Apathy Games

Building your Campaign with a Television Structure

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/01/21 – 00:00 -

When I set out to build a campaign, I work in large story arcs first. I try to get a vague sense of what I want to happen, where it will begin and end, what tone and themes I’m going to explore, and throw in anything I think would be cool. What I don’t do is structure the whole thing.

Campaign as a Series

Instead, I work much like a television show would, particularly modern science fiction like Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, or one of the best examples, Babylon 5. In a show like this, while there is an overall story to the series, it’s clearly broken up into seasons. Each season has it’s own story arc.

Adventure Seasons

And so I break my overall campaign into several arcs, and then concentrate on each arc individually, giving it its own defining conflict, characters, and thematic elements. At this point, individual adventure ideas tend to form. I tend to let them bounce around in my head for a while, building connections with each other.

That’s one of my secrets to success. Don’t solidify things until you get to them. Allow them to grow and entwine with other ideas over time.

Episodic Adventures

It’s at this point that I start the campaign. When there’s enough content that I have a sense of the overall story, but it’s vague enough to still be malleable.

This is where we come back to the television structure. Now each adventure functions like an episode, again with it’s own beginning, middle, and end. So, at this point I have three story arcs going on. The series arc, the season arc, and the episode arc.

When designing the episode arc, the first thing I come up with is some new experience for the players. Maybe it’s a car chase. Maybe it’s an act of espionage. Whatever it is, I try to mix up the play experiences. Then I build the episode’s story. But whatever the story is, it must also establish an important element for the season arc. It could be a character, a conflict, and plot twist. Whatever that element is, it moves the story forward and ties each of the episodes together and establishes the world and story as contiguous.

My weakness

I do have one problem, a trap you should avoid falling into. I tend to make each episode feel complete at the end. It’s my tendency to like things feeling tied together and finished. But I know I could keep my campaign more exciting, and the players wanting more, if I always ended at a dramatic point, with the future more uncertain.

I’m thinking of looking to the same shows I mentioned above for inspiration on this, but since I have an abundant resource of readers at my disposal, I’m also asking you for ideas. Please give me your advice or experience in the comments.

Tags: adventure planning, campaign planning, encounter planning, jeff carlsen
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