@@ismirdochegal4804 Ah, yes .. the alluring sound of the frost maiden sing her night song to the moon. Then you find out your party 10th-level wizard sought to join the frost giants the whole time.
Blender here. Start episodic, transition into serial. The episodes build and establish the world and characters. Over time plot seeds and continuity build up and then I can capitalize on the party's investment in the campaign by connecting dots in interesting ways that could only be possible because of the episodes. Keep up the good work Mister Skorkowsky. Your channel is easily my favorite RPG channel.
I agree. Same characters (or troupe of characters), same world, but run it like an old school tv series, lots of stand alone episodes, if it works, it will grow. I mean even Tolkien started with just The Hobbit, way before he rolled out the Lord of the Rings saga. The take away is, remember to save something for the squeal.. ;) Our group runs largely episodic, though episodes can take a few sessions (the breaks between sessions I even refer to as Add Breaks).
Yeah, on the whole, I agree. I like to have a storyline, but I also love it when my players have directions they would like to take things. Then everyone has a little more skin in the game, and it gives leeway for some really interesting turns.
After all of your good vids, just hearing “Hello internet! Seth Skorkowsky here” makes my whole day better Edit: I have no idea what you’re talking about, MacGyver is the best
I ran a pretty successful "five glowing gems" campaign years ago. We started with a dungeon crawl session in which the big reward at the end was a scroll (obviously magical, but in an ancient magical language none of the characters could read). They then found out it was one page of a super-powerful spell lost to the ages centuries before, and now that they'd found the first page they had a responsibility to find the (six) others, to ensure that the complete spell didn't fall into the wrong hands. The quest ended up taking them from one end of my game world to the other, across multiple environments. The recovery of each hidden page was an episodic adventure unto itself, but we played the entire journey in between and had all kinds of adventures on the road. At one point they spent three or four sessions helping to overthrow an evil emperor and change the fate of a vast desert kingdom, and it wasn't even connected to the quest they were on. They just kinda got caught up in it on their way to the next page location.
By the way, the general term for "five glowing gems" is the "Plot Coupon". Players need to collect all the coupons then turn them in for one free plot resolution. (Used by TV Tropes, but it was used in a lot of places before that, and I think started as criticism of fantasy novels, especially those following the LotR style.)
@@Adamlovesvideos MacGuffins are thingies that drive conflict (usually by desire to have it, I.E. a suitcase full of money or "state secrets" like a NOC list), but have no actual impact on the plot beyond being the nominal motivation for conflicting parties to conflict. Plot coupons are when you need to find x number of keys or y pieces of the lost artifact to redeem them for plot advancement (getting through the sealed door) or something actually useful to the plot (the holy artifact of destroying BBEGs and setting right what has gone wrong).
@@WraithMagus I see. Thank you for the clarification. I think both are useful for a campaign, but the way you describe it makes it sound like plot coupons are typically better for saga campaigns while macguffins are better for episodic campaigns. Though I'm willing to bet that both can be used in either if they're done well.
I ran a 2-part mini adventure I wrote for teenagers at my local library which was very episodic. Part 1 was killing rats in the local mine and part 2 was defeating a necromancer who was causing trouble just outside of town. Both were postings on a job board in the local tavern. Very trope heavy, but very fun to do for middle schoolers who were just starting out. I feel that tropes are great for your first campaigns and as you gain experience, you can expand. But there is nothing wrong with being very cliche your very first time.
Everything is just a reworked trope at this point in human storytelling. People who hate on GMs authors and screenwriters for using tropes don’t truly understand storytelling or literature.
I’m starting an episodic campaign soon and because of time constraints and commitment I’m embracing the trope and cliche. I’m sure our group will enjoy it and we won’t have to think too hard. We’ll be able to get straight into the adventure.
Shadowrun introduced me to a more episodic way of running the game. Something I found out that it's perfect for a large group of players with inconsistent schedules. I find out who can make it that week and then I can plan a mission "episode" that features the skills and story of the pc's that will be there that week. I had 6 players and I would only cancel if 5 people couldn't make it. I had 3-4 people every week for over a year now. We've moved on from shadowrun but are continuing episodic style because it fits the players much better.
Great video, as always. When I saw it I had to laugh out loud--I have a very similar video coming out tomorrow-- I call it the "Star Wars" vs "Star Trek" campaign model I now look forward to my comment box being flooded with people writing, "Hey! You ripped off Skorkowsky!" Side note--I've run both Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express and "Horror" is easier to run. Go for it!
One of my GMs was actually also struggling with this concept of doing a big epic-scale campaign. She both felt intimidated to dedicate such a long time to it and would usually want to not shackle both herself and players to doing one campaign for what could span years. Her solution I thought was very clever. She started running a series of 3-8 session mini-series (depending on the engagement we have for the current thing) that show different vertical slices of her bigger universe from different times and locations. One game will focus on an underwater empire of Mermen trying to be culturally assimilated by both a dogmatic church-operated state and a nation of undead, but after wrapping that story for the time being, we go into a game set in the past after a horrible calamity wiped out the previous civilization, us living in it's ruins getting to see how the new world order was formed. This allows us both to witness many of the transpiring events and to cause important events that have impact in her world. It was a clever idea to tell a bigger story through the actions accomplished by many parties across the history of this world. As for myself? I like to take a leisurely approach to DMing. I tend to set up more like a sandbox of smaller adventures, key characters or meaningful events that take place in wherever the players are and just kinda wait for the players to respond, letting them choose what they want to do with the stuff I plan. I caught this habit with my current group due to how much they wound up creating these session-long tangents for themselves that both slowed down the progression of the current adventure, but simultaneously the players were having too much fun with to stop or discourage from doing. So I began leaning on it, letting them go nuts with their little tangents and express themselves as players fully, while I merely pick and choose interesting bits for my characters to interact with.
AlluMan96 I really like the mini-series method of DMing! Not too long, not too short. Enough campaign to be satisfying and there’s not too much extraneous stuff either
@@wm2429 Having a cohesive world to do it in like she does also makes the mark we as players leave on the world feel more satisfying. One of my characters still exists in her setting and is a player in the larger events of the world. Another player's character has been promoted to a state of legend, where his exploits are the makings of countless stories and songs. By the time this level of status is granted to the player in a normal campaign, it's already over and we'll never see the setting again. With this setting, we not only gain acknowledgement of our accomplishments in the game, but also have active roles in shaping our little corners of the world. It's a longer-term commitment all it's own, but the steps made towards the end goal are made all the more great.
@@AlluMan96 That sounds intriguing, and I guess since it's history if something really dumb happens you can just have it be misremembered, in fact there should be some level of info corruption no matter what. But the control freak in me is still worried this method would end up littering history with king Hot Taco III or the cult of Poopy Butthole...
I suggest everyone to try out the anime route: you know in anime they usually go for a few plots before the story starts to form? I think that's a great way to start playing then, eventually, building up the world around the actions of the players rather than having to think about all those thinks immediately.
I think that can work perfectly fine but I think it’s also fine to put them into a premade world. Just because there’s already events in motion doesn’t mean it needs to take away player agency.
I prefer episodic campaigns loosely connected with actions and consequences. they're easier to make, the players can't derail them (unless they do something really, really stupid), and you can keep doing them for ages without ever repeating yourself or your players starting to lose interest.
I’ve been running episodic adventures with my players in a homebrew setting, and letting them choose where they want to go next after each ‘episode.’ Each one is self-contained, but I’ve been careful to sprinkle in various clues pointing toward a larger narrative behind the scenes. It only took a few games for them to catch on to this, and now they’re choosing to adventure in areas where they think they will find more clues. Honestly, it’s made it easier on me as the DM and writer of the setting; they’ve done a good job of picking up the small details in each adventure and connecting them to one another. I haven’t had to beat them over the head with the clues, or make them so glaringly obvious. They also enjoy the aspect of exploring the setting on their own terms, and learning more about it as they go; they are excited every week to discover more, and it’s given me a lot of confidence and reassurance as a DM and writer.
MacGyver is still awesome. But it is pure cheese for most of the show. I rewatched the whole series three years ago, to the disdain of my wife, and I loved it.
My campaigns are always semi episodic with a long term goal in mind. I do have plans for a longer story but I focus on individual adventures instead, based on what my players want.
I’m in the process of writing a ‘5 glowing crystals’ call of Cthulhu campaign for a group of friends, it’s a nice change of pace compared to my Saga game for my D&D group - this video was a big help as always Seth!
Star Trek Adventures has the “Living Campaign” which opened the door to me as a GM, and it allowed me to tie together some old FASA and LUG modules... and this will allow me the time and experience to write my masterpiece
My Favourite Way is to have each Char having his own Goal. That Goal can be simple or Epic - the Players decide what they want for a "Plot". Then, I create an Atagonist for them who can be a Person or a Group of People. This often provides me with more than one Plot. Then I create one or more "Group"-Atagonists: More or less BBEGs who spice up the Episodes and are not created specificly against one Char rather to annoy the whole Party somehow. After that, I set "Stepstones" for the Players Goals so they do not immediatly get to the End of their personal Journey. Finally, I come up with some "Introducement-Adventure" where the Party meets. At the End of it I ask them what they are planning to do next - whoose personal Agenda will they follow? Upon this decision I come up with a new Adventure/Episode which will be somehow get "Sabotaged" by one of the "Group-Atagonist" if it does not contain a specifc personal Atagonist of one of the Chars - yeah, that can end in multiple Atagonists working against the Party at once. This Way, I always have some Inspiration and my Players "get what they want". Also, changing Chars are no big Deal due to them bringing the Plot along - if the evil Kings illegit Son is not present, the Party has no reason to pursue his Agenda of taking over the Throne, but still will have another one like the Mage now paying for a Trip into the Jungle to find the lost Shrine of Rh'zzach to finally reassemble the Staff of Ch'rrych for preventing the extraplanar Demon Yogg-hurt to take over his Mind. Even if amidst in a Storyarc, the Char can have "something important to do" and so the Party can have a "in-between-Adventure". F.E. when the Rogues Player is not present, let the other Players have to prove his innocence in a murder Case while he is imprisoned.
Don't forget that episodics don't *have* to involve travelling around the world! If you have the game based around a place that naturally has lots to offer (ie, a large city), it's perfectly possible to have a series of largely unrelated adventures within that single setting. Think of the old Spider-Man cartoon- he never leaves New York because he doesn't have to, there's plenty to see and do in just that one location.
You've convinded me to try this on my next campaign. Currently running a saga, and while that is fun (especially with the PCs returning to earlier locations to observe the concequences of their actions), scheduling 5-6 players is very difficult, and I'm getting increasingly afraid to write myself into a corner as the plot just gets more and more complicated.
You should have a look at Mutant: Year Zero. It scratches both itches. There is an overriding meta-plot that you can introduce or not as you see fit, several fleshed out adventure/encounters that you can drop in, but it is also very player driven. The players create their home base and some of the npcs they interact with, they choose how to develop this base (do they choose croplands to increase their food supply? Or do they make schools to make their people literate? But the threats from the Zone make those defences look pretty good...) and often choose where they are going and what they are setting out to achieve. It really encourages player involvement in describing the world as they explore. I've been running a game for a while now, and we're having a blast with it. I have 6 players (probably a few too many, but I'm managing) and the nature of the game allows them to drop in and out if some people are unable to play. The level of player investment is really high, because the world feels more theirs than mine to them.
I really like the Mutant: Year Zero format too. And each of the installments are their own scenario that can all eventually intersect in the Zone it the players and GM like. My problem is not all my players like the setting. So I am currently about to start a space sci-fi game using Fragged Empire rules but modeling the campaign off of Mutant, with the Meta-plot, adventure encounters, a zone of sorts and a home base pressure cooker to build and manage.
Oh man, Seth! Everytime you come out with a video it always perfect coincides with what me and my group are doing. Especially your vid about player compatibility and this one! We are moving from our D&D saga to a more episodic (and easier to follow) Call of Cthulhu campaign. Great content as always, man! 👍
Hey, newbie game master here! First of all I want to thank you for getting me into dm-ing, Seth! It's great fun and I really wanted to get into playing tabletop RPGs, especially after stumbling onto your channel and your epic Call of Cthulhu - 101 series, but none of my friends had ever RPed either. So eventually I decided to just give it a shot and run a one-shot of Mister Corbitt for Call of Cthulhu… That one-shot then blossomed into a whole campaign which took us 5 8-hour sessions over 6 months to complete. It involved the investigators going after rampaging man eating plants, taking ladders to the ‘nads, one of them briefly dying and coming back as a tiny creepy bone dolly and riding a startled cat all the way across Arkham, fighting crazed satanic cultists in hospital basements and negotiating with giant dimension-hopping invisible spiders. I can’t recommend this enough. Wanna experience the craziest adventure you never would’ve imagined possible? Just grab some buddies and some dice and roll, my friend. Just leave your sanity by the door xD Anyway, our campaign was sort of a mix between the episodic and the saga, with each session having its’ own mini boss of sorts, with the overarching Corbitt-mystery slowly getting revealed piece by piece, as the investigators learned more. And initially I thought I had messed up big time, since a scenario that was supposed to only have taken 4 hours at most was now entering its’ 16th hour and showed no signs of ending. But my players had fun. And I had fun. Bottom line: Don’t be afraid to dm. You don’t have to plan the entire Lord of the Rings out from the start, just give the hobbits a kick out the door, let them make their own decisions and see where the dice take you.
I also find the hybrid style to work best (for most of the time); it both helps negate the player's fatigue from following the same story thread all the but it also helps the GM to deal with player decisions that contradict the intended "main quest" path by making it a side story.
