Of Gossamer: Retrofitting For Plot Pt I because I don’t have time to do much of a recap.

Instead, I’m going to dive right in (there may be a few nibbles as we proceed)…

10. Identify cross-links and cross-purposes

At this point you have half a dozen plotlines broken down in detail but sitting in splendid isolation. The next step is to start looking for cross-links, places where one plotline can complicate another.

For example, one point in our plot spine consists of the following two events:

  • When the PCs return to Tribwich and confront Konrad, he will claim to have been extorted into deceiving them by the leader of the Mercenaries. He will know nothing about the people who were following the PCs and trying to get them killed, but promises to look into it when he can; he dislikes not knowing things.
  • PCs Vs The Mercenaries Of Tribwich plotline.PCs drive the mercenaries away after forging a secret alliance with Konrad.

We already have an external plotline indicated there, a side-plot hanging off the main plot thread, and an indication of what it’s supposed to be about. It’s probably a fairly straightforward “Find the Mercenaries, Attack the Mercenaries, Rout the Mercenaries” kind of thing. There should be some sort of setback – “Discover that the Mercenaries have a ‘secret weapon’ or ‘hidden ally’ “ sort of thing, which will contemplate the Routing, as well.

Just as the PCs are about to achieve said rout, we could complicate their lives and the current situation by bringing in an element from another plotline that both PCs and Mercenaries have to work together to solve:

The “Rake The Embers” plotline
A refugee arrives from the Elemental Plane of Fire and begs for protection from the PCs and Mercenaries, not recognizing that they are in the middle of settling their differences. She is being pursued by a pair of powerful Elementals because she wants to warn of a plot to set the Prime Material Plane ablaze as a replacement for their home, which is (mysteriously) going out.

This plotline adds more moving pieces to the aggregate plotline of the campaign. You could start it anywhere, and only the relative strength of the forces involved would need to change. But starting it “now” has some big advantages – because it’s remote to the main setting of the spine, plot developments can be sprinkled throughout the campaign from this point forward in relative isolation, and simply fester and bubble away in the background the rest of the time; and at this point in the campaign, the problem is way beyond the PCs capabilities.

Your goal is to drop future developments from all your plotlines into the main spine of the campaign. Note that since none of them ARE the main spine of the campaign, they should all be resolved completely before the PCs have their final confrontation of that spinal plotline.

11. Resolve complications, preliminary timeline

The easiest way of doing all this is to (1) make copies of your plotlines, and (2) cut-and-paste into the copy of the spine. This enables you to merge all the plotlines into one multi-threaded document. Keeping separate copies that isolate each plotline makes them easier to comprehend; the preliminary timeline that results from the merger is an index to when, in relative terms, the plotline will advance.

The preliminary timeline will have complications that you need to resolve – times when you need the PCs to be distracted by something else to give events time to mature. The best solution: drop in additional standalone plots at such times, little mini-adventures that do nothing important but take up time that the PCs would otherwise use to derail whatever the “master plan” wants to have happened.

Sometimes you will notice that a plotline implicitly gives the PCs a resource or capability that will complicate (there’s that word again!) a later stage of a different plotline – or a later stage assumes that the PCs will have a capability that you haven’t explicitly “baked in” like a contact or an ally. The answer, once again, is to drop in a mini-adventure that gives the required capability or that denies them the use of it at the critical moment.

So your next step is to go through your preliminary timeline looking for these exact issues, and inserting mini-adventures to resolve them. You don’t need to figure out the content of these adventures at this point; you simply need to flag the need for them, and the meta-purpose that they are intended to achieve.

12. A plotline (or two) for each PC

Once you have done that, it’s time to take a second look at your starring cast. Each of your PCs should have at least one plotline that focuses on them as an individual. You may even have a couple – one on their home life, one on their professional life, and one that leads to them having the chance to achieve whatever the ‘one big thing’ was that each wanted to do with their lives, or at least getting a step closer to that being done.

You need to create these plotlines, based on what your players have provided in terms of the background of their characters, and on the results of your discussions with the players.

