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!

But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.

Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!

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.

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the Azukail Games YouTube channel, or my Rumble channel The Literary Mercenary! Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my dystopian sci-fi thriller Old Soldiers, my hardboiled gangland noir series starring a bruiser of a Maine Coon with Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Blue Sky, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!

Stories of Sundara, Tales of the World of Darkness, and More!

Folks who are regular readers of this blog probably know me best for my work on various tabletop RPGs. However, as I mentioned back in I Just Want To Write... on my sister blog, I sort of fell into writing for games by accident. When I started this leg of my career, I was actually focusing on writing short stories and novels. While I haven't stopped writing fiction, it's been tough to work it in around the edges because it just doesn't move the kinds of copies (or get the kind of attention) that even my less popular gaming supplements do.

I have pulled a bit of a sneaky trick recently, though. And my hope is that if folks enjoy it enough that it might lead to some new and interesting projects!

Step through the door and join me, will you?

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron!

Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

An Ogre's Bargain, A Changeling Drama in 3 Parts

Since the start of this year I've been making videos for the Azukail Games YouTube channel, which belongs to one of my publishers. While a lot of these videos are just talking about the Sundara setting I've been working on, a lot of them are miniature audio dramas taken from many of my gaming supplements as a way to get listeners interested. And while a majority of those stories are disconnected from one another, I tried a behind-the-scenes experiment that I wanted to let readers and listeners know about.

In short, the introductory stories from 100 Gateways Into (And Out Of) The Hedge, 100 Ensorcelled Mortals, and 100 Frailties, follow the story of a Summer Courtier named Jacoby. A one-eyed ogre who lives primarily in the Hedge, he tries to keep his busted nose out of other people's business. But when a fellow Summer named Wolfe comes asking for help, Jacoby feels honor and oath-bound to help... which puts him squarely in the sights of Lucius Frakes, an Autumn Court power broker who's pulling the strings.

All three parts of the story are dramatized below!

The full tale is about 22 minutes or so in total, and it took quite a number of hours to get it done from start to finish. However, it's definitely something I'd like to do more of... but I'm going to need help from my readers/listeners to get there!

Potential Plans For The Future

So what's the plan for this going forward? Well, I'd like to write and publish some tie-in short stories, audio dramas like the above tale (without breaking them up into bite-sized pieces), and possibly even writing some novels if that's something folks would like to see. I have ideas for several spheres of the World of Darkness (including Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, and Geist are currently leading the pack), as well as additional stories for my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age setting. Both of these setups would likely come with additional gaming content in the back (write-ups for characters, magic items, spells, and so on) as a bonus, too, if that would interest some folks.

But it's going to depend on numbers. Because the publishers I work with look at what an audience responds to, and the more traffic something gets, or the more sales something earns, that's a project they dedicate more time, energy, and money to.

So if this is something you'd like to see happen in the future, all you need to do is follow these simple steps:

- Subscribe to the Azukail Games YouTube channel. It takes 1k subscribers to get a channel considered for monetization, and if the channel tips over that level, it would allow projects like this to act as their own source of income/funding going forward.

- Watch the videos on the channel, and share them on your socials. The other half of YouTube's requirements is that a channel must have 4k hours of watched content in the past year, which boils down to about 11.5 hours of content per day.

- Leave comments. Comments on the videos, comments on this blog, and on whatever social media platform you saw this link on help boost the signal and spread the word.

- Check out/get copies of existing content. Whether you're in the market for books like the Werewolf: the Apocalypse anthology Tales From The Moot, or you want to check out some fantasy fiction like my Silver Raven Chronicles, anything that boosts the figures on this work makes it more likely to get sequels, audio adaptations, and more.

My hope is that if I can find enough listeners/readers that I'll be able to convince some of the folks I've put out content with to let me take a risk with stuff that leans more into the fiction side of things. Not only that, but I have several performers (including a few who've already helped out on several of the smaller audio dramas) who are ready and willing to step up to the mic and give listeners a full cast experience.

But, as with everything else online, you have to prove to the folks who cut the checks that there's an audience big enough to warrant the investment. So whether you're just hearing about this project, or you've been waiting to see where things were going to go with my updates, consider lending a hand and helping me make this happen!

What's Next on Table Talk?

That's it for this installment of Table Talk! What would you like to see next? I'm listening for your comments and votes!

For more of my work, check out my Vocal archives, as well as the YouTube channel for Azukail Games. Or, to check out books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my recent short story collection The Rejects, head over to My Amazon Author Page!

To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, as well as on Pinterest where I'm building all sorts of boards dedicated to my books, RPG supplements, and greatest hits. Lastly, to help support me and my work, consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron! Even a little donation can have a big impact.

Improved Initiative is Now on Pinterest!