I really needed to hear exactly this right now. My saga-style campaign that I run is getting out of hand and I'm burning out. I don't want to end it because the players have been so great and all their characters are awesome. I think I can save the campaign by running intermittent episodes every once in a while until I get back in the mood to continue the story. Thank you Seth.
I like Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu. It is a huge saga campaign, but also very sandbox-y. I'm running the 7th edition now, and I highly recommend it. It has an opening prologue chapter that isn't very connected to the main plot, which is great to let new players get the feel of the setting and the rules before the main plot begins. And from there, the players can chart their own way through the story, without the need to follow some pre-determined path the GM has set up. :)
Damn, sometimes I forget how good the advice in this channel is. Thanks, Seth, it helped me put a lot of things in perspective. Transitioning from being a White Wolf storyteller to an OSR D&D dungeon master is tricky.
Funny; I'm just outlining a campaign for OSE that we'll be starting over the summer. Worked into the backstories of several PCs are hints that will link up to the long term goal of acquiring a number of rune stones that they'll need to combat the machinations of the big bad far down the road who they will (much later) realize is also seeking these rune stones to activate an evil artifact he has acquired. But the first couple stones are going to be in treasure hoards in their first couple adventures....Great minds, Seth.
1) Todd and Mike can pound sand; MacGuyver is still cool. 2) My group and I prefer a playstyle that starts out episodic and slowly morphs into something more saga-like. This lets the players and GM try the setting out and see how they like it, fine-tune their characters a little, and lets the GM get his or her metaphorical feet under them before launching into an epic saga.
This video is very helpful for people starting out because I know plenty of people who are nervous about coming up with giant sagas and coming up with something new every single week. My personal journey with figuring out what I wanted to do as a game master was running a small test campaign that I stitched together using different maps and hook ideas while creating a meta story line. The campaign's summary was the gods are playing their version of dnd and your characters are their PCs. It opened the door to not only show bits and pieces of the world but also helped the players learn the system and me to learn how to run things. The main goal was get through this game as intact as possible while going through 'the whims of gods' so every week could possibly be something different. One god that is all about combat says "we're doing a battle royale" and one god that is interested in mystery decides the PCs are going to have to solve this small town 'who done it'. After that, I figured that I enjoyed how many anime run things. They have an overarcing theme/storyline but something they have to do from time to time is put in some downtime for a variety of reasons. I like having this option for downtime because I've noticed sometimes players get kind of burnt out or overwhelmed when there's constant doom and gloom so they appreciate having 'a beach episode' or 'a xmas episode' so that their characters can bond, reflect, and everyone in and out of the game can get revitalized about what's going to happen next. The meta storyline also allowed me to show that players can have input too because this is a game we are playing together and the conflicts that could happen and we could possibly deal with them. It was a nice test run for a variety of topics and aspects of the game. Even dying in the campaign had a very strange bug attached to it. Yeah, the gods could bring your character back but there was going to be a catch that you might not appreciate. So it opened the door that resurrection was a thing in the game but there were consequences to it and hurdles that had to be overcome. It opened the dialogue for what would be the same in the main campaign and what would be different and the options available given the classes that people picked. It made it where people actually thought of being a cleric/paladin without the stereotypical baggage that sometimes comes with it. So that's a tiny bit of my experience. The anime format fit with me and my group pretty well and we mostly figured out what generally worked for us through our weird meta storyline. I hope this helps people out a bit. ^-^
Just ran across this now and loved it. We have been playing Conan 2d20 for the last year and our game is an episodic saga campaign. As players we each made 2 characters in a village on the Frontier that our Jarl was instructed to expand and make work. We choose which character we want to use on each mission/ quest so we end up with various combinations of skills both social and combat which makes for interesting game play and interaction. We are presented after every mission with new choices and the ones we don't take, don't go away, they evolve or resolve with varying consequences to our environment. To mKe it more interesting we have 5 friends playing NPC BBG's who our DM consults on a weekly basis to find out what they will be doing(but doesn't discuss it amongst the BBG's or players). All of this has led to one of the greatest adventures I have ever played in
Everything I run is a Saga and I've learned how to work around attendance or player dropping. You have to be so good at Dm'ing if they don't show up they know they're missing out on something truly special. Creates a sense of "I really have to show up this week!" because they don't want to miss out on the experience. That and also just getting player's that you know are in-tune to the style and narrative of the game you wish to run. I think that's the most important part in obtaining long running campaigns, I have two campaigns that're a year old and they're both absolutely amazing with 70% of the original starting cast still a part of the group and the other 30% are there to stay. Once an established group is found, it's really easy to get player's to "buy in" to a long running campaign as it's already been going for so long the likelihood that newcomer's who join. Will actually stay given the track record.
Seth, you just gave me a great idea: have you guys seen Sliders? It's a TV show from the 90s, about a group of people jumping between parallel universes, trying to get back to their own. They always spend a few days in one world, and then they have to go, because if they miss their portal, they are stuck. That would be the perfect framework for a fun, universe-hopping episodic campaign.
Due to sporadic attendance in my online group, we decided for a West Marches style campaign. The adventures themselves were episodic, finished in a single session. The adventures often provide hooks for the players to follow if they are interested. This, hopefully, leads to a sense of continuity. There are also some stories going on in the background, inter-tribal goblin war, an imprisoned demon and turncoat priests, that the players can get involved with if they want.
Savage Worlds uses a system called "plot point campaign". They are episodic campaigns with plot adventures or details at key points. eg. "when the players reach level 4, run this adventure" or "when they go to Egypt, this happens". The campaign I'm about to run even recommends running stand alone adventures between the plot points.
I'm currently running a Star Trek campaign and I'm writing every mission in a four act structure like the series. However, in each mission I have some detail they have to interact with that ties into what I'm using as the overreaching plot. Thus far, I don't think my players have figured out where some of them are connected and I'm hoping for a real ah ha moment at the end of "season 1." I usually enjoy doing the episodic saga storytelling in my campaigns like this and one of the things that's really helped me in this are two TV series, Leverage and the Liberians. They both have John Rogers as the show runner and he does a great job of using monster of the week to push the overall story along. The Leverage DvD's have a great set of commentary tracks where he and the other writers and directors talk about story telling, villains, and piecing things together. The 1st season of the Liberians also has the best monster of the week saga's I've ever seen. In order to defeat the villain they needed at least 1 thing from every episode of the season or their plan wouldn't have worked. As a writer and a GM, it's impressive to watch. Also, MacGyver rocks...
Another one that's really good. there's a system called Through the Breach. Character creation involves reading each characters fortune. This gives each character a five line fate poem. Every session deals with one live of a players fate. When every players poem is resolved the campaign is over. It takes a little bit of work to thematically tie the characters fate to the adventures, but I found it very rewarding and a lot of fun. The campaign is weird west and I know that won't be for everyone, but the tool of giving your campaign a timer worked really well.
Really good advice, been struggling with this myself as my group are eager to play but just can't fit a game in. so I've been thinking of running a series of episodic sessions, linked by an over arching plot at the end.
A LOT of what seem to us (audience) as grander epic Sagas can be (and probably have been) written entirely as episodic creations... For slightly more recent than Seth's reference here... Think "Supernatural"... Each season has a general arc to get through, and eventually the seasons add up to a greater "growth arc" and then you can follow long enough to "get" the bigger picture of the "whole story"... If there's a drawback, in GM'ing a LOT of episodic Campaigns, it would be the ability to notice the obvious spots where a favorite TV show or even a Mini-series was obviously being done "episodically" and the writers "wrote themselves into a corner" and had no choice in a cheap outcome... (ah... but I digress) Okay, McGuffins are a GREAT way to tie this kind of thing together. I don't just mean Seth's "Five Gems" technique, either... SO get a little creative... Need a reason to tie the PC's to this "new plot line"... Symbols of your earlier BBEG that got away... Frustrated Players will DIVE full-bore on a lingering loose end. You DO have to "reward" this behavior, but you don't necessarily have to give up the end-goal any earlier than you need. For example, you can have the BBEG building a whole force for the Players to deal with at higher levels... SO you NEED a symbol... Let's go with a "Black Hand". In the first little adventure, a series of investigative and occasionally violent sessions get the PC's to track this "weird cult of the Black Hand" to a hideout... Obviously, we want our BBEG to avoid being murdered... BUT there should be a climactic fight (so a fairly challenging number of these "cultists" can be there.) AND a reward... Rescue who-ever or Loot the Whatever... or a nice spot of both... to finish the plot... AND among the loot, there should be some serious indications that somebody has been there a LOT higher rank than anyone they captured/killed... Lay kind of heavy on "Black Hands" painted, emblazened, even onyx and obsidian settings for some gemstone values... in the shapes of black hands... The next few adventures can feature nifty little side-quests, and bits of backstory... some odd relatives with struggles to solve (no need to kidnap or murder everyone precious to PC's) and maybe the odd "dark town secret/scandal" to uncover... THEN you finally have a clever idea to tie this BBEG plot together for a leg... and you're anxious to move the plot... SO... one of the regular "quest givers" has some news about a gruesome bit of activity a town or two over... blah-blah-blah... something remarkably evil... (pepper a few details "the way the BBEG would do it") blah-blah... AND they found something like "this" and drop a big fat Black Hand symbol in their laps. AND you can then run however many sessions you like on this new "plot movement" before going back to sidequests, antics, a bit of "kobold krushing" so the party feels "bad-ass" and gets to show off a little... maybe a shenanigan or two to buy some time (while you deliciously plod through the details of your BBEG's next moves, new levels of difficulty, etc.. This is the basic process I've used for decades to let the Players explore the world, allow others to "take over GM'ing" when they have adventures to run... and to encourage everyone at the Table to participate in the GM'ing process to get a feel from both sides of the screen... We only occasionally make specific agreements about "Don't mess with my bad-guy", so everyone can even take up a little larger Plot Arc along their way. Sure, we do run into "continuity" and "consistency" issues... BUT not nearly as troublesome as you'd think. AND this mention of "My Table's Way" isn't to sell our style to you... Instead, it's more an example. If we can manage the Largest Arcs with episodic approach and TRADING GM privileges, you shouldn't worry too much about "being a bit all over the place" while you build your own adventure Sagas episodically on your own... ...AND hell, if you think it might be fun to swap the screen around... try it out. I admit, I'm a physical Table type Role Player and GM. (It might make a difference) BUT we've encouraged a lot more to take up the screen and GM at our Table as well as others, and helped season more GM's than shut them down. ;o)
@@MonkeyJedi99 Thanks... I thought so. Bobby's always going to be my favorite Character... AND I just thought it a more likely useful model than about anything else that came to mind for others to "quickly reference" and understand it. I mean, you can just watch one or two episodes per season and see differences along with consistency all the way through. ;o)
I don’t often have a long story plot line going into my campaigns, but I don’t do episodic either. I think up the story of the next session and how it will turn based on the actions of the players, and then plan the next session at the end of the current session. An old magic the gathering card’s flavor text describes my RPG writing style pretty well: “I don’t have a plan, just a goal. The rest will figure itself out.”
Just got the mail your book's out. Wohoo! :D Oh, and we just found out our Chinchillas got a child earlier this morning. And both of those within 15 min of getting up, so this is shaping up to be a REALLY good day.
I find myself describing my campaign format as being kinda like Buffy. Sessions are largely adventures of the week, but they're tied to a common place with ongoing backburner boss archs that players learns bits and pieces about across sessions. It gives my group flexibility in terms of attendance and game style while still allowing them to develop relationships with NPCs and feel longer-term consequences in the world. I also love that they frequently have to share information with one another instead of always getting it from me.
I think another way to look at the 'five gems' example is the cartoon 'Samurai Jack' . He knows he needs to find the time portal to go back in time so that's the end goal, what follows is a series of episodic adventures that gives him clues as to where the portal could be. Along the way he fights of the forces of evil, saves people, encounters gods, demons, fake portals ect ect.
Wanted to let you know my group is now starting Call of Cthulhu. I personally write my own stories, and am starting with a more episodic chronicle. I am also taking a look at real world stuff in the 1920's for inspiration. So thank you for reintroducing me to Call of Cthulhu.
I'm mostly making my first game episodic with a mission based gameplay with each one connecting a bigger saga with their mission giver being the one that ties them to the larger story.
The only things that are "dated" are things that were chintzy from its onset (Box from Logan's Run, This Island Earth). There's a certain charm and verisimilitude in past efforts.
Heh, chatting with my boyfriend who's also one of my GMs as I was watching and we were just talking about essentially the "5 magical gems" plot as the video progressed and how it feels like it was a good sub type of "bookend" campaign and how it reminded us of so many arcs of the adventure cartoons we grew up on like Digimon (Tags and Crests), Jackie Chan Adventures (Tailsmans), Sailor Moon (The Rainbow Crystals that form the Silver Crystal) and then that part of the video popped up and I had to smile.
I'm doing the "Five Glowing Gems" method for my current campaign. We're playing D&D 5e set in the Multiverse of Magic: the Gathering. Once we reached a certain point, I asked each of the players to pick out a Legendary Artifact card from M:tG, and that would be the McGuffin (an artifact magic item) that their character would need to face the final boss. Then we set out on a series of planehopping adventures to collect their powerful magic items!
BTW, you got my group playing CoC. Mike Riggoletti and associates have really learned how strange and dark New Orleans van be. They are going to soon find an on going plot simply because there are powerful forces who are noticing their interference.
Good breakdown! A good example of a "Five Glowing Gems" campaign would be The Adventure Zone podcast. A great listen if anyone hasn't already... A lot of the game was episodic, but definitely tied together very well at the end.
