Blog Carnival: Shifting Gears Over A Campaign

To participate in this months blog carnival - hosted by Lair of Secrets on the topic of Shifting Gears I want to write on how a campaign changes over time and keeping things fresh.

Mostly I'm doing this because I can - I have good stats for my home campaign (this time) - and it has been running long enough that looking at them is meaningful. The core takeaway from all of this is 'mix it up' - throw some variation and interesting things into a game to both make things memorable but also to let players flex different muscles and skillsets and shuffle around who gets to shine.

In real life we had three blocks
- about seven months of pandemic-era play, 23 sessions getting in 4.8 hrs a session
- a year of 'late pandemic' play with in person sessions, 40 sessions averaging 5.7 hrs
- a six month gap as my daughter arrived since my partner also plays (red line below)
- restart-to-now era, another year with 20 sessions, averaging 3.4 hrs

Running hours played/month, cutting out the 6-month pause, you can see those three eras. In practice that mapped onto a couple of different styles of game. Below I have colour blocked the sessions up to today into five groups - the original campaign set in the starting city, travel within the realm, extraplanar excursions, travel outside the realm in the land of the giants (plateau of Jor) and delving the labyrinth of the Temple of Annam.

As you can see we have 'blocks' of different styles which make the game feel different:

City campaign had two main blocks of activity - first a lot of interacting with NPCs, investigations, chasing clues and unlocking secrets and second, delving into the dungeons beneath the castle, fighting critters and making those hazardous spaces safe. Throughout this block of the campaign, time passed slowly, with long to-do lists getting chased up and time passing in campaign only a little faster than 1:1.

Hex-crawl - traveling the realm - has involved covering distance, usually with a destination in focus and not stopping to deal with much on the way. The party pretty much never left the city until they had found a flying boat and so venturing out, they observe a lot but interact with much less. This phase of the campaign has allowed a much greater variety in things encountered as the party is covering great distances and one encounter can be completely unrelated to the previous on (unlike the city, where these things are beside one another).

Extraplanar excursions were great additional spice to throw in - these were all extra dimensional spaces entered from the castle - the fey-wild through great-grandmas Narnia-wardrove and the extra-dimensional painting space of the Kobolds Art Exhibition. These were opportunities to do something completely different without having to travel.

The Plateau of Jor, domain of the giants, was a sustained period of travel on un-friendly terrain, lands beyond the dominion of humans, where the only support the party had was each other. I leaned into the Plateau being different with a couple of house rules - fleeting luck as in DCC (nat 20 gives you a reroll to use as you please, nat 1 clears all fleeting luck at table) and the Big d30; once a session use a d30 to make a roll. The significant ramp up in danger levels made this block feel distinct and fights became a lot more frequent.

The Labyrinth of the Temple of Annam was another distinct block, six sessions in a divine construct, solving ancient tasks during a grinding dungeon crawl. I have written up more on how I used Graphite Prime's Mazes: The Monotony or How to Run an Actual Maze to create and then run the labyrinth.

The city elements were high social, with high reliance on note-taking, scheming and marshalling resources of their noble house. I used social depth-crawls for high society events and hidden-depths tables to run exploration beneath the palace. The extraplanar excursions tended to require more fey-thinking and operating in bizarre environments. The travelling required navigating and managing the hours of daylight to get where they needed to go. The Plateau of Jor involved dealing with factions and fighting monsters regularly. The Labyrinth was a chunk of a race against the clock and a fairly continuous grind of combat.

Each phase has felt distinct and the switching of gears between them has both allowed a feeling of progress being made and kept it interesting to come to the table.

Friend of the blog C. Kinch made a point on his podcast about livening up a given TTRPG session with some new mechanic or mini-game and I take that point on a slightly longer time-frame - not session by session but in handfuls of sessions. I try to think of what is happening at the place where the players are heading, how would it feel distinct and how could they hit some of the sharp edges in an interesting way - to either introduce thrilling risk or give an opportunity for them to strike them off and shape the world more to their liking.