To illustrate this: one of the personal plotlines for a DMPC (“Dungeon Master’s PC”) in my Champions Campaign revolves around one of their enemies, who has a very strong sense of honor, joining the team to repay the debt of honor that he has decided he owes them for saving his people from a civil war. He simply showed up and announced that he was joining the team in the first adventure of the campaign. Slowly, the PCs have begun to trust and respect him, and slowly, he has begun to trust and respect them. A major step in the “rehabilitation” of this character will come when he tells them his real name – to date, he has simply used his non-de-gurre of “Defender”. This is one step in a plot thread that radically shifts the DMPC’s point of view and reshapes the fortunes and destiny of his people (if all goes according to plan).

That particular plot event could happen almost anytime – but I want it to be in a relatively quiet moment, in terms of the campaign, so that I can take the time to make it feel significant to the players, because it will offer further insights into his species’ culture and society, laying the groundwork for a future visit to his home-world.

13. Integrate into the timeline

Once you have a plotline (or more) for each of the PCs and DMPCs, these need to be integrated into the timeline, the master plan, in exactly the same way as has already been discussed. In some cases, these can provide the mini-adventures you have already identified the need for; in others, they need to be standalone items added in to a master list.

One point that should have been made earlier, but that I don’t think was, is that this integration is a two-way deal; you shouldn’t merely update the master timeline to contain the elements of each plot thread, you should update the description and breakdown of each plotline to mention the context and circumstances within which the plot event occurs.

14. Create the blanks, fill in the blanks

Having pruned back your list of required mini-adventures by using PC-centric plotlines to fill some of the requirements that you’ve identified in the main timeline, it’s time to create empty files for each of the remainder and populate each with ideas. This essentially sets each up as another plot thread (a very short one) that is dealt with in exactly the same manner as the larger ones.

15. Finalize the timeline, divide into adventures

Finalizing the timeline is a simple process – you just go over it again, looking for anything that you’ve missed.

Dividing the content of your master timeline into adventures is – at best – a preliminary breakdown.

One adventure may comprise events from several plot threads as well as the main action of that plotline. I often look for a theme that I can make common to several of these events and use that as a logical grouping. That theme often also provides the title of the adventure (you do name your adventures, right? You should – Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 1) and Part 2 will both help and explain why.

You’ll also find some advice and technique in Yrisa’s Nightmare and other goodies and The Surprising Value of Clickbait to a GM, which is why they are also connected to the “A Good Name” series.

Crafting an Adventure

Congratulations! Your campaign is now a loosely-knitted interweaving of multiple plot threads that interact and conflate into a bigger picture.

Now it’s time to look at how you use it.

This is a fairly simple process:

  1. Create a document to hold the new adventure;
  2. Copy in the various elements that comprise that adventure from the master plan;
  3. Review the ‘big picture’ of what each of the events means in terms of advancing the specific plot thread that they are part of;
  4. Sequence the events within the adventure;
  5. Start expanding on the details, making lists of the NPCs that you need, updating any NPCs involved that you already have, writing narrative passages, and (in general) turning a checklist of content into an episode of the campaign.

I’ve actually described this process in some detail; it’s essentially the same as the one discussed in Tips for and from RPG Campaign Geriatrics – look for the diagram about 3/5ths of the way down the page, then scroll up to the “Plot”, “Structure”, and “Planning” sections (which continue beyond both that diagram and another big one) some distance later.

Integrating new plotlines

You can’t run a campaign for any length of time without two three four things happening: (1) you come up with a brilliant new idea that you want to incorporate into the master plan; (2) you decide that a plotline that seemed brilliant at the time is actually a bit stale and passe; (3) the players want to move in a different direction for a while; and (4) you fail to have an adventure ready in time.

    Brilliant New Ideas

    It’s relatively easy to incorporate a new plotline – you simply repeat the process given above. However, every new idea runs the risk of destabilizing another plotline that you had underway by introducing contradictions or complications that you haven’t factored in. So long as you are aware of the dangers, that can usually be managed.

    Your “Campaign Master Plan” is not a blueprint, to be followed slavishly; it’s a collection of ideas for the advancement of the various plotlines that comprise the campaign, a starting point. Don’t fall into the trap of setting yours in stone.

    Refreshing Stale Ideas

    No-one is brilliant all the time. Some of your ideas will just suck. That’s all right, some of mine do, too. The time to recognize that is when you are writing the adventure, but we all get distracted by our own brilliance at times, too; confirmation bias is just as large a cognitive problem for GMs as it is for anyone else (see “I know what’s happening!” – Confirmation Bias and RPGs).