Great advice! My current campaign has been going for nearly a year. Here is how I came up with the grand plot: 1) After staying away from D&D since 3rd edition released, I picked up 5e and could immediately see it was going to be too easy for my veteran group. 2) Problems included too easy to rest, too easy to heal, too easy to resurrect. 3) To fix resurrection, the plot needed to make necromancy forbidden to the party. So the setting will be a plot where necromancy is causing big problems (demonic and monster attacks) and the players will come to realize that, in order to fix the problem, they would need help for the good gods who had already forbidden it. I also created a detailed lasting wounds system for when a character went under 0 HPs. This has worked excellently to take the extremely cream-puff rules of 5e into something where some caution is needed. 4) To fix the too easy to rest issue, I created a dense world with encounter areas that would make resting difficult. This didn't work very well, because fighting junk encounters to stop resting isn't fun. So, I had to rely on the same solution used for the final problem to fix this one. However, in creating the dense setting area, it was easy to build a detailed plot that tied the various groups together, gave them motivations, and played into the main plot, which turned out to be an intricate story that fell into place around a dwarven genius (inspired by an amazing map of a broken dwarven forge dungeon). This had me weave in the need to reforge one of the lights that held the darkness back (this is from Tolkien's larger body of lore) as the main goal of the quest (still unknown to the players). 5) The final problem was too easy to heal, which is linked with too easy to rest. I fixed both by creating encounters between 2 and 5 times above the recommended encounter power. So they are all far beyond deadly encounters. This fixed the final problem, keep the game rolling and fun, and allowing for a wipe to end the campaign with a loss. In my view, this is among the elements of a truly epic campaign. So it was problems with the target RPG system that required "reasons" that were all the basis of the key points of the campaign. Also, I did use the bookend method of deciding the end of the plot after doing about 6 months of early adventures. I like tweaking the overall story to the party by having a vague ending until I size up their goals. In this case, with one dwarf and one human player, this worked perfectly. Dwarven cleric got the word from his good god about what needed to be done, and the human needed to find out about the small war, since censored by both sides, between human and dwarf, which held the key to finding the forge and the key to progressing and finishing the main plot. Still in progress at about level 9 and should end (if they make it) around level 17.
I think another big plus side of episodic or even semiepisodic sessions is it can really give players satisfaction from completing something. Even if there is some hook or cliff hanger, most episodic stories have a very distinct episode challenge to defeat. No waiting 6 months to feel like you've even done anything
The more TH-cam videos and photoshops I do, the more respect I have for Seth. Consistent quality in both presentation and content is hard to achieve on a weekly schedule.
I'm a blender, but too often, I rely on a completely created world with a little wiggle room, but not enough - and I have sporadic player attendance. Great tips on how to design around these difficulties!
Another type of blended campaign that I generally run resembles a season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Structurally it's episodic but in the background is an overarching plot to stop the Big Bad. I love this approach because while I'm able to indulge my desire to run a saga it allows me to lean on published modules (with minor alterations) to use as individual episodes. As an adult faced with the attendance problems you describe I find this works very well because no individual character is ever going to be essential to an adventure.
My first DnD group was a blend of these, we pinballed around until we found something really interesting and then let the dm know that this is what we're interested in
One of the "five gems" campaigns that I've always wanted to run or play in is "The Rod of Seven Parts" from the AD&D days. It is on a shelf in my closet right now next to the boxed sets for "Temple of Elemental Evil" and "The Ruins of Undermountain" (both 1 and 2). All I have been able to do is use parts of those in my campaigns so far.
I once ran a west marches game, and the group Dwarf made it into a Five Gems Campaign. He decided that, a few years before, he had broken a table. He had promised the bartender that he would replace it with a special table: the Ivory Table, a table upon which adventurers had scratched a map of the local region. It was now in pieces, so he traveled about in search for the missing pieces. It was positively hilarious
I'm running my first serious campaign as DM and I pretty much do episodic adventures set against a large saga style story. I just pepper in bits to tie it together or bring new information to light and every so often have a clearly connected adventures. Right now they're wandering across the country so it's really easy to come up with a session that happens to interest me week to week. I have three major story beats planned out, so I have an idea of where I want them to go without having put a ton of work into establishing exactly how they need to get there. Get the best of both worlds, and at least the group is having fun and has stuck together for 13 sessions.
I run my campaign as a saga with "filler episodes". If more than one player is missing, we just play an episode that isn't going to move the plot a lot, but will give them plenty of fun interacting with the world.
I have run huge saga style games (multiple years) where I had an overall plot, usually a beginning, middle and end. These are a lot of fun. The players know they are having a big impact on the world. I have also run very episodic/sandbox style games. Players drove what would happen based on what their characters wanted to achieve. And they were also a lot of fun because I would only build what I needed based on what they wanted to do. It also gave me a chance to run episodes that might be very much like an old movie or TV show (for instance re-enacting Yojimbo).
Perfect timing. I was feeling worried about what I'm starting TOMORROW and to hear about the "5 glowing gems" makes me feel at ease that something similar has a "name". (Five glowing bosses in this case). I'm used to bookending and it just felt like this new style might solve all the issues with my current gaming context.
I like the 2005 - 2009 Doctor Who approach. Drop little hints in some episodic games for a big finale, things that will seem insignificant or could be missed entirely by the players. Then, for the end, drop in a short saga.
Another benefit of fully episodic campaigns is that it's super easy for someone to guest GM and give the primary GM a break, Hell there might not even be an official GM and the only thing that stays consistent is the characters and basic setting
I do a bit of a funnel. Early sessions I let the characters pick the path they take with no real set goals, but then I start adding in goals according to their play style and start narrowing in focus. I throw in some adventure cues and design a few encounters along the way.
Good stuff! I like to run a hybrid game with some individual adventures and dungeon crawls interspersed with some longer multi-session story lines. And of course, it's easy to drop little hints to link even the one-shots to an overarching theme. You can use a dungeon crawl to introduce a cult that will later be important (just an example), or someone the PCs face off against in a relatively low stakes encounter might resurface down the road. I like recurring characters and villains that keep popping up.
Great video, lots of ideas. We live at a time when the hobby has never been more accessible with the proliferation of games being streamed online, but many of these games feature veteran players and have juicy budgets for miniatures, scenery etc (Critical Role) and that is very intimidating for rookies. My advice is start small, tell an episodic story focused on a single settlement or location. Add layers to the story as you go & things will often grow organically into something much larger in scale. You don’t even need a clear destination in mind, just play sandbox.
I've been over the past year trying out many different systems online with friends and have been doing them as one-shots. It was a little weird for me at first since my friends who got me into tabletop in the first place along with all major module and video references being sagas really railroaded us into pure saga play. The only derivations were a one-shot now and then when we needed a quick break or when I got the COC 7e book and blended all the modules included into a connected yet still mostly episodic campaign. Now doing all these one-shots have really shown me the importance of smaller factored stuff, whether fully individual or as an episodic campaign. Sometimes a one-shot of "you're in a town hanging out and... boom, orcs are besieging the town, what do" if welcome after so much of the 5 crystals mass effort to get the big thing done. Also an idea I've always had for a campaign but haven't gotten around to yet is same characters, different systems. I got the idea from those memory crystals from Planescape: Torment. The idea would be the party had to 5 crystals' clues from these extra-dimensional memories, which plopped them into different systems and worlds, almost Time Splitters 2 style.
Great vid. I'd love it if you could do a follow up with ways to mitigate some of the weak points of each style. Like how to deal with plot armor without killing the beloved characters. Keep up the good work! Cheers!
Great video... personally i tend to create a blended campaign "soft saga". i have a few things that i'm seeding since the start but most of the adventures, are short independent plots with a few connections with the saga. Like, having a "cult" and every adventure is independent, but all have "something" with the cult. like the time when they found the abandoned dwarven temple, but it was profaned with undead, and the "source" of those undead was a corrupted dwarven. and he was corrupted by someone in the cult. (that gives them a breadcrumb trail and at the same time you have creative freedom to plot each adventure independently )
Super late to watching this, but I wanted to thank you for making this video, Seth! I am a very new DM, and I've struggled with plotting my first campaign; which is a Ravenloft one, using a blend of new and old content. It's fun content, but there's sooo much! So hearing your advice has allowed me to plot more effectively for short and longer term play of my first game. I think I'll aim for a "Blended + 5 Glowing Gems" type game. Tried and true methods of running a game! Thanks again Seth, your advice and experience is much appreciated as always :)
My big campaign took place as a level by level increase of different episodes on one continent in which the players could roll a new character whenever they wanted until level 10. All the while hearing tidbits of stories of the other continent. After the 10th episode the king called for a warship to invade and chart the mysterious new world continent. While aboard this ship I allowed the players to cycle back to any prior character they had and boost it to level 10. Upon landing in the new continent they discovered a portal to hell had opened and demons had established a kingdom and the long saga progressed from there.
A good mixture of both can be really effective - my characters visit wildly different locations and have very different adventures (like Monster of the Week) but all the adventures tie together into the overall grand quest (for my guys, it's stopping the Old Gods)
Rewatching a few months later. The point around 12:00 comes up a lot in a few CoC Facebook groups I’m in. A new person will post something like ‘I just discovered this game, I’ve never played before but I found a bunch of people to run for. I’m really excited, do you guys have any tips?’ And yeah, the responses are almost unanimously along the lines of ‘Woah, slow down. Play a few games first, and then start with running one shots or some shorter scenarios to get into the swing of things.’ I think as you say a lot of people come from D&D (particularly 5e) with a perception the only way to do a TTRPG are these saga campaigns.
Great timing! Two weeks from now is our session 0 for an episodic type campaign. We were getting tired last year of not everybody being at the sessions so I’m catering smaller one shots to use as episodes for each session. That way I can grab one day of and make sure it hit all or most of the characters (and PCs) goals.
I'm a big fan of Seth. I actually started running Call of Cuthulu because of his videos. I'm running Horror on the Orient right now actually. It's a five gem campaign, and about half that box is props and research about the Orient Express and the cities. It's actually really cool
I always do the blender... :) I call it, the first adventures are season one of my series, like in babylon 5, where everything was set up, and in later adventures everything i laid out eventually comes together to form the overall plotark. That worked pretty well on my shadowrun campaign i ran last year and that is about to end in 4 or 5 weeks :) that was a lot of fun, and in late summer 2019 i said - ok guys, everything i laid out from january to about june finally pays off and pays dividents now. And ohhhhhh boy it did. BBEG had been on screen 3 times till that moment, but wasn't visible as BBEG. A heist they did earlier that year, turned out to be super crucial to the story at large. and everyone was pretty flabbergasted by how it turned out to be later, since now they tend to recall most events i laid out back there, giving us back all the funny memories. it also helps that one player decided to write an in character diary of everything out of character view, and we had a showcase, where they put in some items they found during the adventures/runs. Like a hold-out pistol from boss 1, or a pilots hat as they captured a plane, or that collar of the guarddog from complex 1 they broke in ^^ selfies etc. it's pretty fun to see how this showcase and that diary evolves. it also helps that everything is online, since we play on role 20 ^^
When I was writing my Weird West TTRPG, I called One (Or two) Shots a Lyric (also Limerick and Verse work here), Adventures or short modules were called Ballads (or Song), and Campaigns were called Epics (or Saga). Ballads had a nice western sounding feel while also referencing Tolkien and GRRM as well as invoking writing terminology and old world poetry. I felt it also gave a nice understanding of a game and how in depth it should be and how much work to put in. A Lyric/Limerick/Verse is short statement, possibly a joke, about a person or group. The entirety of my plot and story should be feasibly written in 2-5 lines. If you imagine it musical, the rhyme is the theme and Aesop. A memorable limerick is possible, but it's going to take a lot of editing and re-working to make it stand the test of time and mean something or be extremely funny for the target audience. Writing reliably memorable limericks take an immense amount of skill, but ever once in a while a random individual can write something profound. Either way, it won't waste much of someone's time, so you're better off just throwing it out there and seeing if something sticks. A Ballad/Song is longer and more complex telling a complete story. The entirety of the plot should be able to be written somewhere between half a page to a few pages and a detailed recount story could fill a short book or movie. Or in the words of Justin Timberlake and Madonna: You've only got 4 minutes. Again, if you image it as a song, the rhyming schemes and repetitive nature should be hammering home the theme and concept of your plot. This can have multiple themes/rhyming schemes, but a memorable one plays with one or two. A memorable song is very possible. Some will like it, some will hate it, and someone might love it until the end of time. It's not too hard to write a song and even someone new to the scene can write an instant hit. An Epic/Saga is several stories interacting with each other weaving complex narrative and will take time to uncover and understand the themes and Aesops. Each player should have their own special arcs working in tandem with the story while reinforcing the literary elements of the main plot. Several songs or stories should be not only working together but building upon each other. Your story could fill a thick book. It could be a trilogy. It could be a full series. It will have a plethora of minor themes all swirling around a central themes. Think Tolkien, GRRM, the Dune series, and all the other complex classics. Some parts might not be as memorable as others, but it is going to take skill to not make it feel like a bloated mess littered with plot holes. When you're done with it, even if it wasn't your audience's favorite, they will never forget it and if you're lucky, it will be something they'll compare everything else to. It's a bit odd calling them that in public, but privately, it has vastly helped my writing by judging what kind of a story I want to tell or how long a plot will take and how much room to I have to tell my story. If it's a Lyric, most my time will be spent editing an idea down and condensing it to the core message. A ballad has a bit of wiggle room for the story, but I won't have too much time to play around with the backstory of my characters. An epic has all the time in the world to play with ever facet of each character and have several antagonists. It also fits nicely with the idea that an epic is several connected ballads which is a series of connected lyrics. I felt it worked better than One Shot, Adventure, and Campaign. Still haven't finished my TTRPG though. You got me distracted on a Cyberpunk 2077 epic. In regards to your Five Glowing Gems style campaign, I believe the literary term for the "gems" is Plot Coupons. They're not MacGuffins or plot devices because what they are matters, but they are kind of like plot devices you collect and cash in at the end of the story.
