Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 317082" data-attributes="member: 812">My current campaign has had about 60 sessions, over close to two years now. Characters are up around 8th to 10th level.A campaign for me (because we all seem to have different definitions) is a set of arcing adventures that loosely tell a larger story while following a variety of shorter tales. I typically have several layers of story in a campaign:The Big Arc -- what's REALLY going on, end of the world kind of stuff. Once this gets wrapped up the campaign is over.The Season Arc -- I break my campaign up into "Seasons" of twenty to thirty sessions each. A given season typically has an overriding arc that culminates in a climactic finish of some kind.The Adventure Arc -- A season is broken up into four or five "Adventures", each four or five sessions long and with a pretty tight storyline. Not every adventure ties directly into the Season Arc, but the majority of them do.So the Big Arc is very sketchy, just a few ideas and such about background material. It slowly takes shape over the life of the campaign, as the players provide input and determine part of the shape of the story. When I start the campaign, I don't really know how many Seasons it will take to complete the Big Arc, so I don't bother to detail it too much. Let the players do some of the heavy lifting for me.I generate Season Arcs one at a time, so next Season is always pretty much unknown until the current Season is winding down. By that point, I have a clearish idea of what my PCs are up to and what sort of story is likely to grab their attention. Plus, there's always new material, bad guys, cultures and such that emerge during a season and often grab my attention and interest. My last season got entirely taken over and hijacked by an especially pushy (but hot) NPC who I in fact just made up on the spur of the moment to justify an attempt to steal a party magic item I needed to get rid of. She inserted herself on center stage and wouldn't go away so I had to restructure the whole season around her.Adventure Arcs pretty much generate themselves as the Season progresses and the PCs move from place to place. These are almost completely under PC control -- they decide where they're going to go and what they're going to do. I've gotten good at lifting material from various resources in order to put adventures together in a big hurry, so I can respond to PC shenangans without too much trouble. I like to take a little break between seasons so I can catch my breath, though.Um, what was the question again?</blockquote>

Verification