Creating a long-term campaign

[KingsTears]

I am planning to run a FR campaign in an unusual circumstance-- I don't know who my players are or how long any given character will play. I would like a few words of advice and some basic guidance about how you'd go about putting together a campaign that ideally will run for 2-5 years of real game time, and include characters that start at 1st level and end in epic levels (maybe 25th?).

FYI- I'm an experienced GM (some 20 years) and the circumstance is created by running at the local university's registered student organization for gaming. It's a great place to play, but players come and go like college students... Anyway, I'm trying to think a bit out of the box by looking at the nuts and bolts of story arc and plot line creation, but I'm stymied by having run the last several campaigns to 10-15 level in a year, or two, based largely on plot lines driven by one or two characters. I find myself wanting something more... open? Something that is truly brilliant: episodic enough to join in without hours of what came before and still continuous, as a story arc, from start to finish with an actual start and a climax wherein the story ends. Can this be done? What about how the story is built gets these resaults?

Thanks,
Catherine Keene

 

[random user]

My first thought is you create some sort of organization. It's responsible for... something, anything really, it doesn't matter too much as long as you can base adventures off of it.

Maybe it's a society to compile all the knowledge of all the spieces / creations of the world.

Maybe it's a society to uncover treason and spies within the local government.

Maybe it's a society that travels the lands to find talented young wizards.

Your characters can be members of that society, and they go out on missions for the society. Since FR is pretty high magic, teleport may help get people together in between missions. If people come and go, that's easily handled in game as different people may be assigned to different missions. You could even run two different stories in the same timeline if you have multiple groups who can't all make a common time for a semester.

There can be a general arc going through it. For the treason society, plots could be uncovered, spies found... eventually it may come to open warfare and a huge climatic battle.

For the wizards maybe there is something mysterious that is killing off potential new wizards. Or maybe someone is kidnapping them. Or maybe someone is zombie-fying them. The arc could cover finding out who is responsible and then dealing with whatever they they are plotting.

Just my initial 2cp

 

[Cassandra]

Organization indeed

My current DM has dealt with a slightly similar situation. He has been running a campaign off and on for over ten years, with a varying group of players, in different states. Early on, the party saved the life of the king. The king rewarded them by making the group's leader (not coincidentally the character of the DM's wife) a Baroness. The barony, however, was largely wild and overrun by dangerous monsters. The heroes have had to deal with pirates, zombies, hill giants, neighboring nobles, and various other things. Whenever a player cannot be present, his character is assumed to be in another part of the barony, taking care of some other mission on behalf of the Baroness.

The DM tries very hard to make one-session adventures, realizing that the same players will not necessarily be present to play the next time. Since the Baroness is married to the game master, she is almost always present and adventures can revolve around that character. Over the years the GM has gotten good at developing scenarios that can be played in about four hours, though I still don't know how he does it.

Good luck!

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Start small -- a town or village, with a little bit of the local area developed, is all you need to get started. Have a few key NPCs, a few minor plots, and a few "status quo" encounters ("There be lost loot in the Dragonspine Mountains!").

Have a concept for bigger adventures -- the machinations of monsters and evil organizations, not all of which will be revealed to the players.

Once things start, just make sure the players have options at each turn -- different adventures to choose from, or lines of investigation to follow. The campaign will evolve from there based on their choices, and guided only generally by your rough overall concept.

That way, you build only what the party can see and reach in the short term, keeping your options open for future sessions. Worry about what lies beyond the horizon when the party gets to it.

 

[Thanee]

Having some experience in a very similar approach (we had a long-running shadowrun campaign with multiple, changing GMs and ever-changing player base), I can give you this advice:

If you want to create something, that can be called a grand picture, then you'll need reports of the individual games. Either player-written or you'll have to do all the work. Similar to the story hours here.

In my example above, when I was part of the GM crew (during the last third or something), we did a newsflash-style HTML-document, which contained information about what was going on, plus some other bits and pieces to round things off, as well as having one player in each group write a report from the character's perspective. This stuff is also very fun to read after a while and absolutely worth it. A webpage where you can upload all the stories would be a good idea, obviously.

Players that are interested can then read it to get a better picture, which will allow them to better integrate into the campaign.

Character-driven plots are obviously not the best idea, unless they are only very short duration sub-plots. Also plots should allow for changing characters, so having a group travel into the plane of no return or somesuch isn't adviseable. Keep it simple, there will be enough complications, anyways.

Our campaign also started out with some sort of parent organization, with all player characters being part of it, but the organization was shattered as part of a story arc (there were three huge story arcs, each with a different set of GMs) and the loose ties, which persisted also worked very well.

An organization would allow players to have a certain feel of trust towards each other, which is good.

With completely different groups you could also play adventures, which are linked to some degree, but highlighting a completely different angle. As an example, the Matrix Reloaded (or was it Revolutions!?) movie + the computer game would create something similar, where the story in both is essentially the same, just watched from a different position and focused on other characters.

Bye
Thanee

 

[scourger]

draw on popular culture

I would suggest that you draw on popular culture for your camapign arc. Use a story that everyone already basically knows for the story arc, then fill in the details with the players' actions in your campaign world.

Lord of the Rings is one example. Just decide what evil item has to be taken from which end of the Realms to the other and destroyed in what manner to defeat whatever big threat to the world. Almost anyone can be the "thing-bearer", and almost anyone can asist him or her in the quest to destroy the thing. If one thing-bearer becomes unavailable, someone else bears the thing. New characters can join or leave the quest at any plot point since the world is richly populated. Another great benefit is that most of your players will probably have seen the movies and will immediately identify the plot without a lot of explanation (or work) by you.

It would probably be better if the thing is just a liability and not an asset to the party (no rings of invisibility for the party to fight over). The thing could just be a minor piece in whatever is needed for world domination by the Big Bad Guy. That way, the party increasingly comes to the BBG's attention as he or she sends more and more dangerous and devious foes to capture the thing. Also, the players can just vote at the beginning of each session as to who is carrying the thing (since you will have PCs coming & going freely). An overland adventure probably works better than a dungeon crawl for freely coming & going characters. But, at some climactic point, the BBG has everything but the party's thing for world domination. The BBG probably then comes looking for it--just as the player characters are trying to destroy it.

Good luck!