This is a really good video and something I never really thought about until you put it into words. I am one of those people who was introduced to TTRPG's through D&D but when it came to being a GM I cut my teeth on Call of Cthulhu (which your videos are what made me really want to play it). I ran a campaign for a little under a year and it was very episodic, each session my players would be able to start and finish most adventures, but as I got better with the rules and my storytelling I was able to end the campaign with one big saga that lasted 10 or 12 sessions. I had my BBEG be one of my player's character from a dark future. It was a lot of fun.
Seth! I love watching your videos and have used them to build my confidence and finally venture into the brave new world of being a GM! Thank you so much!! As a fan of White Wolf and the World of Darkness it was exciting to hear you mention them! Do you think you'll ever do a video on any of their systems or games?
Since I'm a very story-based GM/DM/Storyteller/Keeper/etc I tend to think of it as Novel vs Short Story. With the option of a Novella in there as well, or perhaps done as a Serial. [] *Novel* maps onto "epic campaign" where there's a big ol' story that will be traversed through, taking a year or maybe more. The metaphor breaks down a little if you start asking about multi-novel sagas like you get in the fantasy genre. I tend to lump those into the same category since the only practical reason for multiple books for a single story is that there are limits to what binding can accomplish. [] *Short Story* maps onto one-shot pretty well. In my experience a true one-shot (i.e. one session only) game is quite rare, and my "one shots" tend to last for two or three sessions on average. [] *Novella* lands between these two extremes. And this is where I tend to be most comfortable running games. The story isn't an epic, but it's not simple either. I'd say it takes 10 to 20 sessions to complete, with some wiggle room on either end. If one were to go for a TV/Move metaphor, I suppose this would be the single-season show, or mini-series. I particularly enjoy this length of game because by the time a campaign would be dragging, the intermediate "Novella" story is instead ratcheting up for its conclusion. [] *Serial* games would be the analog for the episodic structure. How long it goes is unknown, and while there is _probably_ some through line from one installment to the next (and like a "one shot", these may in practice wind up being a couple sessions each) there might not be anymore connective tissue than the basic setup (i.e. a shady detective agency, scoundrels with a spaceship, etc.). You could treat it like installments in a slightly disjointed novel, or equivalent to issues of a comic book, or installments in a long-running series of adventure stories, a la Sherlock Holmes). Personally I find this about equally difficult to run as a massive Novel/Campaign/Saga game because I _need_ some sort of framework to contain things, and if there's the potential for it to go on forever, I actually lose interest as the person running the game.
In my current campaign players have 3 versions of their characters: One low level, one mid level and one high level. The campaign started with them being naked in a prison cell with no memories of their history at all. They freed themselves and found some epic items that their feeling was that they must belong to them. After that they fought an enemy that they must have come across already, because he knew them, and then headed off to a village nearby. They can use tokens to get their memories back piece by piece, and I will create adventures for them depending on what they want to memorize. We are still in the phase where they met each other and had some minor adventures, but - who knows - maybe we will find out how the elf got her epic bow soon. :-D
I hadn't considered an episodic format, and my pitch idea might fit rather well with that; Lowmagic Medieval Xcom/witcher focusing more on investigations surrounding the supernatural rather than combat, with them travelling around to problem areas to root out rumours. I really wish I had people I could discuss design with, like a council of GMs. There's a scenario I've been struggling with to make interesting, I'd really like to have one of those idea sessions with likeminded peeps.
Sorry about that i started out saying a lot of stuff towards your comment but then felt i was babbling and going way to off base. So i decided to erase it. I do know the feeling though. When i ran games i often spoke to people i worked with about it or to my family members that were not involved in the game. They acted as my council. Toss me some of your ideas maybe I can help. I have been a storyteller for about 17 years now in case you're wondering about my credentials.
@@breaksthemind2881 Oh ok. Sure! But uh, brace yourself, this might go a bit long. The scenario is meant to act as a partial introductory scene. The setup is the PCs are all criminals pardoned by a lordling whose family was involved with hunting supernatural creatures and dealing with paranormal events. He invests a large sum of money in order to bail them out of jail, basically most of his last savings, thus the PCs lives belong to him until they've paid off said debt. From there, it gets a bit hazy, as the first mission I've been intending to be a flashback while they're travelling towards his old family holdfast. One problem though is that the flashback might contain battle(s). So the setup is two groups infiltrating another lord's party in order to falsify documents to support their lordling's claims to power as his family were dishonored and his father lost the title. The lord's manse is located in the outskirts of a settlement and there's a storm and a downpour underway. Group 1 is tasked with stealth stuff, sneak in with some help from group 2, find the lord's office, get hold of his signet ring and falsify his signature on a document. Avoid battle if possible and avoid tripping any alarms and disturbing the partygoers. Group 1 starts outdoors in the rain and needs to decide on an entry point. Group 2 is tasked to act as serving personnel and maybe a false guest or two, talking with partygoers, garnering further support to legitimise their lordling regaining his title and demesne. Opening doors for group 1 and helping to distract partygoers and actual servants from learning what's going on. And to keep the lord from returning to his office. If the signet ring should be on the lord's person, to borrow it without him knowing. Now, they say that combat is great for introductory stuff, so I was thinking having the finale involve battle, but I'd rather not have it involve the lord as it would be better if he remained clueless, the document won't be much use if he realises it's false before they use it. So I'm considering a third faction, the problem is that the land is mostly at peace and I don't wish to introduce anything supernatural that soon in the campaign. The setting is medieval low magic, think the witcher and lovecraftian, monsters are superstitions. So what I'd like ideas for is dividing up the mission in acts of interesting events and complications, like maybe the host gives a toast which brings him closer to the office, changing of the guards, or something. A satisfying and dramatic ending. And thoughts suggestions regarding complications, like do you think combat could even work in a flashback, should it even be a flashback, should there be combat etc. I'm thinking having the events be arranged like on a clock, as the two groups have no means to communicate between themselves unless they meet up, thus they need to be following a schedule of their own, so both groups know that at this point in time, they need to be at this door, and by a certain time they need to be finished and clear out.
@@gossamera4665 It's taken me quite some time but i think i have some ideas. First off i think the game should start with a small role-playing scene at the prison. Allow them to speak to the lord himself or maybe an attendee that is bailing them out instead of just explaining it to them. This will feel more personal for the players. From there you can fast forward to group 1 in the rain scene. For group 1 let them choose which entry they want to go into. Whatever it is they choose have an alarm to disarm. When there in have them get passed guards stealthy. There goal here is to make it to the wine cellar or the kitchen. Now pause before they make it there and move to group 2. Group 2 have them in two groups. The ones that are portraying the false guests will choose from 3 to 4 individuals in the party. Two out of the individuals will have something important for group 1 to use to help them. One player must pick pockets the other must distract them. Meanwhile the other players of group 2 must must some how get the signet ring from the lord himself. When all is said and done a server must go to meet group 1 in the kitchen or wine cellar to pass off items to them. Back to group 1 have them use said items to get where they need to be. All the while stealthy avoiding guards. While there doing that have a timer set with each thing they accomplish taking a set amount of time. If they do everything without incident the time will not expire and they will succeed in which case they can meet back with the server to replace the ring back to the lord. Now if time expires have an event occur in the party where the lord wants to go back to the room where they are falsifying documents. If this occurs allow group 2 to try and delay the lord. While group 2 is doing there thing have a suspicious meter where whatever they do during the party will raise the suspicious meter up or down. Now if any of them fail and are not able to clean it up allow them a chance to still do what they were tasked but now it must be done with force. As far as fighting goes i think if they can avoid it then let them. The fun of the game will be the tension in every moment of every move they make. With those timers and suspicious meters in place this should help in creating that. You can make this a flashback if you want but when you're done you must introduce them back into the present by skilful means. Don't just tell them okay that was a flashback and you are here now. I do think combat in a flashback is fine but in this story i think it should be avoided if they can. As far as another faction is concerned I'm all for It. Perhaps they to are infiltrating the place to ether get there hands on the same thing the players are trying to get or they are enemies of the lord the players are working with and to jolt them out of the flashback they come face to face with them on there way back to the lord. This could also be your final battle of the session. If I was running the story i would probably do it in this fashion. But that's just me. I hope what i have given you is useful or at least getting the cogs of your imagination turning.
@@breaksthemind2881 Thank you, it's great having someone to bounce ideas off of, always appreciated. Here's what I'm thinking; start in the rain in the mission, keep it vague as to who is where, immidiate flashback to how they got there, do the prison RP introduction thing. I omitted that PCs get to choose from two pools, one criminal, the other liasons/overseers working directly for the lordling tasked with helping and keeping the criminals in line during missions, if they want to be clerics or paladins or just not criminals. And then go into a planning phase where they set up for the mission, who goes in which group, method of entry etc. I'm planning to draw up a few maps, maybe have them plan it out on an old map with limited information that won't show recent additions to the manse for some curveballs. Then after the mission is done, do a fast forward to where they're travelling to the lordling's holdfast. That way any risk involved will still be real rather than having them be invulnerable since it's a flashback. I like the idea of a suspicion meter, the guests might become nervous and less likely to talk about what they're after, extra guards etc. A bit gamey but it would likely add to the suspense to have a visible representation of a fail state. Or I suppose I could just narrate the results and keep the actual status of the meter to myself to avoid the meta aspect. I'll think more on this. What objects could the other guests be handling out to help with the infiltration though? It obviously can't be keys... Starting to turn into a puzzle game this, use the crank to lower the kettle, pick up the carrot hehe. Like it would have to be something that makes sense, like a cigar or something, even though cigars might not be entirely from that time period, but you get my point, something they would be likely to offer a sympathetic person that makes sense within context. Like maybe a guest loses a button and hands away his vest with his crest on it for the servants to mend or something. The problem with medieval settings is that you're awfully limited in that regard, you can't like take a cellphone or a keycard or extract dna from a cigarette butt or dirty glass or something. Regarding avoiding a fight, there are a few reasons why I was considering a fight in the finale, one being for the type of player who wants to fight, since it's openly discouraged during the mission, but I was thinking maybe have this other faction chase after them at the end so it won't affect the mission and then possibly fight, or alternatively to have them attack the lord's party for the PCs to jump in as saviours and gain additional support for their cause with the nobles or just to use it as a means of escaping should they wish to, but that might mean some of their supporters end up dead. Another reason is that it's just plain recommended to start off with some action and it makes for a dramatic finale. And to get potential new players familiar with the system and so on, there's a lot of benefits to it, I'm just having a hard time justifying the fight happening naturally. Like for instance, say it's a rival attacking the lord, that seems a bit convenient. As does the idea of this faction having the same or similar goals as the PCs, like two lords wanting to be restored to honour at the same time. I suppose maybe they could be bandits or something, but that's a bit more daring than I like those to be and also too generic. But the idea of having some of the guests be infiltrators for this other faction is appealing, it's just a matter of who they are, such an organized group. Edit: Maybe the reason for the party is that the lord snubbed his rival somehow, the rival have put a few men in place and at the end arrive in capulet vs montaghue style. That way it's not out of the blue and convenient it's foreshadowed and makes sense? Thoughts?
Seth: *Orcs riding polar bears.*
Me: *Takes notes.*
Write that down, WRITE THAT DOWN lol
@@leos.2322 Add the Werewolf-Template to a Frost Giant and let him shapeshift into a Winterwolf.
Add the Werewolf-Template to a Frost Giant and let him shapeshift into a Winterwolf. I did that. It was cool
@@ismirdochegal4804 Ah, yes .. the alluring sound of the frost maiden sing her night song to the moon.
Then you find out your party 10th-level wizard sought to join the frost giants the whole time.
Blender here. Start episodic, transition into serial. The episodes build and establish the world and characters. Over time plot seeds and continuity build up and then I can capitalize on the party's investment in the campaign by connecting dots in interesting ways that could only be possible because of the episodes.
Keep up the good work Mister Skorkowsky. Your channel is easily my favorite RPG channel.
I agree. Same characters (or troupe of characters), same world, but run it like an old school tv series, lots of stand alone episodes, if it works, it will grow. I mean even Tolkien started with just The Hobbit, way before he rolled out the Lord of the Rings saga. The take away is, remember to save something for the squeal.. ;)
Our group runs largely episodic, though episodes can take a few sessions (the breaks between sessions I even refer to as Add Breaks).
Bingo
Blender all the way.
Best of both worlds.
Yeah, on the whole, I agree. I like to have a storyline, but I also love it when my players have directions they would like to take things. Then everyone has a little more skin in the game, and it gives leeway for some really interesting turns.
If Star Trek is the episodic, you're describing the Deep Space 9 of campaigns. That's how I like to run things, too.
After all of your good vids, just hearing “Hello internet! Seth Skorkowsky here” makes my whole day better
Edit: I have no idea what you’re talking about, MacGyver is the best
Agreed
I agree wholeheartedly.
It's my drug.
Original MacGyver is the best. Not that new... thing.
Octo Dude But of course. I had assumed he was talking about the original
The X-Files: the best example of an episodic/saga combo
Episodes involving mutants: episodic
Episodes involving aliens: Saga
Episode involving Peacock family: Disturbing
I ran a pretty successful "five glowing gems" campaign years ago. We started with a dungeon crawl session in which the big reward at the end was a scroll (obviously magical, but in an ancient magical language none of the characters could read). They then found out it was one page of a super-powerful spell lost to the ages centuries before, and now that they'd found the first page they had a responsibility to find the (six) others, to ensure that the complete spell didn't fall into the wrong hands.
