Lessons from "Dust to Dust" (and "Imperial Fist")

The Eberron "Dust to Dust" campaign ended in a TPK on Tuesday. That's somewhat unfortunate, in that it's never the preferred way to end a campaign (and I had an actual plan for bringing it to a real end for perhaps the first time), but on the other hand it came at a convenient time. So that's fine.

The biggest lesson I've 'learned' from this campaign is actually something I've 'known' for some time but managed to ignore. And it's the same lesson I should have learned from the "Imperial Fist" campaign, which suffered from many of the same frustrations.

And it is this: to have a successful campaign you (well, I) have to do significant underlying preparation work.

That preparation work doesn't guarantee success, of course - it's entirely possible to do loads of prep work and still have it go wrong for any number of reasons. But it does seem that not doing that preparation work does guarantee... not failure, as such, but more a less-than-satisfactory result.

And it's notable the difference between the quality of the prep work I did for "The Eberron Code" versus the work I did for either "Dust to Dust" or "Imperial Fist", and also the quality of the end result in all of these cases.

I think that's the biggest and best lesson from that campaign. In "Dust to Dust" I had a fairly solid (but, alas, underbaked) image for the start of the campaign, I had vague notions for four acts for the campaign story, and I thought I had some neat stuff in terms of factions and anchor NPCs. As it turned out, though, none of those things really came to anything - once we were underway, I just didn't have the time to properly flesh out any of the material, which meant most of it quickly fell by the wayside. A real shame.

So, what's next? Well, nothing. There remains the possibility of this year's "Christmas Game", but I'm not going to give that much, if any, attention until at least after we move out of the flat (and probably not until after we move in to the new place). That means it will probably be cancelled this year, as I just have other things to do. In terms of campaign play, I don't have anything in the hopper. And it will be the middle of next year, at the very least, before I even consider starting something off again.