    Sometimes, too, your pacing is off for one reason or another and a plotline is simply taking too long to get to the point – you can tell that everyone’s getting tired of waiting for it.

    When that happens, you have two choices: junk what you’ve got planned for that adventure and start planning it from wherever it had gotten up to, or compress the plotline, as described in When Good Ideas Linger Too Long: Compacting plotlines.

    Again, nothing is set in stone. The key point to remember is to examine cross-connections to your other plotlines, because changing whatever you had in mind produces an adventure that may not achieve the same metaplot functions that the original did.

    I’ve learned over the years that it’s often better to keep plot descriptions short and bullet-pointed and only expand them into full adventures when the time of play is imminent. I’ve offered a number of campaign examples in this format; one of the best (in terms of an example) is Control-Alt-Delete – A Modern-day SciFi Campaign.

    A Change Of Tack

    Sometimes the players Zig when you wanted or expected them to Zag. Campaign Mastery tackled this problem quite a long time ago, in Ask The GMs: Giving Players The Power To Choose Their Own Adventures, and more recently in Giving PCs Choice And Having Your Plot, Too. The bottom line is that at the end of the day, so long as the players have fun and the metaplot functions that you needed the intended adventure to serve are satisfied, how you get there doesn’t matter.

    It’s important, therefore, to know what the meta-goals for any adventure are (the big picture) and to be prepared to throw everything else away if the players want to do something else instead.

    Sometimes, you don’t have to be that extreme, because once the players deal with whatever side-excursion they have in mind, they will be happy to follow the path that you expected them to take in the first case; you need to bear in mind what it was that the players want their characters to achieve with this excursion.

    There are other occasions when the divergence is more serious – the players may want to resolve a plotline now, rather than waiting for the time when you wanted to resolve it. Again, the short answer is to let them try. If they fail, your original plans simply have added context; if they succeed, you can draw upon those later plans to improvise the adventure. Having your campaign planned actually makes it easier to (successfully) diverge from that plan – something that the GM can take advantage of, when they need to.

    The Dreaded Deadline Doom

    Every now and then, we all get bitten by this. Your options are simple: abandon the game session, run your unfinished adventure (improvising the parts that aren’t yet done), or drop in a fill-in adventure.

    The first choice, in my opinion, is a last resort; too many missed game sessions and you won’t have a campaign any more; people will find other things to occupy their time. Choosing between the others is a question of the adventure in question and how much of it you have finished.

    You can improvise settings and locations.

    You can improvise characters.

    You can improvise narrative.

    None of these will have significant long-term impact on the campaign if everything follows the plot that you’ve outlined, but there is a greater potential for conflict between plot and the characters who are supposed to be driving it. In general, if the adventure has reached the point where the players know everything that they need to know to resolve the plotline, I would go with the planned adventure and improv whatever I had to; if they don’t, then a drop-in self=contained adventure would be preferable.

    These situations are inherently unpredictable in their timing. Something my co-GM and I have taken to doing for the Adventurer’s Club campaign is preparing a fill-in adventure in advance, ready to go. When a critical player is absent, or other circumstances mandate it, we wheel it out.

Recommendation: An Ideas File

I strongly advocate that GMs keep another document: a file in which new ideas can accumulate until you need one to flesh out an adventure, or to be the kernel of a drop-in adventure.

By the time the first Zenith-3 campaign had run it’s course, I had so many ideas for plotlines for the next one that they form a distinctive pair of plot “threads” within the campaign plan – and I was fairly certain the well was dry, making this my last superhero campaign for the foreseeable future. But I’ve since come up with a handful of ideas, which I will keep on standby as fill-ins should I need them!

Complicating The Picture

When I outlined this article, one of the last steps involved in planning it was to review the information I had been given by the person requesting the assistance to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. This is something that you should do when creating adventures, too – a quick review of the big picture in case there’s something important that has been overlooked.

There’s an implication in what I was told that I hadn’t picked up on – a suggestion that the GM actually had four different groups adventuring in the same campaign world at the same time. Everything I’ve written about assumes a single group in a campaign environment.

Lacking a term for this sort of multi-ply campaign, I’ve coined “Megacampaign” to describe them.