The quest ended up taking them from one end of my game world to the other, across multiple environments. The recovery of each hidden page was an episodic adventure unto itself, but we played the entire journey in between and had all kinds of adventures on the road. At one point they spent three or four sessions helping to overthrow an evil emperor and change the fate of a vast desert kingdom, and it wasn't even connected to the quest they were on. They just kinda got caught up in it on their way to the next page location.
What was the spell?
@@MrTybex Magic Missile.... LOL j/k
@@MrTybex I would like to know the spell as well.
By the way, the general term for "five glowing gems" is the "Plot Coupon". Players need to collect all the coupons then turn them in for one free plot resolution. (Used by TV Tropes, but it was used in a lot of places before that, and I think started as criticism of fantasy novels, especially those following the LotR style.)
Reminds me of the *Deltora Quest* series.
I thought it was called "macguffins" where you need to collect all of them in order to resolve the plot.
@@Adamlovesvideos MacGuffins are thingies that drive conflict (usually by desire to have it, I.E. a suitcase full of money or "state secrets" like a NOC list), but have no actual impact on the plot beyond being the nominal motivation for conflicting parties to conflict. Plot coupons are when you need to find x number of keys or y pieces of the lost artifact to redeem them for plot advancement (getting through the sealed door) or something actually useful to the plot (the holy artifact of destroying BBEGs and setting right what has gone wrong).
@@WraithMagus I see. Thank you for the clarification. I think both are useful for a campaign, but the way you describe it makes it sound like plot coupons are typically better for saga campaigns while macguffins are better for episodic campaigns. Though I'm willing to bet that both can be used in either if they're done well.
@@--enyo--I was thinking of either Legend of Zelda or older Final Fantasies.
I'm here to tell you you're going to LOVE Horror on the Orient Express, especially if you decide to throw in all the flashback sequences
I once cobbled together a version of this for fifth edition eberron before the source books came out and we had a blast.
@@beasleydad heresy
@@beasleydad i... i... i dont know what to feel
"And then there's West Marches campaigns ... don't ... don't worry about those, yet ..."
I read this as "Spinward marches"
I ran a 2-part mini adventure I wrote for teenagers at my local library which was very episodic. Part 1 was killing rats in the local mine and part 2 was defeating a necromancer who was causing trouble just outside of town. Both were postings on a job board in the local tavern. Very trope heavy, but very fun to do for middle schoolers who were just starting out. I feel that tropes are great for your first campaigns and as you gain experience, you can expand. But there is nothing wrong with being very cliche your very first time.
as Tv tropes said, Tropes are not bad, they are just names for common writing conventions.
And they're tropes for a reason, they're so good that people just copy them continuously
Everything is just a reworked trope at this point in human storytelling. People who hate on GMs authors and screenwriters for using tropes don’t truly understand storytelling or literature.
I’m starting an episodic campaign soon and because of time constraints and commitment I’m embracing the trope and cliche. I’m sure our group will enjoy it and we won’t have to think too hard. We’ll be able to get straight into the adventure.
Shadowrun introduced me to a more episodic way of running the game. Something I found out that it's perfect for a large group of players with inconsistent schedules.
I find out who can make it that week and then I can plan a mission "episode" that features the skills and story of the pc's that will be there that week.
I had 6 players and I would only cancel if 5 people couldn't make it. I had 3-4 people every week for over a year now. We've moved on from shadowrun but are continuing episodic style because it fits the players much better.
Great video, as always. When I saw it I had to laugh out loud--I have a very similar video coming out tomorrow-- I call it the "Star Wars" vs "Star Trek" campaign model I now look forward to my comment box being flooded with people writing, "Hey! You ripped off Skorkowsky!" Side note--I've run both Masks of Nyarlathotep and Horror on the Orient Express and "Horror" is easier to run. Go for it!
One of my GMs was actually also struggling with this concept of doing a big epic-scale campaign. She both felt intimidated to dedicate such a long time to it and would usually want to not shackle both herself and players to doing one campaign for what could span years. Her solution I thought was very clever. She started running a series of 3-8 session mini-series (depending on the engagement we have for the current thing) that show different vertical slices of her bigger universe from different times and locations. One game will focus on an underwater empire of Mermen trying to be culturally assimilated by both a dogmatic church-operated state and a nation of undead, but after wrapping that story for the time being, we go into a game set in the past after a horrible calamity wiped out the previous civilization, us living in it's ruins getting to see how the new world order was formed. This allows us both to witness many of the transpiring events and to cause important events that have impact in her world. It was a clever idea to tell a bigger story through the actions accomplished by many parties across the history of this world.
As for myself? I like to take a leisurely approach to DMing. I tend to set up more like a sandbox of smaller adventures, key characters or meaningful events that take place in wherever the players are and just kinda wait for the players to respond, letting them choose what they want to do with the stuff I plan. I caught this habit with my current group due to how much they wound up creating these session-long tangents for themselves that both slowed down the progression of the current adventure, but simultaneously the players were having too much fun with to stop or discourage from doing. So I began leaning on it, letting them go nuts with their little tangents and express themselves as players fully, while I merely pick and choose interesting bits for my characters to interact with.
AlluMan96 I really like the mini-series method of DMing! Not too long, not too short. Enough campaign to be satisfying and there’s not too much extraneous stuff either
@@wm2429
Having a cohesive world to do it in like she does also makes the mark we as players leave on the world feel more satisfying. One of my characters still exists in her setting and is a player in the larger events of the world. Another player's character has been promoted to a state of legend, where his exploits are the makings of countless stories and songs. By the time this level of status is granted to the player in a normal campaign, it's already over and we'll never see the setting again. With this setting, we not only gain acknowledgement of our accomplishments in the game, but also have active roles in shaping our little corners of the world. It's a longer-term commitment all it's own, but the steps made towards the end goal are made all the more great.
@@AlluMan96 That sounds intriguing, and I guess since it's history if something really dumb happens you can just have it be misremembered, in fact there should be some level of info corruption no matter what. But the control freak in me is still worried this method would end up littering history with king Hot Taco III or the cult of Poopy Butthole...
I suggest everyone to try out the anime route: you know in anime they usually go for a few plots before the story starts to form? I think that's a great way to start playing then, eventually, building up the world around the actions of the players rather than having to think about all those thinks immediately.
I think that can work perfectly fine but I think it’s also fine to put them into a premade world. Just because there’s already events in motion doesn’t mean it needs to take away player agency.
I prefer episodic campaigns loosely connected with actions and consequences. they're easier to make, the players can't derail them (unless they do something really, really stupid), and you can keep doing them for ages without ever repeating yourself or your players starting to lose interest.
Same. I find they’re actually great for the character development side of things, because you can balance the story more with the characters.
I’ve been running episodic adventures with my players in a homebrew setting, and letting them choose where they want to go next after each ‘episode.’ Each one is self-contained, but I’ve been careful to sprinkle in various clues pointing toward a larger narrative behind the scenes. It only took a few games for them to catch on to this, and now they’re choosing to adventure in areas where they think they will find more clues. Honestly, it’s made it easier on me as the DM and writer of the setting; they’ve done a good job of picking up the small details in each adventure and connecting them to one another. I haven’t had to beat them over the head with the clues, or make them so glaringly obvious. They also enjoy the aspect of exploring the setting on their own terms, and learning more about it as they go; they are excited every week to discover more, and it’s given me a lot of confidence and reassurance as a DM and writer.
Seth gives us a lot of good advice, but nothing so important as "It's probably best that you avoid rewatching Knight Rider". Seriously, just don't.
Y?
Because it's not as cool as you remember it being
I think Stargate still holds up.
@@--enyo-- it does honestly mostly because it didn't try to hard
MacGyver is still awesome. But it is pure cheese for most of the show. I rewatched the whole series three years ago, to the disdain of my wife, and I loved it.
My campaigns are always semi episodic with a long term goal in mind. I do have plans for a longer story but I focus on individual adventures instead, based on what my players want.
"Sporadic Attendance"... yup, that sums it up for my gaming group quite nicely :-)
I’m in the process of writing a ‘5 glowing crystals’ call of Cthulhu campaign for a group of friends, it’s a nice change of pace compared to my Saga game for my D&D group - this video was a big help as always Seth!
Loved your "bookend" campaign example with "the fugitive". That's the campaign I am running but could not put it into words so clearly.
Star Trek Adventures has the “Living Campaign” which opened the door to me as a GM, and it allowed me to tie together some old FASA and LUG modules... and this will allow me the time and experience to write my masterpiece
I blame The Lord of the Rings... When I DM'ed in highschool that was my template.
I recognize that plot armor guide! It’s from Terrible Writing Advice!
My Favourite Way is to have each Char having his own Goal. That Goal can be simple or Epic - the Players decide what they want for a "Plot". Then, I create an Atagonist for them who can be a Person or a Group of People. This often provides me with more than one Plot.
Then I create one or more "Group"-Atagonists: More or less BBEGs who spice up the Episodes and are not created specificly against one Char rather to annoy the whole Party somehow.
After that, I set "Stepstones" for the Players Goals so they do not immediatly get to the End of their personal Journey.
Finally, I come up with some "Introducement-Adventure" where the Party meets. At the End of it I ask them what they are planning to do next - whoose personal Agenda will they follow?
Upon this decision I come up with a new Adventure/Episode which will be somehow get "Sabotaged" by one of the "Group-Atagonist" if it does not contain a specifc personal Atagonist of one of the Chars - yeah, that can end in multiple Atagonists working against the Party at once.
This Way, I always have some Inspiration and my Players "get what they want".
Also, changing Chars are no big Deal due to them bringing the Plot along - if the evil Kings illegit Son is not present, the Party has no reason to pursue his Agenda of taking over the Throne, but still will have another one like the Mage now paying for a Trip into the Jungle to find the lost Shrine of Rh'zzach to finally reassemble the Staff of Ch'rrych for preventing the extraplanar Demon Yogg-hurt to take over his Mind. Even if amidst in a Storyarc, the Char can have "something important to do" and so the Party can have a "in-between-Adventure". F.E. when the Rogues Player is not present, let the other Players have to prove his innocence in a murder Case while he is imprisoned.
I do personal goals for my characters and request them for all the characters when I am the DM.
I like running connected mini-series. 2 to 4 sessions exploring thing, then then a connection session then off to the next mini series.
Don't forget that episodics don't *have* to involve travelling around the world! If you have the game based around a place that naturally has lots to offer (ie, a large city), it's perfectly possible to have a series of largely unrelated adventures within that single setting. Think of the old Spider-Man cartoon- he never leaves New York because he doesn't have to, there's plenty to see and do in just that one location.
I love watching you slowly going mad over time. Giving the voices in your head some screen-time is very generous
You've convinded me to try this on my next campaign. Currently running a saga, and while that is fun (especially with the PCs returning to earlier locations to observe the concequences of their actions), scheduling 5-6 players is very difficult, and I'm getting increasingly afraid to write myself into a corner as the plot just gets more and more complicated.
You should have a look at Mutant: Year Zero. It scratches both itches. There is an overriding meta-plot that you can introduce or not as you see fit, several fleshed out adventure/encounters that you can drop in, but it is also very player driven. The players create their home base and some of the npcs they interact with, they choose how to develop this base (do they choose croplands to increase their food supply? Or do they make schools to make their people literate? But the threats from the Zone make those defences look pretty good...) and often choose where they are going and what they are setting out to achieve. It really encourages player involvement in describing the world as they explore. I've been running a game for a while now, and we're having a blast with it. I have 6 players (probably a few too many, but I'm managing) and the nature of the game allows them to drop in and out if some people are unable to play. The level of player investment is really high, because the world feels more theirs than mine to them.
I really like the Mutant: Year Zero format too. And each of the installments are their own scenario that can all eventually intersect in the Zone it the players and GM like. My problem is not all my players like the setting. So I am currently about to start a space sci-fi game using Fragged Empire rules but modeling the campaign off of Mutant, with the Meta-plot, adventure encounters, a zone of sorts and a home base pressure cooker to build and manage.
Oh man, Seth! Everytime you come out with a video it always perfect coincides with what me and my group are doing. Especially your vid about player compatibility and this one! We are moving from our D&D saga to a more episodic (and easier to follow) Call of Cthulhu campaign. Great content as always, man! 👍
TheDilden - Seth got me into Call of Cthulhu. I couldn’t be happier to leave D&D 5e behind for a while.
Hey, newbie game master here! First of all I want to thank you for getting me into dm-ing, Seth! It's great fun and I really wanted to get into playing tabletop RPGs, especially after stumbling onto your channel and your epic Call of Cthulhu - 101 series, but none of my friends had ever RPed either. So eventually I decided to just give it a shot and run a one-shot of Mister Corbitt for Call of Cthulhu…
That one-shot then blossomed into a whole campaign which took us 5 8-hour sessions over 6 months to complete. It involved the investigators going after rampaging man eating plants, taking ladders to the ‘nads, one of them briefly dying and coming back as a tiny creepy bone dolly and riding a startled cat all the way across Arkham, fighting crazed satanic cultists in hospital basements and negotiating with giant dimension-hopping invisible spiders. I can’t recommend this enough. Wanna experience the craziest adventure you never would’ve imagined possible? Just grab some buddies and some dice and roll, my friend. Just leave your sanity by the door xD
Anyway, our campaign was sort of a mix between the episodic and the saga, with each session having its’ own mini boss of sorts, with the overarching Corbitt-mystery slowly getting revealed piece by piece, as the investigators learned more. And initially I thought I had messed up big time, since a scenario that was supposed to only have taken 4 hours at most was now entering its’ 16th hour and showed no signs of ending. But my players had fun. And I had fun.