One of the unfortunate realities of being a creator is that you need to reach out to the biggest audience possible in whatever ways you can. I've been fortunate that I've found a pretty reliable base of supporters on Facebook, and I've been steadily trying to grow my Tumblr and Twitter presence over the years as well. Incidentally, if you're not following me on these sites, I'll link my Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter pages to make it easy for you.

However, with the recent demise of Google +, I've had to find a new outlet to make up for the loss in traffic and regular readers. And so, at the urging of several people, I have decided to jump onto a new platform with both feet... Pinterest!

I know these are Post-Its, but you get the general idea.

While I added the link to my Pinterest up there on the top bar, I thought I'd take this opportunity to discuss what I've done with it so far, and what I plan on doing with it in the future, should you choose to follow me there.

Pinning Down My Releases and Latest Activities

My primary goal over at Pinterest at the moment is to put together a single, easy place to find all my books and supplements. For instance, if you check out the Board For My Books then you'll find things like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, but you'll also find collections that I've been a part of, like the horror anthologies American Nightmare and Noir Carnival. No muss, no fuss, nothing getting lost in the shuffle or your newsfeed; it's all right there at your fingertips!

I've also started a second board, which will be a repository for all the RPG supplements/books I've written or been a part of. On My RPG Supplements Board you'll find things like the 100 Whispers and Rumors in a Borderland Town that I wrote for Raging Swan Press, as well as stuff like Feats Reforged IV: The Magic Feats from Total Party Kill Games. That board is being brought up to speed a little bit every day, but soon it will be a cover-indexed place to find all the stuff you can use at your gaming table that will be updated as soon as something new drops so you never miss a release.

And that's just the start of my plans.

Would you like to know more?

Once I've got my books and supplements up to speed, I'd like to create an additional board for cool games and supplements I've found in my searches. Some of them will have been reviewed here in the past, and some won't, but the idea is to put together a central location where folks can find stuff I would personally recommend, in case you're curious. I'll likely have another board with physical things like props, coins, etc. that could be used both at a tabletop game, and in a LARP. I'll also be combing through my past articles, both from here and on Vocal to showcase which pieces of advice have gotten the most views in the past. So if you don't want to dig through 5+ years of history on my blog, you'll have the greatest hits at your fingertips!

That should keep me busy till... oh, about the end of spring! And after that, I'm sure I'll be building more boards to showcase all the wild, weird, or otherwise handy tools folks can use at their own tables. So if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, please head to my Pinterest page, and give me a follow! Check out what I've got up so far, and if you'd like to see something I haven't mentioned then leave it in the comments below.

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday update. I promise I'll be back on-message shortly with more gaming-specific thoughts, advice, plans, and suggestions!

If you'd like to see even more of my work, you might want to drop by the YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio where I help out quite a bit. And if you'd like to help support me, you could either Buy Me A Ko-Fi, or go to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a patron! Every little bit helps, and trust me it's greatly appreciated.

Are You Reading Chris A. Jackson? Why The Hell Not!?

So, you find yourself in that awkward place where you don't know what to read next. You want something pulse-pounding, but masterfully constructed. You want stories that are easy to get into, but which aren't simple. You want a little bit of the familiar, a little bit of the strange, and you've already read everything on my Amazon author page. Who's going to give you something like that?

This guy, since you asked.

The fellow whose picture you're admiring is author Chris A. Jackson, and if that name sounds familiar for some reason, it's likely because he wrote both Pirate's Honor and Pirate's Promise for Paizo's Pathfinder Tales.

Ringing a bell now?

More Than Just Golarion

While Mr. Jackson has contributed two, solid tales of adventure and grit to Paizo's ongoing series of fiction set in the world of Golarion, that's just one facet of the jewel that is his career. According to his website, he's written half a dozen fantasy novels of his own, a few sci-fi novels, and he's been a part of some seriously hard-hitting short story anthologies, all of which are available on his Amazon author page. Not only has he been a full-time author since 2009, but he's also an award-winning author, as well as a Kindle bestseller.

Trust me when I tell you that those aren't distinctions they just hand out along with your book cover.

I haven't read all of his books myself, but what I have read I will be more than happy to recommend to anyone looking for a new storyteller to follow. That's praise which doesn't come cheap these days, particularly given how restricted my reading time has become over the past year and change.

At least until the DA puts two and two together. Then I'll have 20 to life to catch up on books.

Don't take my word for it, though. Follow him on Facebook, or check him out on Twitter to see what he has to say. If you're a fan of solid adventure, thought-provoking fiction, and worlds that are whole and distinct, while being easy to slip into, you'll thank me for the recommendation. Whenever, that is, you finish the stack of books you'll likely end up with.

Thanks for stopping by for this Monday's update! If you'd like to help support me and my blog, then consider stopping by my Patreon page to become a patron. I work cheap, and as little as $1 a month can be a really big help. If you want to make sure you stay caught up on all my updates, then be sure to follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, too, while you're at it.