Four Great Campaigns, and what I learned from them

I've been playing RPGs for just over 24 years now. I've run a lot of campaigns in that time, most of which were largely unremarkable. However, there were four that stood head and shoulders above the rest, that serve as the highlights of my gaming career, and which are my go-to examples for how I would like my campaigns to unfold. These were:

Unnamed 2nd Edition Campaign

I ran this game back when I was sixteen, and before I adopted the practice of naming my campaigns. It was the last successful campaign I ran using the AD&D 2nd Edition rules, the last successful campaign I ran with my original gaming group (from when I was at school), and the last session was actually the last time I saw several of the members of that group.

In hindsight, this campaign was little more than a bad "Lord of the Rings" rip-off. There were magical swords, evil overlords, dark knights... all that stuff. The campaign was also very much a railroad, was light on both dungeons and dragons, and played very fast and loose with the rules. Objectively, it really wasn't a terribly good campaign.

But it was fun! Oh, this campaign was so much fun. The group got together every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evening for two hours (oh, to have that much free time again), and fairly quickly blazed through the levels. Such plot as there was therefore unfolded quickly, and the story was at least marginally compelling.

However, the key lesson from the campaign is this: who you have playing the game is much more important than what game you're playing. If you have a good group of players all determined to have fun, you'll have fun. If you have even one problem player, or a conflict of personalities, you're pretty much screwed.

Rivers of Time

This was a Vampire: the Masquerade campaign that started while I was at university and ran for five years of real-time. Initially, it ran in the summer months, but gradually expanded to run all year round. The game also started with two players, added two more, lost one, and then added two more for the finale. And the storyline stretched for 2,300 years of game time, starting in ancient Rome after the sack of Carthage and ending in a future city with no name as the world ended. The campaign also spawned off a lot of characters and plot threads that actually got resolved in a whole set of interlinking campaigns and one-shots spanning pretty much the whole World of Darkness.

Along the way, this campaign had some stellar moments. There was an adventure set in Arthur's Britain which turned a great many things on their heads, and which worked out really well. That laid the seeds for a plot thread involving Excalibur (one of the sourcebooks noted a legend suggesting the sword had been given to the Lionheart during the Crusades). The other real highlight was when a plot seed that was sown in the second session finally came to a fruition five years later, and did so in a remarkably satisfactory manner.

Of all the campaigns I've run, this was probably the greatest achievement. The length of it, the scope of it, and the way it ran so smoothly for so long...

But this campaign also suffered from a pretty devastating flaw: it simply went on too long. Like "Battlestar Galactica", it started exceptionally well, and then lost a lot of steam. There was a lot of good material in the later years, but after about halfway through the second year those highlights became fewer and further between. Additionally, since then it has become significantly harder to get a consistent group together and to keep them together over the long haul, with the consequence that I wouldn't try anything like this again.

The major lesson from this campaign is that planning is key, especially planning up-front. The campaign was able to unfold so well because right at the start I put in a lot of time thinking about story arcs, laying the seeds for later plotlines, and generally getting my house in order. It started to lose steam as soon as my initial ideas ran out, and I had to start padding things out.

The secondary lesson from this is that I now plan campaigns with a scope already defined. If a campaign is intended to run for 15 levels and 24 months, I'll have laid that out up-front. If it's intended to run for 6 levels and 20 sessions, I say that instead. That way, I know roughly how much material to plan for, and am less likely to have to stretch too little material over too much time.

Shackled City

I don't use pre-generated adventures very often, and have had distinctly mixed results from doing so. However, the use of the first Adventure Path from Dungeon magazine ranks as one of the highlights of my career. This was the last successful campaign I ran with my second group, and ran for 11 months in the year before I left for Yeovil. The campaign ran from 1st level to 18th, with the characters hitting 19th once the experience points were granted for the final session. This campaign therefore also represents the highest level I have seen gained 'fairly' in any edition of D&D.

The great strength of this campaign was that pretty much everything was already done for me. All that preparation that I said was key, above, was already in place. All I needed to do was administer the character sheets, and print out tokens for use on the battle-mat. (Yes, we used on in those days!)

And the campaign had some wonderful set-pieces. There was one session that was entirely dominated by a single lengthy combat against Kuo-toa, set in a temple constructed of three levels, with several waves of reinforcements. The battle started almost as soon as the session began. Six hours later, all but one PC was down and bleeding, the last PC (a Cleric) was down to single-digit hit points, but the last monster was likewise weak. The Cleric had just missed his attack.

So it came down to this: if the monster hit her attack roll (scoring a fairly low die result, as well), then that would be it - TPK. If not... I have never seen a single die roll carry so much emotion and expectation. It was awesome. (The attack missed, of course.)

The big lesson from Shackled City was that I never again want to run 3e at those sorts of levels. As expected, the game started to break down around 12th level, and got progressively worse as levels went up. By the end, it simply wasn't worth the effort - but we'd come so far we weren't about to give up.

I also learned quite a lot about encounter design from Shackled City. Unfortunately, I'm far from convinced I've done much to actually apply that knowledge. It's one thing to know that the environment needs to play a part; it's quite another to make sure it does. (Incidentally, this was something that 4e tended to do very well.)

The Eberron Code

My current campaign very quickly became one of the 'greats'. The group of players here really gelled, they became quite involved in the goings-on in the campaign, and they unravelled most of the mysteries. Truly, a satisfying campaign. I have also been very happy with the way the players have tried to be more creative with their actions than some in the past - there's a fair amount of shouting warcries, tipping enemies off of ledges, pushing people here and there, and other shenanigans. All in all, it's been good fun.

I've also had a great deal of fun at two of the last three sessions, when key facts were revealed. Odd just how much impact the word "Tarrasque" can have...

I have learned quite a few lessons from this campaign, but I'm going to hold off on spelling them out for the time being. Once the campaign is done, I'll post a fuller retrospective, but for now... spoilers.

Onward!

Of course, the real trick is to make sure that my next campaign also becomes one of the 'greats'. But that's easier said than done.