Bottom line: Don’t be afraid to dm. You don’t have to plan the entire Lord of the Rings out from the start, just give the hobbits a kick out the door, let them make their own decisions and see where the dice take you.
I also find the hybrid style to work best (for most of the time); it both helps negate the player's fatigue from following the same story thread all the but it also helps the GM to deal with player decisions that contradict the intended "main quest" path by making it a side story.
I really needed to hear exactly this right now. My saga-style campaign that I run is getting out of hand and I'm burning out. I don't want to end it because the players have been so great and all their characters are awesome. I think I can save the campaign by running intermittent episodes every once in a while until I get back in the mood to continue the story. Thank you Seth.
I like Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu. It is a huge saga campaign, but also very sandbox-y. I'm running the 7th edition now, and I highly recommend it. It has an opening prologue chapter that isn't very connected to the main plot, which is great to let new players get the feel of the setting and the rules before the main plot begins. And from there, the players can chart their own way through the story, without the need to follow some pre-determined path the GM has set up. :)
Damn, sometimes I forget how good the advice in this channel is. Thanks, Seth, it helped me put a lot of things in perspective. Transitioning from being a White Wolf storyteller to an OSR D&D dungeon master is tricky.
Funny; I'm just outlining a campaign for OSE that we'll be starting over the summer. Worked into the backstories of several PCs are hints that will link up to the long term goal of acquiring a number of rune stones that they'll need to combat the machinations of the big bad far down the road who they will (much later) realize is also seeking these rune stones to activate an evil artifact he has acquired. But the first couple stones are going to be in treasure hoards in their first couple adventures....Great minds, Seth.
I've just committed to the Dolmenwood setting with my new group for OSE
1) Todd and Mike can pound sand; MacGuyver is still cool.
2) My group and I prefer a playstyle that starts out episodic and slowly morphs into something more saga-like. This lets the players and GM try the setting out and see how they like it, fine-tune their characters a little, and lets the GM get his or her metaphorical feet under them before launching into an epic saga.
This video is very helpful for people starting out because I know plenty of people who are nervous about coming up with giant sagas and coming up with something new every single week. My personal journey with figuring out what I wanted to do as a game master was running a small test campaign that I stitched together using different maps and hook ideas while creating a meta story line. The campaign's summary was the gods are playing their version of dnd and your characters are their PCs. It opened the door to not only show bits and pieces of the world but also helped the players learn the system and me to learn how to run things. The main goal was get through this game as intact as possible while going through 'the whims of gods' so every week could possibly be something different. One god that is all about combat says "we're doing a battle royale" and one god that is interested in mystery decides the PCs are going to have to solve this small town 'who done it'. After that, I figured that I enjoyed how many anime run things. They have an overarcing theme/storyline but something they have to do from time to time is put in some downtime for a variety of reasons. I like having this option for downtime because I've noticed sometimes players get kind of burnt out or overwhelmed when there's constant doom and gloom so they appreciate having 'a beach episode' or 'a xmas episode' so that their characters can bond, reflect, and everyone in and out of the game can get revitalized about what's going to happen next. The meta storyline also allowed me to show that players can have input too because this is a game we are playing together and the conflicts that could happen and we could possibly deal with them. It was a nice test run for a variety of topics and aspects of the game. Even dying in the campaign had a very strange bug attached to it. Yeah, the gods could bring your character back but there was going to be a catch that you might not appreciate. So it opened the door that resurrection was a thing in the game but there were consequences to it and hurdles that had to be overcome. It opened the dialogue for what would be the same in the main campaign and what would be different and the options available given the classes that people picked. It made it where people actually thought of being a cleric/paladin without the stereotypical baggage that sometimes comes with it. So that's a tiny bit of my experience. The anime format fit with me and my group pretty well and we mostly figured out what generally worked for us through our weird meta storyline. I hope this helps people out a bit. ^-^
Just ran across this now and loved it. We have been playing Conan 2d20 for the last year and our game is an episodic saga campaign. As players we each made 2 characters in a village on the Frontier that our Jarl was instructed to expand and make work. We choose which character we want to use on each mission/ quest so we end up with various combinations of skills both social and combat which makes for interesting game play and interaction. We are presented after every mission with new choices and the ones we don't take, don't go away, they evolve or resolve with varying consequences to our environment. To mKe it more interesting we have 5 friends playing NPC BBG's who our DM consults on a weekly basis to find out what they will be doing(but doesn't discuss it amongst the BBG's or players). All of this has led to one of the greatest adventures I have ever played in
Everything I run is a Saga and I've learned how to work around attendance or player dropping. You have to be so good at Dm'ing if they don't show up they know they're missing out on something truly special. Creates a sense of "I really have to show up this week!" because they don't want to miss out on the experience. That and also just getting player's that you know are in-tune to the style and narrative of the game you wish to run. I think that's the most important part in obtaining long running campaigns, I have two campaigns that're a year old and they're both absolutely amazing with 70% of the original starting cast still a part of the group and the other 30% are there to stay. Once an established group is found, it's really easy to get player's to "buy in" to a long running campaign as it's already been going for so long the likelihood that newcomer's who join. Will actually stay given the track record.
Seth, you just gave me a great idea: have you guys seen Sliders? It's a TV show from the 90s, about a group of people jumping between parallel universes, trying to get back to their own. They always spend a few days in one world, and then they have to go, because if they miss their portal, they are stuck. That would be the perfect framework for a fun, universe-hopping episodic campaign.
Due to sporadic attendance in my online group, we decided for a West Marches style campaign. The adventures themselves were episodic, finished in a single session. The adventures often provide hooks for the players to follow if they are interested. This, hopefully, leads to a sense of continuity. There are also some stories going on in the background, inter-tribal goblin war, an imprisoned demon and turncoat priests, that the players can get involved with if they want.
Man, his videos look so freakin crisp now. Come a long way, love that I've been here since the beginning.
Savage Worlds uses a system called "plot point campaign". They are episodic campaigns with plot adventures or details at key points. eg. "when the players reach level 4, run this adventure" or "when they go to Egypt, this happens". The campaign I'm about to run even recommends running stand alone adventures between the plot points.
I'm currently running a Star Trek campaign and I'm writing every mission in a four act structure like the series. However, in each mission I have some detail they have to interact with that ties into what I'm using as the overreaching plot. Thus far, I don't think my players have figured out where some of them are connected and I'm hoping for a real ah ha moment at the end of "season 1."
I usually enjoy doing the episodic saga storytelling in my campaigns like this and one of the things that's really helped me in this are two TV series, Leverage and the Liberians. They both have John Rogers as the show runner and he does a great job of using monster of the week to push the overall story along. The Leverage DvD's have a great set of commentary tracks where he and the other writers and directors talk about story telling, villains, and piecing things together. The 1st season of the Liberians also has the best monster of the week saga's I've ever seen. In order to defeat the villain they needed at least 1 thing from every episode of the season or their plan wouldn't have worked. As a writer and a GM, it's impressive to watch.
Also, MacGyver rocks...
Another one that's really good. there's a system called Through the Breach. Character creation involves reading each characters fortune. This gives each character a five line fate poem. Every session deals with one live of a players fate. When every players poem is resolved the campaign is over. It takes a little bit of work to thematically tie the characters fate to the adventures, but I found it very rewarding and a lot of fun. The campaign is weird west and I know that won't be for everyone, but the tool of giving your campaign a timer worked really well.
I hope the payoff was a good one for the first season! Sounds really fun.
Really good advice, been struggling with this myself as my group are eager to play but just can't fit a game in. so I've been thinking of running a series of episodic sessions, linked by an over arching plot at the end.
Perfect! Don't forget to have what went on the first time bite the next group in the ass.
A LOT of what seem to us (audience) as grander epic Sagas can be (and probably have been) written entirely as episodic creations... For slightly more recent than Seth's reference here... Think "Supernatural"... Each season has a general arc to get through, and eventually the seasons add up to a greater "growth arc" and then you can follow long enough to "get" the bigger picture of the "whole story"...
If there's a drawback, in GM'ing a LOT of episodic Campaigns, it would be the ability to notice the obvious spots where a favorite TV show or even a Mini-series was obviously being done "episodically" and the writers "wrote themselves into a corner" and had no choice in a cheap outcome... (ah... but I digress)
Okay, McGuffins are a GREAT way to tie this kind of thing together. I don't just mean Seth's "Five Gems" technique, either... SO get a little creative...
Need a reason to tie the PC's to this "new plot line"... Symbols of your earlier BBEG that got away... Frustrated Players will DIVE full-bore on a lingering loose end. You DO have to "reward" this behavior, but you don't necessarily have to give up the end-goal any earlier than you need.
For example, you can have the BBEG building a whole force for the Players to deal with at higher levels... SO you NEED a symbol... Let's go with a "Black Hand". In the first little adventure, a series of investigative and occasionally violent sessions get the PC's to track this "weird cult of the Black Hand" to a hideout... Obviously, we want our BBEG to avoid being murdered... BUT there should be a climactic fight (so a fairly challenging number of these "cultists" can be there.) AND a reward... Rescue who-ever or Loot the Whatever... or a nice spot of both... to finish the plot... AND among the loot, there should be some serious indications that somebody has been there a LOT higher rank than anyone they captured/killed... Lay kind of heavy on "Black Hands" painted, emblazened, even onyx and obsidian settings for some gemstone values... in the shapes of black hands...
The next few adventures can feature nifty little side-quests, and bits of backstory... some odd relatives with struggles to solve (no need to kidnap or murder everyone precious to PC's) and maybe the odd "dark town secret/scandal" to uncover... THEN you finally have a clever idea to tie this BBEG plot together for a leg... and you're anxious to move the plot...
SO... one of the regular "quest givers" has some news about a gruesome bit of activity a town or two over... blah-blah-blah... something remarkably evil... (pepper a few details "the way the BBEG would do it") blah-blah... AND they found something like "this" and drop a big fat Black Hand symbol in their laps.
AND you can then run however many sessions you like on this new "plot movement" before going back to sidequests, antics, a bit of "kobold krushing" so the party feels "bad-ass" and gets to show off a little... maybe a shenanigan or two to buy some time (while you deliciously plod through the details of your BBEG's next moves, new levels of difficulty, etc..
This is the basic process I've used for decades to let the Players explore the world, allow others to "take over GM'ing" when they have adventures to run... and to encourage everyone at the Table to participate in the GM'ing process to get a feel from both sides of the screen... We only occasionally make specific agreements about "Don't mess with my bad-guy", so everyone can even take up a little larger Plot Arc along their way.
Sure, we do run into "continuity" and "consistency" issues... BUT not nearly as troublesome as you'd think. AND this mention of "My Table's Way" isn't to sell our style to you... Instead, it's more an example. If we can manage the Largest Arcs with episodic approach and TRADING GM privileges, you shouldn't worry too much about "being a bit all over the place" while you build your own adventure Sagas episodically on your own...
...AND hell, if you think it might be fun to swap the screen around... try it out. I admit, I'm a physical Table type Role Player and GM. (It might make a difference) BUT we've encouraged a lot more to take up the screen and GM at our Table as well as others, and helped season more GM's than shut them down. ;o)
@@gnarthdarkanen7464 Supernatural is a GREAT model for an episodic saga. Plus, the music rocks.
@@MonkeyJedi99 Thanks... I thought so.
Bobby's always going to be my favorite Character... AND I just thought it a more likely useful model than about anything else that came to mind for others to "quickly reference" and understand it.
I mean, you can just watch one or two episodes per season and see differences along with consistency all the way through. ;o)
That knight rider and macgyver callout feels directed specifically at me.
I don’t often have a long story plot line going into my campaigns, but I don’t do episodic either. I think up the story of the next session and how it will turn based on the actions of the players, and then plan the next session at the end of the current session.
An old magic the gathering card’s flavor text describes my RPG writing style pretty well: “I don’t have a plan, just a goal. The rest will figure itself out.”
Just got the mail your book's out. Wohoo! :D
Oh, and we just found out our Chinchillas got a child earlier this morning.
And both of those within 15 min of getting up, so this is shaping up to be a REALLY good day.
I find myself describing my campaign format as being kinda like Buffy. Sessions are largely adventures of the week, but they're tied to a common place with ongoing backburner boss archs that players learns bits and pieces about across sessions. It gives my group flexibility in terms of attendance and game style while still allowing them to develop relationships with NPCs and feel longer-term consequences in the world. I also love that they frequently have to share information with one another instead of always getting it from me.
I think another way to look at the 'five gems' example is the cartoon 'Samurai Jack' . He knows he needs to find the time portal to go back in time so that's the end goal, what follows is a series of episodic adventures that gives him clues as to where the portal could be. Along the way he fights of the forces of evil, saves people, encounters gods, demons, fake portals ect ect.
Wanted to let you know my group is now starting Call of Cthulhu. I personally write my own stories, and am starting with a more episodic chronicle. I am also taking a look at real world stuff in the 1920's for inspiration. So thank you for reintroducing me to Call of Cthulhu.
I'm mostly making my first game episodic with a mission based gameplay with each one connecting a bigger saga with their mission giver being the one that ties them to the larger story.
Todd doesn't know anything, Knight Rider and MacGyver are still awesome. Dated? maybe, but still awesome :)
The only things that are "dated" are things that were chintzy from its onset (Box from Logan's Run, This Island Earth). There's a certain charm and verisimilitude in past efforts.
Cheesy? Yes, even back then. Entertsining? Yes.
