Running long campaigns is something we’ve all heard about, but they’re deceptively hard to pull off. The biggest issue is often scheduling a regular group, but assuming you have that there’s also the challenge of keeping a consistent story going for years.
In this article, I want to talk about some lessons I’ve learned running a multi-year campaign myself. I’ve certainly made some mistakes during that time, and hopefully, this overview will help you avoid some of them yourself. I’ve tried to write this in a generic way so that it’s applicable to you regardless of which system you and your group play.
Creating a Plan
In this first section, we’ll look at some of the planning steps I take before and during the running of a long campaign. Even if you like to plan as little as possible, I still think it’s worth having a broad outline and keeping some of the other points below in mind.
Have a Broad Plan
The first thing to do when starting a campaign, regardless of size, is to come up with a broad plan. At this point, I don’t think it’s smart to have too many details as things can and do change, but it still helps to have a general idea of the overarching story beats you want your players to encounter.
I find it helpful here to think in loose acts based on what the party’s main goal is. In the beginning, they might still be learning about the world and figuring out what their goal is. By the middle of the campaign they probably have a pretty good idea of what they’re trying to do and who the primary antagonists are, but still might be searching for ways to accomplish that. In the end, there’s a good chance they have everything they need and just have to put their plans into action.
Consider the general flow of your story and determine the key milestones towards whatever the main goal of the players is. Write this down and use this as a general roadmap for where your sessions are going to go. You don’t need to follow it exactly, and probably won’t, but it will give you a decent idea of the key moments you want your story to have.
Leave Ideas Vague To Start
I alluded to this a bit above, but I always find it helpful to be fairly vague with my story points, especially at this early stage. The problem, and anyone who’s run any games before certainly understands this, is you never know what your players are going to do. I’ve had my fair share of carefully laid plans thrown to the wayside because my players decided to go in a completely different direction.
That’s perfectly okay, and part of the fun of a tabletop game, but it means we have to be careful. We don’t want to spend too much time planning for something that might not even happen.
That’s why, at this point, it’s important to leave things somewhat vague with lots of wiggle room for changes. That’s especially the case for things that your players might not run into for months or years in real-time. As you approach the actual session where you plan something to happen you can revisit it and flesh it out a bit more, but for now, keep things fluid and ready to change as needed.
Work In Short Stories
As you’re planning out your main beats I also find it helpful to find places to work in smaller, local stories. These would be akin to side-quests, and help break up the flow of the main story and add some depth to the world. Just because the players are focused on a world-ending evil doesn't mean the everyman doesn’t have problems of their own.
For me, this is an ongoing thing that I think about for every new session. While I certainly do this a bit at the beginning there’s always the danger of overplanning and having prep go to waste. Instead, come up with general ideas that can be worked on in a variety of ways, then keep this in the back of your head during every session prep.
Have Multiple Ways Stories Connect
On the note of players making choices, always make sure to have multiple ways that your story beats can be joined together. This just ensures that you have options to keep your story on track should your players make choices that deviate from what you expect.
This is also one of those things that doesn’t have to be done all at once. I generally like to have the next couple of sessions planned out, but beyond that, I don’t worry about it too much. You just want to avoid being in a situation where you expect the party to go right and they decide to go left and you have nothing prepared.
Use Player Backstories
Another great way to not only build out the world but also involve the players, is to work in their backstory. I always like to start the first session with a brief overview of everyone’s character and what their goals or motivations are.
These can lead to some really interesting situations and everyone always loves to see their story getting the spotlight for a bit. It’s also a great way to break up the story and add some variety. In certain situations, you can even tie them back into the main story. Maybe one player’s personal antagonist is also a friend of the big bad guy?
Pull Inspiration From Multiple Places
One of the things that can be difficult to do for multiple years is to keep providing your players with unique and interesting stories and encounters. Running into another group of bandits gets old after the 100th time.
There are a lot of techniques here, but I think one of the best ways to come up with fresh ideas is to pull from a variety of sources. Of course, you can pull from whichever game system you use, but don’t be afraid to branch out into other systems, or look outside the TTRPG genre entirely. I pull a lot of my ideas from history books for example. There’s a never-ending wealth of ideas to draw from, and running a game that goes on for years demands a bit of work on your part to keep it from getting stale or predictable.
Building The World
Now that you have a broad plan I think it’s important to start thinking about your world. This isn’t going to be world-building per se, but more of how the world and the story interact with each other. In a lot of respects, the world is just another character, and it goes through change as most characters normally do. The points in this section have more to do with playing the game than planning it, so you’ll want to keep these in mind as the sessions progress.
In-Game Time
Something that may or may not play a big role in your game is the passage of in-game time. This is likely to be somewhat a function of your system. Some games have very specific rules for resource usage that require close attention to time, while others don’t.
Even if you play a system that doesn’t need minute-by-minute tracking I still think it’s useful to consider time on a larger scale. One example would be the passage of seasons, a long campaign might take years of in-game time and it’s likely different places behave differently depending on the time of year.
