Emergent Campaigns

 There has been some discussion in the podverse about the term ‘campaign’ in a roleplay game context.

• What is a campaign?
• How up front do your goals for a campaign need to be?
• How planned in does the framework need to be?

I'd like to write a bit about emergent campaigns, how sometimes, long form play can ‘well up’ organically from simple beginnings.

Perhaps I am focusing somewhat on time just now as I have retired this week, but I really think one of the most important considerations when you are thinking about a multi-session game that you want to run, is how long you really have to play it through. The most valuable thing any of us can give is our time; it is a resource that we should treat with respect and courtesy to those in the group that are offering it to play. Up front, having a view on the estimated elapsed time of the game, is important and will help shape what your ‘campaign’ will be.

But what is a ‘campaign in this context? It’s an old name which evokes a range of definitions:

Cambridge Dictionary would say:

a planned group of especially political, business, or military activities that are intended to achieve a particular aim:

Or, more simply...

to organize a series of activities to try to achieve something.

In the roleplaying game context, a ‘campaign’ is an old name for well, something, and I suspect probably not necessarily for what we now think of as a campaign. A recognisably contemporary description will involve a sequence of adventures, possibly with an overarching theme or linked goal, with a continuing roster of players and characters. A play sequence where the characters grow, both in terms of game advancement, and in their shared relationships, their own stories and affecting change to the setting. A moment in time where the shared stories of the characters changes the story of the setting in which you play.

A campaign may well also have plot, events that take place either with and influenced by the story, or independently of it, as the verisimilitude of the world shimmers with the glamour of a real other place. 

It could be, and despite my forty years I’m not positioning this view definitively, that the early meaning of the term is much more about a perpetuating setting, which can be interacted via a series of groups of players, and that there can be swap-over of players and characters as the campaign progresses. So, less about one group story, and instead a story of a setting and the more improvised interactions of multiple groups within it. This might even explain some of the early design of D&D and why the emphasis was placed where it was.

Perhaps the current Westmarch style of game, where a large roster of players self determine points of interest and self organise sessions to play, cleaves closer to the original definition of ‘campaign’. Language is fluid, and has a way of making sense within the context of time, so I’m not going to flap about exactly what the term means, and I think others have encapsulated the things that make a campaign over a series of adventures.  

I’d like to write about campaigns based on my journey of actually running one, the one that I am running right now. 

We’re 35 or so sessions in, with more than a year of elapsed time, one group, with one change of a player throughout. I didn’t knw that was what to was going to be when I set out. The themes that I wanted to explore emerged during play and were inspired by the suggestions laced throughout the gaming books I was using and the interaction around the virtual table.

I started my journey by finding a heroic fantasy game full of passion, that put the player characters in the centre and clothed them with cinematic powers of high fantasy, setting them in a Points of Light environment where ‘The World needs Heroes’. 

The first vehicle for me was a strong retail interest and investment in the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which I then felt I needed to justify with some actual play. I was genuinely interested to see how the game would play out at the virtual table.

So, I didn’t start with an overarching metaplot or any notion of how long the series of games would last. I just wanted to give it a go.

Initially, I took up a starting scenario book,  The March of the Phantom Brigade, and used that as a way of letting myself in gently. I built some tools in Role VTT to facilitate online play, and had a platform that would enable us to meet together and see each other. Role VTT is the best VTT I’ve seen for putting the players front and centre, and has just about enough to support tactical combat encounters (though that is much better serviced by most other VTTs).

I liked this adventure because it provided an opportunity for the characters to immediately change the setting. The story has them guarding a caravan of settlers, off to create a new point of light, based in an old fortification to the south. Straight away, the core theme of the 4th Ediiton of the Dragon Game was there in the concept of this scenario book. I was getting them to create something new, push back against the darkness and create a better place. The core possibilities, the central theme was right there at the start. They aso got to splat some stirges, and get spooked by undead, so there was that.

Being the Dragon Game, we had exploration and some nice combat encounters right off the bat, with some early connections and a sense of place.

The game could have ended there. I’d have fulfilled much of my goals, and whereas it wouldn’t of been a long campaign, or indeed a campaign at all, that wasn’t what I was starting with. Just this segment taught me that I loved the game, I liked how it played out, and we had a really nice group of players, with enthusiasm for more.

So, I continued the core theme of PC heroes maintaining the points of light by encouraging them West and into the marvellous mini sandbox of Harkenwold and the mini campaign set there:

From here the sense of campaign started to emerge in play. We had an adventuring company that were starting to make a name for themselves - an identity that transcended individual characters and instead looked at them as a group - really important for campaign play I think, and something that is explored more explicitely in game structure in Forged in the Dark family of games with Crew or Cell or Company sheets that themselves grow over time.

