Naming the Campaign

My scan and shred efforts have now reached a point where I'm spending a lot of time with old character sheets from ancient campaigns - some from school, some from univeristy, and some that are more recent (though those last are mostly done now). One of the things that changed when I went to university is that, following a recommendation in the "Vampire: the Masquerade" rulebook, I started naming campaigns - "Rivers of Time", "Imperial Fist", and so on. Prior to that point, I was just running a game with no particular name attached.

One of the things that is very interesting from that is that for almost all of the campaigns that have names I have at least some recollection of what happened in the campaign, what the themes and purpose was, and so on. Conversely, most of the campaigns that don't have names are largely forgotten. There is one exception to this (there are also a couple of cases where I remember some of what a particular character did, but nothing about the wider campaign).

(There are two key exceptions, where I have named campaigns but no associated memories. Oddly, some of the same characters appear in both. I think what happened is that I was noodling around a few ideas but then never got around to actually running either of these campaigns. But I can't be sure - I don't seem to have anything other than a bunch of character sheets for either. Sheets with none of the tell-tale signs of actually ever being used.)

There's no revelatory conclusion to this, except that it serves to remind me that the advice given was indeed good: some time early in the development of a campaign the GM should probably come up with a name for it. Obviously an evocative name is better than a dull one, but even a dull name can serve a useful function in providing a useful shorthand for the events of that campaign.

(Oh, and it reminds me also that a GM should always have good recycling facilities - the PCs might skip plot point A in a given campaign, and that's fine... it just means you get to transplant that plot point to some later campaign further down the line. And in extreme cases, given that you are likely to have different groups over the years, you can even choose to reuse plots, characters and ideas that your previous group did encounter.)