Heh, chatting with my boyfriend who's also one of my GMs as I was watching and we were just talking about essentially the "5 magical gems" plot as the video progressed and how it feels like it was a good sub type of "bookend" campaign and how it reminded us of so many arcs of the adventure cartoons we grew up on like Digimon (Tags and Crests), Jackie Chan Adventures (Tailsmans), Sailor Moon (The Rainbow Crystals that form the Silver Crystal) and then that part of the video popped up and I had to smile.
I'm doing the "Five Glowing Gems" method for my current campaign. We're playing D&D 5e set in the Multiverse of Magic: the Gathering. Once we reached a certain point, I asked each of the players to pick out a Legendary Artifact card from M:tG, and that would be the McGuffin (an artifact magic item) that their character would need to face the final boss. Then we set out on a series of planehopping adventures to collect their powerful magic items!
Oh god Seth! Your DM sin is popping up lol. But seriously I do hope you do The horror on the orient express someday soon.
Since I've had a glimpse of this majestic box of a campaign in Seth's hands now I totally want him to do it too.
BTW, you got my group playing CoC. Mike Riggoletti and associates have really learned how strange and dark New Orleans van be. They are going to soon find an on going plot simply because there are powerful forces who are noticing their interference.
Good breakdown! A good example of a "Five Glowing Gems" campaign would be The Adventure Zone podcast. A great listen if anyone hasn't already... A lot of the game was episodic, but definitely tied together very well at the end.
Great advice!
My current campaign has been going for nearly a year. Here is how I came up with the grand plot:
1) After staying away from D&D since 3rd edition released, I picked up 5e and could immediately see it was going to be too easy for my veteran group.
2) Problems included too easy to rest, too easy to heal, too easy to resurrect.
3) To fix resurrection, the plot needed to make necromancy forbidden to the party. So the setting will be a plot where necromancy is causing big problems (demonic and monster attacks) and the players will come to realize that, in order to fix the problem, they would need help for the good gods who had already forbidden it. I also created a detailed lasting wounds system for when a character went under 0 HPs. This has worked excellently to take the extremely cream-puff rules of 5e into something where some caution is needed.
4) To fix the too easy to rest issue, I created a dense world with encounter areas that would make resting difficult. This didn't work very well, because fighting junk encounters to stop resting isn't fun. So, I had to rely on the same solution used for the final problem to fix this one. However, in creating the dense setting area, it was easy to build a detailed plot that tied the various groups together, gave them motivations, and played into the main plot, which turned out to be an intricate story that fell into place around a dwarven genius (inspired by an amazing map of a broken dwarven forge dungeon). This had me weave in the need to reforge one of the lights that held the darkness back (this is from Tolkien's larger body of lore) as the main goal of the quest (still unknown to the players).
5) The final problem was too easy to heal, which is linked with too easy to rest. I fixed both by creating encounters between 2 and 5 times above the recommended encounter power. So they are all far beyond deadly encounters. This fixed the final problem, keep the game rolling and fun, and allowing for a wipe to end the campaign with a loss. In my view, this is among the elements of a truly epic campaign.
So it was problems with the target RPG system that required "reasons" that were all the basis of the key points of the campaign. Also, I did use the bookend method of deciding the end of the plot after doing about 6 months of early adventures. I like tweaking the overall story to the party by having a vague ending until I size up their goals. In this case, with one dwarf and one human player, this worked perfectly. Dwarven cleric got the word from his good god about what needed to be done, and the human needed to find out about the small war, since censored by both sides, between human and dwarf, which held the key to finding the forge and the key to progressing and finishing the main plot.
Still in progress at about level 9 and should end (if they make it) around level 17.
I think another big plus side of episodic or even semiepisodic sessions is it can really give players satisfaction from completing something. Even if there is some hook or cliff hanger, most episodic stories have a very distinct episode challenge to defeat. No waiting 6 months to feel like you've even done anything
The more TH-cam videos and photoshops I do, the more respect I have for Seth. Consistent quality in both presentation and content is hard to achieve on a weekly schedule.
I'm a blender, but too often, I rely on a completely created world with a little wiggle room, but not enough - and I have sporadic player attendance. Great tips on how to design around these difficulties!
Another type of blended campaign that I generally run resembles a season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Structurally it's episodic but in the background is an overarching plot to stop the Big Bad. I love this approach because while I'm able to indulge my desire to run a saga it allows me to lean on published modules (with minor alterations) to use as individual episodes. As an adult faced with the attendance problems you describe I find this works very well because no individual character is ever going to be essential to an adventure.
My first DnD group was a blend of these, we pinballed around until we found something really interesting and then let the dm know that this is what we're interested in
The 5 glowing gems campaign...
Or, the four Crystals of Light campaign.
This warms my Final Fantasy loving heart.
Awesome vids Seth! Thanks for all the AD&D content over the years.
One of the "five gems" campaigns that I've always wanted to run or play in is "The Rod of Seven Parts" from the AD&D days. It is on a shelf in my closet right now next to the boxed sets for "Temple of Elemental Evil" and "The Ruins of Undermountain" (both 1 and 2). All I have been able to do is use parts of those in my campaigns so far.
I once ran a west marches game, and the group Dwarf made it into a Five Gems Campaign. He decided that, a few years before, he had broken a table. He had promised the bartender that he would replace it with a special table: the Ivory Table, a table upon which adventurers had scratched a map of the local region. It was now in pieces, so he traveled about in search for the missing pieces. It was positively hilarious
I'm running my first serious campaign as DM and I pretty much do episodic adventures set against a large saga style story. I just pepper in bits to tie it together or bring new information to light and every so often have a clearly connected adventures. Right now they're wandering across the country so it's really easy to come up with a session that happens to interest me week to week. I have three major story beats planned out, so I have an idea of where I want them to go without having put a ton of work into establishing exactly how they need to get there. Get the best of both worlds, and at least the group is having fun and has stuck together for 13 sessions.
I run my campaign as a saga with "filler episodes". If more than one player is missing, we just play an episode that isn't going to move the plot a lot, but will give them plenty of fun interacting with the world.
I have run huge saga style games (multiple years) where I had an overall plot, usually a beginning, middle and end. These are a lot of fun. The players know they are having a big impact on the world. I have also run very episodic/sandbox style games. Players drove what would happen based on what their characters wanted to achieve. And they were also a lot of fun because I would only build what I needed based on what they wanted to do. It also gave me a chance to run episodes that might be very much like an old movie or TV show (for instance re-enacting Yojimbo).
Perfect timing. I was feeling worried about what I'm starting TOMORROW and to hear about the "5 glowing gems" makes me feel at ease that something similar has a "name". (Five glowing bosses in this case). I'm used to bookending and it just felt like this new style might solve all the issues with my current gaming context.
I like the 2005 - 2009 Doctor Who approach. Drop little hints in some episodic games for a big finale, things that will seem insignificant or could be missed entirely by the players. Then, for the end, drop in a short saga.
Another benefit of fully episodic campaigns is that it's super easy for someone to guest GM and give the primary GM a break, Hell there might not even be an official GM and the only thing that stays consistent is the characters and basic setting
I do a bit of a funnel. Early sessions I let the characters pick the path they take with no real set goals, but then I start adding in goals according to their play style and start narrowing in focus. I throw in some adventure cues and design a few encounters along the way.
Good stuff! I like to run a hybrid game with some individual adventures and dungeon crawls interspersed with some longer multi-session story lines. And of course, it's easy to drop little hints to link even the one-shots to an overarching theme. You can use a dungeon crawl to introduce a cult that will later be important (just an example), or someone the PCs face off against in a relatively low stakes encounter might resurface down the road. I like recurring characters and villains that keep popping up.
Best RPG channel on YT. Thanks for all the excellent content! Cheers.
Great video, lots of ideas. We live at a time when the hobby has never been more accessible with the proliferation of games being streamed online, but many of these games feature veteran players and have juicy budgets for miniatures, scenery etc (Critical Role) and that is very intimidating for rookies. My advice is start small, tell an episodic story focused on a single settlement or location. Add layers to the story as you go & things will often grow organically into something much larger in scale. You don’t even need a clear destination in mind, just play sandbox.
I've been over the past year trying out many different systems online with friends and have been doing them as one-shots. It was a little weird for me at first since my friends who got me into tabletop in the first place along with all major module and video references being sagas really railroaded us into pure saga play. The only derivations were a one-shot now and then when we needed a quick break or when I got the COC 7e book and blended all the modules included into a connected yet still mostly episodic campaign. Now doing all these one-shots have really shown me the importance of smaller factored stuff, whether fully individual or as an episodic campaign. Sometimes a one-shot of "you're in a town hanging out and... boom, orcs are besieging the town, what do" if welcome after so much of the 5 crystals mass effort to get the big thing done. Also an idea I've always had for a campaign but haven't gotten around to yet is same characters, different systems. I got the idea from those memory crystals from Planescape: Torment. The idea would be the party had to 5 crystals' clues from these extra-dimensional memories, which plopped them into different systems and worlds, almost Time Splitters 2 style.
Great vid. I'd love it if you could do a follow up with ways to mitigate some of the weak points of each style. Like how to deal with plot armor without killing the beloved characters.
Keep up the good work! Cheers!
Thanks Seth for the clarity.
You rock, Seth! Great advice for newcomers and equally great refreshers for vets.
Great video... personally i tend to create a blended campaign "soft saga". i have a few things that i'm seeding since the start but most of the adventures, are short independent plots with a few connections with the saga.
Like, having a "cult" and every adventure is independent, but all have "something" with the cult. like the time when they found the abandoned dwarven temple, but it was profaned with undead, and the "source" of those undead was a corrupted dwarven. and he was corrupted by someone in the cult. (that gives them a breadcrumb trail and at the same time you have creative freedom to plot each adventure independently )
Super late to watching this, but I wanted to thank you for making this video, Seth! I am a very new DM, and I've struggled with plotting my first campaign; which is a Ravenloft one, using a blend of new and old content. It's fun content, but there's sooo much! So hearing your advice has allowed me to plot more effectively for short and longer term play of my first game. I think I'll aim for a "Blended + 5 Glowing Gems" type game. Tried and true methods of running a game! Thanks again Seth, your advice and experience is much appreciated as always :)
Happy to be of help. Good luck on the campaign.
Thank you for this video. You've helped me steer my campaign plans in the right direction.
My big campaign took place as a level by level increase of different episodes on one continent in which the players could roll a new character whenever they wanted until level 10. All the while hearing tidbits of stories of the other continent.
After the 10th episode the king called for a warship to invade and chart the mysterious new world continent. While aboard this ship I allowed the players to cycle back to any prior character they had and boost it to level 10.
Upon landing in the new continent they discovered a portal to hell had opened and demons had established a kingdom and the long saga progressed from there.
A good mixture of both can be really effective - my characters visit wildly different locations and have very different adventures (like Monster of the Week) but all the adventures tie together into the overall grand quest (for my guys, it's stopping the Old Gods)
I’ve been asked about this a lot by new/potential players. This is a really good video for explaining it.
Rewatching a few months later. The point around 12:00 comes up a lot in a few CoC Facebook groups I’m in. A new person will post something like ‘I just discovered this game, I’ve never played before but I found a bunch of people to run for. I’m really excited, do you guys have any tips?’
And yeah, the responses are almost unanimously along the lines of ‘Woah, slow down. Play a few games first, and then start with running one shots or some shorter scenarios to get into the swing of things.’
I think as you say a lot of people come from D&D (particularly 5e) with a perception the only way to do a TTRPG are these saga campaigns.
Great timing! Two weeks from now is our session 0 for an episodic type campaign. We were getting tired last year of not everybody being at the sessions so I’m catering smaller one shots to use as episodes for each session. That way I can grab one day of and make sure it hit all or most of the characters (and PCs) goals.
I'm a big fan of Seth. I actually started running Call of Cuthulu because of his videos. I'm running Horror on the Orient right now actually. It's a five gem campaign, and about half that box is props and research about the Orient Express and the cities. It's actually really cool
I always do the blender... :)
I call it, the first adventures are season one of my series, like in babylon 5, where everything was set up, and in later adventures everything i laid out eventually comes together to form the overall plotark.
That worked pretty well on my shadowrun campaign i ran last year and that is about to end in 4 or 5 weeks :)
that was a lot of fun, and in late summer 2019 i said - ok guys, everything i laid out from january to about june finally pays off and pays dividents now.
And ohhhhhh boy it did. BBEG had been on screen 3 times till that moment, but wasn't visible as BBEG. A heist they did earlier that year, turned out to be super crucial to the story at large.
and everyone was pretty flabbergasted by how it turned out to be later, since now they tend to recall most events i laid out back there, giving us back all the funny memories.
it also helps that one player decided to write an in character diary of everything out of character view, and we had a showcase, where they put in some items they found during the adventures/runs.
Like a hold-out pistol from boss 1, or a pilots hat as they captured a plane, or that collar of the guarddog from complex 1 they broke in ^^
selfies etc.
it's pretty fun to see how this showcase and that diary evolves.
it also helps that everything is online, since we play on role 20 ^^
I like the breakdown you do with these meta subjects. It helps naming things and structuring thoughts.
When I was writing my Weird West TTRPG, I called One (Or two) Shots a Lyric (also Limerick and Verse work here), Adventures or short modules were called Ballads (or Song), and Campaigns were called Epics (or Saga). Ballads had a nice western sounding feel while also referencing Tolkien and GRRM as well as invoking writing terminology and old world poetry. I felt it also gave a nice understanding of a game and how in depth it should be and how much work to put in.