Well, I started to have this ‘noteriety of group’ as a personality in itself, going on with 4th Edition D&D.

The sense of campaign and what I wanted to achieve began to crystalise from here. Now, I would say that, once again, I would have been happy for the game to close at the end of the Reavers of Harkenwold. I felt incredibly lucky that I had preserved the interest of the players for as long as I had, but truth be told, we were enjoying each others company and the story we were telling. I signalled a season end. This enabled me to properly pause and check n with the players and gauge the mood.

We are still in play, with another season commissioned, but now I have an end goal that I’m working towards. We’ll see how it goes. I’d like to see a full Heroic arc - player character Levels 1-10 (currently nearly 6) where the characters put the entire region onto a new footing.

Nentir Vale is a northerly province of old empire. How about the ancient line of emperors returns, and not where any of the many factions of the area expects? Which faction will Sturm und Drang support and will the old power of Nerath return ,up here in the North? That’s what I want to explore, with a climactic event that will decide and answer the question.

And so, around the PCs, the factions move.

• The line of emperors somehow preserved over the generations
• Iron Circle Invaders from the South
• A mad undead emperor of long ago
• The ancient dragons of the North with their own selfish agendas
• Ghosts of warriors past
• A family of assassins
• Dragonborn seeking a rekindling of their own empire of ancient times
• Tieflings wanting the same for their own ‘Bael Turath’
• The elves and ents of the two great forests
• Eladrin dreams of the past and present, because they see the two as the same
• Resurgent orc tribes in the mountains of the west

And others...

Many of these will come together, with the PCs at the centre to answer that campaign question. If I can pull it off, it will run for much of this year and will then provide a series finale.

I have a mind map on the relationships, as it got a bit involved.

Through this we are also exploring some PC backstory in play. I think a mark of a campaign is that the backstories are hooks for good play and make what you are doing personal as well as setting transformational. Backstories are only useful if they become front stories, are visible, and inform and drive actual play. Assumptions in backstory are challenged and changed by the experience at the table. In real life we write and rewrite our own narrative, to give meaning to who we are, no reason not to afford the same luxury to player characters.

I now have an ending in mind and will set to get there, whilst taking my own advice of not holding on too strong to the threads that I am weaving. Guide them into the loom, and let the process work through the pattern, to produce the finished campaign.

I am enjoying seeing threads develop where the PCs might have intervened, but because of their choices they focused elsewhere. Plot happens, but the story will take its own path. We can also only tell one main story comfortably, along with some other smaller ones. There is a sandbox element, with a sense that the world moves around them, whether they are there or not. I think that’s also a really important element to a campaign.

In all of this you might have detected a running theme? Dont hold onto your campaign too tightly. Stay loose and see how it develops, find the narrative cul-de-sacs, enjoy them, and then move on. 

A campaign is a lengthy journey. As with life, the trick I think is to enjoy every step on the way, and not fixate on the end point that will give a satisfactory conclusion to all that time that has been invested.

And with that moment of apparent lucidity, let's recap.

Up front planning of a campaign is a good thing to do. It gives you a framework to play in, some explicit  goals that you can develop as you go and it manages players’ expectations as to the amount of time they should consider commiting to. That’s fair. If you make this explicit, I also think it is important you stick to it, with any extensions to the story, new arcs perhaps, being optional rather than expected. The actors, the players, are people with busy lives and so you proceed with them at the heart whilst recognising that stories, good stories, have good endings.

A lot of games have lengthy pre-written campaigns, adventure paths, that you simply play through, some of them are famous, some notorious. Running one of those gives you a pre-packaged campaign with many of the questions set out ready to explore. Either way, at some point, your campaign will emerge, directed or otherwise as you look to tell a story that culminates in a satisfying conclusion, a good ending, to cap off all that time in a satisfying manner.

But story and indeed plot can emerge as you go, and if everyone is having fun on the way to getting that structure in place, then all to the good! And so far, the D&D 4e game has been a great example of that and one that I may repeat, telling other stories, maybe with some or all of the current cast of people who have been gracious enough to give of their time.

And to give a fuller context, in 40 years of my gaming, this emergent campaign has been one of my best and without a shodow of a doubt the longest I have ever experienced. I wasn’t actually sure if I had one of these long and developing series in me as a DM/GM. Again this situation has emerged, and I’m jolly glad it did.

My next campaign, I think, will be the Secrets of the Sorcerer - a pre-written Modiphius Conan 2d20 mini campaign of about 12 sessions to be run in Foundry VTT. That is all packaged and ready for me to share. It’s up-front and waiting to be told.

But that is another story, and one I will tell another time. So, until the next time, hope you are well, take care and good gaming.