This adds a new level of complexity, and your planning has to take it into account. This section is how to do that, using the principles and approach already provided.

    Megacampaign Plans & Timeline

    In a nutshell: create separate master plans, as described, for each campaign, and then integrate them into a Master Plan / Timeline for the overall campaign. This enables you to have the effects of what Group 1 do show up in the background of adventures by Group 2, and so on.

    In general, it’s that simple. But I have some additional advice for such situations, some additional planning elements that will help.

    Isolationism

    First of all, do your best to keep the different adventuring groups separate and distinct. If one group is based in the capital city of the central Kingdom, the others should be somewhere else. If a second group moves to that capital city temporarily, as happened in the example campaign that I concocted in the first part of this article, then the master plan should move the first group away from there for as long as necessary. This helps keep the campaign plot threads isolated and prevents one group getting in the way of a second.

    Checkpoints

    An ongoing problem will be synchronization. between the campaigns. Assuming that they play with the same frequency can help, but won’t be enough; some adventures will take a single game session, some will take two or three or four or eight or whatever.

    Whenever something major is planned to occur in one timeline, something that will have knock-on effects in the other campaigns, that creates a Checkpoint. These should be highlighted in your campaign planning to make sure that each campaign is ‘ready’ for the event.

    In other words, you want to keep the campaign date roughly the same in all the campaigns.

    Checkpoints won’t occur in every adventure (they will probably become more frequent as the campaign draws to a conclusion)..

    Consider the diagram (done in some haste, so not as neat as I intended, but it will serve). You can clearly see a Megacampaign consisting of three separate concurrent campaigns. Each contains adventures of different lengths in in-game days.

    At the bottom of the diagram, you can see a Checkpoint – an event in Campaign #2 that will have repercussions felt within the other campaigns. In Campaign #3, the impact is slight, it’s just an event in the background (at least for now), but in Campaign#1, the repercussions will trigger a significant new adventure.

    The problem: there’s a substantial gap in time at three points in two campaigns before the date in question is reached – Campaigns #1 and #3 are ready for the event to take place before Campaign #2 actually delivers the event.

    Some of that gap can be accommodated, if you anticipate the need, with a couple of days spacing between adventures – your introduction to the adventure simply starts off, “a couple of days after….” and proceeds from there. That won’t work with every adventure; some are too tightly connected with the adventure that precedes or follows.

    But if that’s not enough, then you will need Filler.

    Filler

    Filler is another word for a standalone small adventure whose sole meta-purpose is to chew up time, giving PCs that are in a campaign waiting around for a checkpoint to be reached something to do while they wait. Of course, the PCs don’t know that they are waiting for timelines to sync up – and you don’t know how long (in game-days) the filler has to be; you have to wait for the actual event to occur in Campaign #2.

    That makes Filler more complicated, because it has two separate time dimensions to be accommodated – game-time and game sessions. This can usually be managed, if you know about the problem in advance, but it’s something that you have to keep in mind.

    This is where the ideas file can be a lifesaver, because it gives you something you can drop into a campaign as “filler”.

Because organizing a campaign into a system helps you keep track of the Big Picture, it actually makes the campaign more flexible and responsive. Prep and campaign management become much easier.

It might be easier to create a campaign in a structured and systematic way in the first place, but it’s by no means too late when you start finding yourself drowning; it just means that there’s a little additional work involved in making sure that the major plot threads already underway are documented and integrated into a comprehensive master plan.

The two parts of this article show how it can be done; the rest is up to you.

Further Reading

Although I’ve touched on some of the articles that I’ve written or co-written on campaign structures in the text as they became relevant, there are a lot more that were omitted for various reasons, mostly a lack of direct relevance to the problem at hand. They contain a lot of advice that can be integrated into the structure created by the process in this two-part article or otherwise be helpful, especially in the longer term.

When asked the question that sparked this article, I responded with that list of relevant reading as preliminary reading. I thought it germane to include it (with a few additions) here as a footnote to the main content. The sequence has been selected with some care, so tackle them in the order shown if you’re interested. There will be some redundancy with articles referenced in the article body.

This list is not exhaustive; it’s very much a cherry-pick from amongst the hundreds of articles on the subject of campaigns. In addition, you may find other articles of value indexed on these pages (and you should find a summary of most of the above as well, so that you know what to look for within them):

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