A Lyric/Limerick/Verse is short statement, possibly a joke, about a person or group. The entirety of my plot and story should be feasibly written in 2-5 lines. If you imagine it musical, the rhyme is the theme and Aesop. A memorable limerick is possible, but it's going to take a lot of editing and re-working to make it stand the test of time and mean something or be extremely funny for the target audience. Writing reliably memorable limericks take an immense amount of skill, but ever once in a while a random individual can write something profound. Either way, it won't waste much of someone's time, so you're better off just throwing it out there and seeing if something sticks.
A Ballad/Song is longer and more complex telling a complete story. The entirety of the plot should be able to be written somewhere between half a page to a few pages and a detailed recount story could fill a short book or movie. Or in the words of Justin Timberlake and Madonna: You've only got 4 minutes. Again, if you image it as a song, the rhyming schemes and repetitive nature should be hammering home the theme and concept of your plot. This can have multiple themes/rhyming schemes, but a memorable one plays with one or two. A memorable song is very possible. Some will like it, some will hate it, and someone might love it until the end of time. It's not too hard to write a song and even someone new to the scene can write an instant hit.
An Epic/Saga is several stories interacting with each other weaving complex narrative and will take time to uncover and understand the themes and Aesops. Each player should have their own special arcs working in tandem with the story while reinforcing the literary elements of the main plot. Several songs or stories should be not only working together but building upon each other. Your story could fill a thick book. It could be a trilogy. It could be a full series. It will have a plethora of minor themes all swirling around a central themes. Think Tolkien, GRRM, the Dune series, and all the other complex classics. Some parts might not be as memorable as others, but it is going to take skill to not make it feel like a bloated mess littered with plot holes. When you're done with it, even if it wasn't your audience's favorite, they will never forget it and if you're lucky, it will be something they'll compare everything else to.
It's a bit odd calling them that in public, but privately, it has vastly helped my writing by judging what kind of a story I want to tell or how long a plot will take and how much room to I have to tell my story. If it's a Lyric, most my time will be spent editing an idea down and condensing it to the core message. A ballad has a bit of wiggle room for the story, but I won't have too much time to play around with the backstory of my characters. An epic has all the time in the world to play with ever facet of each character and have several antagonists. It also fits nicely with the idea that an epic is several connected ballads which is a series of connected lyrics. I felt it worked better than One Shot, Adventure, and Campaign. Still haven't finished my TTRPG though. You got me distracted on a Cyberpunk 2077 epic.
In regards to your Five Glowing Gems style campaign, I believe the literary term for the "gems" is Plot Coupons. They're not MacGuffins or plot devices because what they are matters, but they are kind of like plot devices you collect and cash in at the end of the story.
This is a really good video and something I never really thought about until you put it into words. I am one of those people who was introduced to TTRPG's through D&D but when it came to being a GM I cut my teeth on Call of Cthulhu (which your videos are what made me really want to play it). I ran a campaign for a little under a year and it was very episodic, each session my players would be able to start and finish most adventures, but as I got better with the rules and my storytelling I was able to end the campaign with one big saga that lasted 10 or 12 sessions. I had my BBEG be one of my player's character from a dark future. It was a lot of fun.
Seth! I love watching your videos and have used them to build my confidence and finally venture into the brave new world of being a GM! Thank you so much!!
As a fan of White Wolf and the World of Darkness it was exciting to hear you mention them! Do you think you'll ever do a video on any of their systems or games?
Since I'm a very story-based GM/DM/Storyteller/Keeper/etc I tend to think of it as Novel vs Short Story. With the option of a Novella in there as well, or perhaps done as a Serial.
[] *Novel* maps onto "epic campaign" where there's a big ol' story that will be traversed through, taking a year or maybe more. The metaphor breaks down a little if you start asking about multi-novel sagas like you get in the fantasy genre. I tend to lump those into the same category since the only practical reason for multiple books for a single story is that there are limits to what binding can accomplish.
[] *Short Story* maps onto one-shot pretty well. In my experience a true one-shot (i.e. one session only) game is quite rare, and my "one shots" tend to last for two or three sessions on average.
[] *Novella* lands between these two extremes. And this is where I tend to be most comfortable running games. The story isn't an epic, but it's not simple either. I'd say it takes 10 to 20 sessions to complete, with some wiggle room on either end. If one were to go for a TV/Move metaphor, I suppose this would be the single-season show, or mini-series. I particularly enjoy this length of game because by the time a campaign would be dragging, the intermediate "Novella" story is instead ratcheting up for its conclusion.
[] *Serial* games would be the analog for the episodic structure. How long it goes is unknown, and while there is _probably_ some through line from one installment to the next (and like a "one shot", these may in practice wind up being a couple sessions each) there might not be anymore connective tissue than the basic setup (i.e. a shady detective agency, scoundrels with a spaceship, etc.). You could treat it like installments in a slightly disjointed novel, or equivalent to issues of a comic book, or installments in a long-running series of adventure stories, a la Sherlock Holmes). Personally I find this about equally difficult to run as a massive Novel/Campaign/Saga game because I _need_ some sort of framework to contain things, and if there's the potential for it to go on forever, I actually lose interest as the person running the game.
In my current campaign players have 3 versions of their characters: One low level, one mid level and one high level. The campaign started with them being naked in a prison cell with no memories of their history at all. They freed themselves and found some epic items that their feeling was that they must belong to them. After that they fought an enemy that they must have come across already, because he knew them, and then headed off to a village nearby. They can use tokens to get their memories back piece by piece, and I will create adventures for them depending on what they want to memorize. We are still in the phase where they met each other and had some minor adventures, but - who knows - maybe we will find out how the elf got her epic bow soon. :-D
I hadn't considered an episodic format, and my pitch idea might fit rather well with that; Lowmagic Medieval Xcom/witcher focusing more on investigations surrounding the supernatural rather than combat, with them travelling around to problem areas to root out rumours.
I really wish I had people I could discuss design with, like a council of GMs. There's a scenario I've been struggling with to make interesting, I'd really like to have one of those idea sessions with likeminded peeps.
@breaks the mind That's odd, I was notified of a reply but I can't see it in full. Did you reply to the wrong comment and removed it?
Sorry about that i started out saying a lot of stuff towards your comment but then felt i was babbling and going way to off base. So i decided to erase it. I do know the feeling though. When i ran games i often spoke to people i worked with about it or to my family members that were not involved in the game. They acted as my council. Toss me some of your ideas maybe I can help. I have been a storyteller for about 17 years now in case you're wondering about my credentials.
@@breaksthemind2881 Oh ok. Sure! But uh, brace yourself, this might go a bit long. The scenario is meant to act as a partial introductory scene. The setup is the PCs are all criminals pardoned by a lordling whose family was involved with hunting supernatural creatures and dealing with paranormal events. He invests a large sum of money in order to bail them out of jail, basically most of his last savings, thus the PCs lives belong to him until they've paid off said debt.
From there, it gets a bit hazy, as the first mission I've been intending to be a flashback while they're travelling towards his old family holdfast. One problem though is that the flashback might contain battle(s).
So the setup is two groups infiltrating another lord's party in order to falsify documents to support their lordling's claims to power as his family were dishonored and his father lost the title. The lord's manse is located in the outskirts of a settlement and there's a storm and a downpour underway.
Group 1 is tasked with stealth stuff, sneak in with some help from group 2, find the lord's office, get hold of his signet ring and falsify his signature on a document. Avoid battle if possible and avoid tripping any alarms and disturbing the partygoers. Group 1 starts outdoors in the rain and needs to decide on an entry point.
Group 2 is tasked to act as serving personnel and maybe a false guest or two, talking with partygoers, garnering further support to legitimise their lordling regaining his title and demesne. Opening doors for group 1 and helping to distract partygoers and actual servants from learning what's going on. And to keep the lord from returning to his office. If the signet ring should be on the lord's person, to borrow it without him knowing.
Now, they say that combat is great for introductory stuff, so I was thinking having the finale involve battle, but I'd rather not have it involve the lord as it would be better if he remained clueless, the document won't be much use if he realises it's false before they use it. So I'm considering a third faction, the problem is that the land is mostly at peace and I don't wish to introduce anything supernatural that soon in the campaign.
The setting is medieval low magic, think the witcher and lovecraftian, monsters are superstitions.
So what I'd like ideas for is dividing up the mission in acts of interesting events and complications, like maybe the host gives a toast which brings him closer to the office, changing of the guards, or something. A satisfying and dramatic ending. And thoughts suggestions regarding complications, like do you think combat could even work in a flashback, should it even be a flashback, should there be combat etc.
I'm thinking having the events be arranged like on a clock, as the two groups have no means to communicate between themselves unless they meet up, thus they need to be following a schedule of their own, so both groups know that at this point in time, they need to be at this door, and by a certain time they need to be finished and clear out.
@@gossamera4665 It's taken me quite some time but i think i have some ideas. First off i think the game should start with a small role-playing scene at the prison. Allow them to speak to the lord himself or maybe an attendee that is bailing them out instead of just explaining it to them. This will feel more personal for the players. From there you can fast forward to group 1 in the rain scene. For group 1 let them choose which entry they want to go into. Whatever it is they choose have an alarm to disarm. When there in have them get passed guards stealthy. There goal here is to make it to the wine cellar or the kitchen. Now pause before they make it there and move to group 2. Group 2 have them in two groups. The ones that are portraying the false guests will choose from 3 to 4 individuals in the party. Two out of the individuals will have something important for group 1 to use to help them. One player must pick pockets the other must distract them. Meanwhile the other players of group 2 must must some how get the signet ring from the lord himself. When all is said and done a server must go to meet group 1 in the kitchen or wine cellar to pass off items to them. Back to group 1 have them use said items to get where they need to be. All the while stealthy avoiding guards. While there doing that have a timer set with each thing they accomplish taking a set amount of time. If they do everything without incident the time will not expire and they will succeed in which case they can meet back with the server to replace the ring back to the lord. Now if time expires have an event occur in the party where the lord wants to go back to the room where they are falsifying documents. If this occurs allow group 2 to try and delay the lord. While group 2 is doing there thing have a suspicious meter where whatever they do during the party will raise the suspicious meter up or down. Now if any of them fail and are not able to clean it up allow them a chance to still do what they were tasked but now it must be done with force. As far as fighting goes i think if they can avoid it then let them. The fun of the game will be the tension in every moment of every move they make. With those timers and suspicious meters in place this should help in creating that. You can make this a flashback if you want but when you're done you must introduce them back into the present by skilful means. Don't just tell them okay that was a flashback and you are here now. I do think combat in a flashback is fine but in this story i think it should be avoided if they can. As far as another faction is concerned I'm all for It. Perhaps they to are infiltrating the place to ether get there hands on the same thing the players are trying to get or they are enemies of the lord the players are working with and to jolt them out of the flashback they come face to face with them on there way back to the lord. This could also be your final battle of the session. If I was running the story i would probably do it in this fashion. But that's just me. I hope what i have given you is useful or at least getting the cogs of your imagination turning.
@@breaksthemind2881 Thank you, it's great having someone to bounce ideas off of, always appreciated.
Here's what I'm thinking; start in the rain in the mission, keep it vague as to who is where, immidiate flashback to how they got there, do the prison RP introduction thing. I omitted that PCs get to choose from two pools, one criminal, the other liasons/overseers working directly for the lordling tasked with helping and keeping the criminals in line during missions, if they want to be clerics or paladins or just not criminals.
And then go into a planning phase where they set up for the mission, who goes in which group, method of entry etc. I'm planning to draw up a few maps, maybe have them plan it out on an old map with limited information that won't show recent additions to the manse for some curveballs.
Then after the mission is done, do a fast forward to where they're travelling to the lordling's holdfast. That way any risk involved will still be real rather than having them be invulnerable since it's a flashback.
I like the idea of a suspicion meter, the guests might become nervous and less likely to talk about what they're after, extra guards etc. A bit gamey but it would likely add to the suspense to have a visible representation of a fail state. Or I suppose I could just narrate the results and keep the actual status of the meter to myself to avoid the meta aspect. I'll think more on this.
What objects could the other guests be handling out to help with the infiltration though? It obviously can't be keys... Starting to turn into a puzzle game this, use the crank to lower the kettle, pick up the carrot hehe. Like it would have to be something that makes sense, like a cigar or something, even though cigars might not be entirely from that time period, but you get my point, something they would be likely to offer a sympathetic person that makes sense within context. Like maybe a guest loses a button and hands away his vest with his crest on it for the servants to mend or something. The problem with medieval settings is that you're awfully limited in that regard, you can't like take a cellphone or a keycard or extract dna from a cigarette butt or dirty glass or something.
Regarding avoiding a fight, there are a few reasons why I was considering a fight in the finale, one being for the type of player who wants to fight, since it's openly discouraged during the mission, but I was thinking maybe have this other faction chase after them at the end so it won't affect the mission and then possibly fight, or alternatively to have them attack the lord's party for the PCs to jump in as saviours and gain additional support for their cause with the nobles or just to use it as a means of escaping should they wish to, but that might mean some of their supporters end up dead. Another reason is that it's just plain recommended to start off with some action and it makes for a dramatic finale. And to get potential new players familiar with the system and so on, there's a lot of benefits to it, I'm just having a hard time justifying the fight happening naturally. Like for instance, say it's a rival attacking the lord, that seems a bit convenient. As does the idea of this faction having the same or similar goals as the PCs, like two lords wanting to be restored to honour at the same time. I suppose maybe they could be bandits or something, but that's a bit more daring than I like those to be and also too generic. But the idea of having some of the guests be infiltrators for this other faction is appealing, it's just a matter of who they are, such an organized group.
Edit: Maybe the reason for the party is that the lord snubbed his rival somehow, the rival have put a few men in place and at the end arrive in capulet vs montaghue style. That way it's not out of the blue and convenient it's foreshadowed and makes sense? Thoughts?