There are other sorts of things that might crop up, certain jobs might only happen during specific seasons. Or, certain locations might be more or less popular. Give some thought to how granular you want to track time, and also what sorts of effects the passage of time might have.
How the Players Affect The World
One thing that I think really adds a lot of depth to the world is to have areas and people change over time. This is especially true when the players interact with it, they always have some sort of effect.
For example, if the party decides it’s a good idea to raid a small town there’s a good chance they won’t be welcome back. Or, if they sabotage an important trade shipment it might economically ruin the company/person responsible for it. Always think about the choices your players make and how they might come back to help or hinder them. This is a great way to make the world feel alive, and will make sure your players are thinking about their actions and the consequences.
Recurring Characters
Lastly, I think recurring characters are a fun way to keep references to old sessions even years in the future. In one of my campaigns, the players met a character in one of the first sessions who later ended up helping them in one of the final battles years later. In between, they had various interactions that helped build the relationship between them. My players ended up really liking this character, and I’d say it was one of the highlights of the campaign.
One last thing, like the world, people change too. Keep in mind the interactions your players have and what that might lead to.
Running The Game
In this penultimate section, I wanted to go over some tips for actually running the individual sessions. These tips will help in the thick of it, when your players are at the table and the dice are rolling.
Take Copious Notes
This is a mistake I made at first, I didn’t take nearly enough notes and I ended up forgetting important information. Don’t be like me, I’ve now found it better to take too many notes over too few.
When taking notes, I think it’s important to come up with a system of organization that helps you keep things organized. I like to separate out notes for each player, important NPCs, and quests. This helps me remember where the most important things in my story are at all times, which ultimately leads to a more consistent narrative that can even seem completely planned out at times.
Use Tools To Help
I wanted to call out the variety of tools out there for managing campaigns. Some people prefer pencil and paper, and that’s perfectly fine, but I like to have a more centralized store of data, I tend to get lost in sheets of paper.
A little self-promotion here, but I think WorldsCrafter is the best one out there. Full disclosure, I built it, so I’m definitely a bit biased. There are a lot of other great tools out there as well, and all of them behave just a bit differently. I won’t hold it against you if one of the other ones fits your personal tastes better.
The important thing is to get a place where you can plan, take notes, and keep all your campaign’s details in one place. You don’t want to be scrambling to remember an NPC’s name in the thick of the session.
Be Prepared For Being Unprepared
Lastly, always be prepared for your players to do something completely unexpected. I know I’ve touched on this a bit above, but it happens so much I wanted to reiterate it here.
I generally have a loose idea of the specific locations the players might go to, but I also have a variety of tools to help me generate other areas on the fly. Random generators are really useful here and have saved my butt more times than I can count. They do vary in quality though, so make sure to test any you plan to use beforehand to make sure they give you usable results.
Another good technique is to generate a bunch of pre-made content that you keep in reserve. I always have a couple of different taverns and patrons ready to go as my players tend to want to visit them often. This takes a bit more prep than simply using a random generator, but it can lead to much better results. Just make sure to keep them fairly generic so that they can be dropped into a variety of situations.
What Next
In this last section, I just wanted to detail a handful of ways you can build upon your campaign during or after it's done. These are things I’ve done at my own table, and they ended up being very successful. They might not apply to you, but keep them in mind and look out for opportunities to implement them.
Share The World
One thing we’ve done at my table is take the world that I had initially built and have some of the players who wanted to try running a game use it. What they did in this case was draw up a new landmass to the west of where our main campaign took place. This gave them the freedom to explore their own area, but also created a nice tie-in back to our main campaign.
This led to some fun crossovers. In our case, my player’s new continent had a rare and exotic herb that only grew there, and that ended up showing up as a plot point in our main campaign. It ended up being very interesting to try and integrate the two together, and made every game at the table feel connected in some way. It was also a great way to add depth and lore to the world.
One Shots In The Same World
In a similar vein, another thing we did was run a handful of one-shot sessions using the same world as the campaign. These would usually happen when someone couldn’t make it, so we’d put the main game on hold and run a little side adventure.
These were also very successful and helped flesh out some of the world that the players already or had yet to explore. It was very cool to see places that the players had already visited but from a different perspective. You can even take it a step further and play out a session dealing with the consequences of the player’s actions. If they cause trouble in a town and leave a one-shot idea might be to play as characters from that town dealing with those issues.
The Next Campaign
And for my last tip, I wanted to talk about one thing you can do after the campaign ends. In our case, after a 5-year campaign, we started a new one that took place in the same world but about 100 years later.
In our first playthrough, my players were a bit naughty, and that led to a lot of issues for the towns and people that they came in contact with. In our 2nd campaign, they play a group in the same world dealing with the consequences of their first campaign’s decisions. This has led to a lot of interesting interactions, throwbacks, and ultimately has helped build a cohesive narrative that the players feel more engaged with because they partially created it.
