Campaign Structural Paradigms

[Lanefan]

I'll start with a hard-set first adventure after which there's a vaguely-defined storyboard that I use for overarching plotlines and suitable adventure ideas that fit within those plotlines.

However, I'm very much aware that after that first adventure anything can happen, and my storyboard might go out the window in a hurry depending what the players/PCs decide to do and-or where they decide to go. For one campaign, for example, I had an initial storyboard of about 15 adventures that involved a fair amount of city intrigue culminating in an attempt to overthrow the King. Four adventures in, however, the PCs decided to head up-country instead and they ended up leaving the area for over a year. Wheeeee - out the window went that storyboard, replaced with a series of not-always-connected (or coherent!) stand-alone adventures until another storyline presented itself later.

That said, the overall paradigm I try for is a big sprawling campaign with multiple parties operating in the same setting, sometimes meeting and interweaving with each other and maybe even with a common-to-most home base, such that various different things can be going on at once. Kind of like troupe or West Marches play, except the players don't change every week and the adventures last for several (or more) sessions each.

 

[Jack Daniel]

My preferred paradigm is the "living sandbox" milieu. Draw a hex map, fill it with: cool places, interesting people, conflicting factions, dangerous monsters, desirable treasures, a difficult mystery, and loads of clues. Turn the players loose on the world and see what happens. Make sure the world keeps on ticking like a living, breathing place where things happen — the PCs can impact the world by interacting with it, and when they don't, things may still happen that impact them.

In the short term, each game session is one adventure; when we aren't playing, time passes in-game at the same pace as real time, which means that between games, the PCs get downtime to heal, study, train, etc. But sometimes downtime overlaps with a session, and that's when a player has to roll up an extra PC and expand their personal selection of adventurers to choose from before each game.

Long-term, there are eventually many more PCs than players, spread out over a variety of levels, so that the players may collectively decide on a case-by-case basis to tackle adventures suited to a variety of levels — low-level dungeon-crawls, mid-level wilderness expeditions, high-level statecraft and warfare, or epic-level planar travel and questing for godhood.

But the point of play — the reason we're doing all of this exploration, dungeon-delving, information-gathering, treasure-hunting, mystery-solving, wilderness-taming, castle-building, army-raising, etc. — is to experience the feeling of going on thrilling, challenging, dangerous adventures in a (simulation of a) believable fantasy world with as much verisimilitude as I can practically muster up.

 

[Lanefan]

In the short term, each game session is one adventure; when we aren't playing, time passes in-game at the same pace as real time,

Gygax presented this as a standard mode of play in the 1e DMG as well; but I just can't see how one adventure per session can happen unless a) your adventures are very short, or b) your sessions are crazy long, or c) you're skipping lots of detail.

I mean, take some of the classic modules - KotB, Hommlet, Isle of Dread, any of the G series - there's a lot in each of those and IME they take 6-10+ sessions each, meaning a really keen crew might take 4-7 if things are being done at an old-school level of detail.

Otherwise, what you're doing sounds really cool.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I guess that means adventures are short then. One adventure is one excursion — leave town, go do stuff in dangerous places, return to town. Every game session begins and ends in Castellan/Kendall* Keep, or Hommlet, or Tanaroa, or Mantua, or the unspecified home-base locations from the G series. Any one of those modules will involve several adventures.

* The Keep on the Borderlands has a different name depending on whether it's located in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos or the Flanaess.

 

[Lanefan]

I guess that means adventures are short then. One adventure is one excursion — leave town, go do stuff in dangerous places, return to town. Every game session begins and ends in Castellan/Kendall* Keep, or Hommlet, or Tanaroa, or Mantua, or the unspecified home-base locations from the G series. Any one of those modules will involve several adventures.

* The Keep on the Borderlands has a different name depending on whether it's located in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos or the Flanaess.

Ah. To me the "adventure" is the entire module.

What happens if they simply don't finish - say, a combat runs long or they get trapped in the dungeon somewhere - in time to return to town before the session ends?

 

[Jack Daniel]

What happens if they simply don't finish - say, a combat runs long or they get trapped in the dungeon somewhere - in time to return to town before the session ends?

I run the TSR editions, so I can't recall a combat ever having "run long"; trapped in the dungeon can happen, but it's rare, and it's very bad (random tables dictating the fates of characters who end a session in the dungeon are dime-a-dozen on OSR blogs; the outcomes usually range from "lost forever, presumed dead" in the worst case to "you somehow stumbled back to town with no new information added to your map and no idea how you got out of that horrible pit" in the best case).

 

[Lanefan]

I run the TSR editions, so I can't recall a combat ever having "run long";

Same here, modified 1e; and major combats frequently take half a session and a few take more than a full session to complete. My record is a combat that spanned two complete sessions and part of a third; which in 38 years of DMing has happened twice. (in both cases it was a large party invading the home base of a larger group of opposed adventurer-types plus their assorted pets etc.)

trapped in the dungeon can happen, but it's rare, and it's very bad (random tables dictating the fates of characters who end a session in the dungeon are dime-a-dozen on OSR blogs; the outcomes usually range from "lost forever, presumed dead" in the worst case to "you somehow stumbled back to town with no new information added to your map and no idea how you got out of that horrible pit" in the best case).

I vastly prefer to leave them wherever/whenever they happen to be and pick up from that same point next session.

Not so easy if you've a rotating cast of players from one session to the next, to be sure; but that's not something I usually have to worry about.

 

[This Effin’ GM]

Are there any solid resources for campaign structures? I’ve been searching and searching for something I can use rather than reverse engineer

 

[Voadam]

I tend to run modules and adventure paths with a lot of modification and PC freedom.

I feel it ends up being episodic, each module might be a show's season but any given night might be a one off thing of its own or a part of the overall central plot.

When I took over DMing a shared campaign (three of us traded around DMing for the same group using the same characters in the same setting) and ran a pair of modules it did feel a bunch like a new director/showrunner for seasons six and seven.

To add to the analogy when the party TPK'd in my Reign of Winter adventure path game in module 3 it felt like the series was cancelled prematurely by the network.

A lot of campaigns I've been in as a player feel like they were prematurely cancelled by the network, usually without a TPK though.