Campaign Building - A Single Novel, Or An Episodic Story?

Campaigns are how we describe our stories in RPGs. And while it's true that not every game you play is going to follow the level 1 to level 20 format, the idea of a story where characters gain resources, skills, abilities, and experience to become more formidable than they were until they hit the final confrontation and the story gets a crescendo is the basis of how most games work. However, there is a question that you, as a GM, should answer when you start putting the next game together.

Do you intend to run a game with a single throughline the way you'd read a novel, or are you going to run a segmented storyline that's more episodic in nature?

It's all connected!

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The Structure of Your Story

Whether you're writing your own adventure, or you're using a pre-written campaign like Storm King's Thunder or Kingmaker, the structure of the story you're telling still boils down to one of these two major styles. So I wanted to talk about them, and about the pros and cons, to try to get some of my fellow Game Masters actually thinking about these campaign styles, and why they use one or the other for a given campaign.

The Novel

From page 1, all the way to the end.

The novel is, essentially, when you have a long-running campaign that will have the same characters all the way through from the beginning to the end. However, the trademark of the novel is that characters are also involved in a single, cohesive story for the entire campaign. This is a lot harder to do than it sounds, particularly in games where you want your players to grind up their levels before you throw heavy stuff at them. However, there's two ways to maintain this single story cohesion all the way through.

1. Write a complex storyline that, from level 1, has your players hooked into the ongoing narrative and setting up the final endgame. For example, they act as a squad of mercenaries sent to deal with orcs attacking a borderland town. They defend the town, discovering members of a cult who were backing the orcs in their attacks. Through this, they find the town is actually safeguarding an ancient relic that had been forgotten. The party escorts the relic to the regional governor, and end up having to uncover a conspiracy where several nobles were members of the cult. This failure of the minions draws the eyes of the cult's leaders, who then begin attempting to take this item. The party has to find the rest of the relics in the set so they can finally end the undying lord of the Unseeing Eye for once and all.

The idea is that each segment of the campaign feeds into the next, with the plot growing in stakes and danger, and all of them are connected. Every aspect matters, and it is all part of the same story.

2. Start the game off at the power level you want for the "interesting" part of things. This is a far easier approach, and it often means you dispense with any filler or level-grinding parts of the game to get the PCs up to snuff for when the main plot starts really rolling. So there's no low-level quests like clearing out goblin caves, or dealing with bandits on the highway just to solidify the party and get some XP on their sheets... you just start at level 5, because that's when the main plot of an undead army attempting to claim the nation would have started to unfold.

This does, of course, mean that your game isn't going to run as long as it otherwise might. That is either a feature or a flaw, depending on your outlook, as some GMs (and players, too) might want a tighter game where they play for 6 months to a year and focus on the "good part" of the game, without all the faff and chaff of the unconnected side quests, monster hunting, and grind that can often show up in a game.

The Episodic Story

As we rejoin our adventurers...

An episodic story is, well, episodic. There are smaller stories that each have their own arcs, and these stories are added to over the length of a campaign to create a complete chronicle of the characters' adventures. While some of them might be connected, many of them won't be.

Perhaps the best comparison for this kind of campaign is reading a collection of short stories about classic sword and sorcery heroes like Conan or Solomon Kane. Because while the stories feature the same character, and there might even be a loose kind of timeline involved, the events of one story aren't necessarily going to impact the next except in references made, or perhaps in a call back somewhere in the text.

An episodic campaign might have an eventual end goal, but not all the parts of the campaign will be bent toward that singular goal. For example, level 1-3 might deal with the PCs routing out a bandit encampment, and bringing down their leader Three-Fingered Galt. Then level 4-7 might involve trying to find a buried relic in a recently-uncovered castle in the deep desert. Level 8-10 might involve them challenging the Warlock of Black Mountain, and ending the threat he poses. And then, once they've really hit their stride, they spend until level 17 getting involved in the struggle over the Aqualine Throne... will they choose a successor, topple the kingdom entirely, or will they become the rulers of the nation's next age?

Episodic stories give you a lot of freedom, but more importantly they offer you off-ramps. So if someone wants to switch characters to try something new for the next arc, or your table is getting kind of bored, you can end the game at the end of a given episode, and try something else. However, there is that question of whether or not you want to stick with the same characters for their entire journey, and just how interconnected that journey really was.

Consider Your Structure

There's no objectively superior campaign version. You can do a full 1-20 campaign with a single, interconnected plot. You could do short arcs put together. Hell, if you really want to you could run a bunch of individual one-shots and just have a game that feels almost like a TV show (which is, incidentally, sort of how pick up games of my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic would run). But it's important that you ask what kind of story you're looking to tell, and what your players are interested in experiencing, before you start putting together the blueprint for your next campaign.

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