Art of adventure threading for campaigns

I poked one of the mainstay DM's of our local game society for their top tips on how to stitch scattered adventures together to make a campaign:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweak the adventures to fit the theme
- Work in meaningful player choices with meaningful consequences to the ongoing story

You can also consider these for any campaign you may be writing yourself or elements to watch for in written campaigns too.

Why think about stitching adventures together?

In short, to give yourself more options than the two dozen or so famous campaigns.

After the dozen or so 5e campaigns from WotC, the hivemind of the web recommends about another dozen 3rd party campaigns. You can delve into the past for yet more but sometimes even then you cannot find quite the thing you are looking for. There are also loosely tied anthology adventures, Adventurers Guild seasons, old Dungeon magazines and other sources that you might find that fit the campaign you want to run. There is a mass of creativity out there - fit to every flavour and preference of table - but assembling them all into something coherent can be a challenge.

Making the various sessions of your campaign feel coherent is also a base requirement to make it feel like more than just random events happening one after another.

Players like their knowledge to count, so repeatedly encountering the same NPCs allows what they have learned about those NPCs to be relevant and useful. "The Baron hates cats? How about for that distraction we need, let us set a half dozen cats lose at his coronation."

Working in meaningful choices with consequences actualises player agency - their decisions mattered and continued to matter over multiple sessions.

All these things are basic elements of making a good campaign but they are particularly important at the connecting edges of different escapades. Assuming that a given adventure is decent in and of itself, the trick is to make it feel like part of a coherent whole.

Stitching campaigns together from multiple adventures

The trick of campaign threading has been well deployed locally in our gaming group - both 'pre-threaded' connected Adventurers League adventures and through connecting independent adventures.

One comrade at RPGVienna ran a very nifty campaign based on the Storm Kings Thunder adventurers league season - the low-level cycle around Parnast. Over a bunch of Friday nights we got to Parnast, ran a bunch of quests around it then successfully defended the village from siege with the help of allies gathered in the previous adventures. It was perhaps eight sessions or so but it was a great, highly thematic campaign.

There was also a Ravnica mini-campaign built around the 'Secrets of the Triseklion' adventures bulked out with other appropriate adventures. Both of these were proper campaigns in my eye for having consequences to an over-arching sequence of events carrying over sessions - compared to my own Brancalonia games which had consequences but were otherwise fairly episodic, not really a coherent campaign.

The Storm Kings Thunder series were pre-threaded; written with recurring NPCs and as part of an over-arching sequence of events - but the Ravnica campaign was bulked out beyond the core adventures and needed to be reworked to be coherent. As mentioned above this meant:
- Conservation of NPCs
- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme
- Having player choices with meaningful consequences

- Conservation of NPCs

We have mention conservation of NPCs before - just make similar NPCs be the same person. This can be expanded to have similar 'table function' NPCs be the same person - traders, quest-givers, etc. - where they have the same interaction with the characters, even if quite different as written.

I retained this in the Brancalonia campaign - but the impact was significantly lessened because the rotating cast of players meant that a given NPC appeared much less frequently to any one player so they did not reach the same level of 'that guy' recognisability.

- Tweaking the adventures to fit the theme

Here we have the work of identifying what fits within a campaign style - what can be easily repainted to lie seamlessly with other parts - and how to bulk out a set of adventures with others that were not immediately coherent or that provide options you need.

The first trick here is recognising that while any adventure can be made to fit into a campaign with enough elbow-grease, some are a lot easier to meld together than others. Terrain is a typical common factor to take but an adversary or location could also be used depending on the theme of the campaign - what is the key part of your campaign. If a common adversary, then that same foe on different terrains could be potentially useful. If a type of play - mountain traversal, ship voyages, urban investigations - then those are the factors you want to seek out.

Often this can be a thing that takes some work - an adventure might be set on a ship but make essentially no reference to that beyond the floorplan shape - so identifying whether an adventure truly contains the factors you want can be somewhat tiresome.

The other side of this coin is figuring out where you have a gap to be filled among the adventures you already have - typically done by using level progression for a first estimate but it can also be linked to state of the campaign - you might need some artic wilderness adventure to serve for if the party decides to trek to a given location rather than taking some other route.

If you can get your hands on a good review archive that helps you determine a) what is good and b) what adventures have what elements within them those are great tools for identifying good starting points to start finishing things.

- Having player choices with meaningful consequences

With pre-threaded adventures this is already done by the writers (one hopes) but in assembling disparate adventures the achievements and consequences of one ought to knock on to subsequent adventures beyond just levelling up.

Note, one or two isolated adventures can be fine as a change of pace or palate cleanser but, to make it feel like the adventures are part of a coherent whole, there ought to be decisions to make and consequences that come from those.

This one is hard to generalise because the decisions to be made are heavily dependent on the individual adventures. How the consequences of those decisions ripple through the rest of the campaign will be reliant on the nature of that campaign. The main lens I can suggest is to note what factions and foes make gains or suffer losses during an adventure and how, then consider how those will affect other things later - even if only through rumours and tales in taverns later on. Other elements like destruction of sites or establishment of new ones can also be big markers of consequence.

Plan to test

I will be trying these principles out with the old Dungeon Magazine Spelljammer adventures and will write up how those go. I had the great good fortune to find a copy of 'Under the Dark Fist' being sold by someone apparently divesting themselves of their whole D&D collection (!) and so I may even try and work in some of the official materials too.