Aim Small, Miss Small: Running an Eight-Session RPG Campaign
I spent the last few months running Lonely Adventurer’s Cult of the Morach module for my open-table RPG group. We held our eighth and final Morach session last week. It was both the longest campaign this specific group has ever played together and the longest continuous game I’ve ever run – not to mention the only campaign I’ve ever GMed to completion.
While finishing an eight-session campaign is a humble achievement in a hobby where games can span years or even decades, I still feel a sense of accomplishment given that virtually every other campaign I’ve ever organized has petered out as I lost motivation or became overwhelmed by the prospect of running a game each week.
I know I’m not the only GM to ever find actually finishing a campaign a daunting task, so I thought I’d explore what allowed this game to grow from a quick Discord pitch into a completed adventure.
Scope creep
Morach’s elevator pitch is that a small village is being subverted by a cult. As soon as the PCs arrive on the scene, a clock starts ticking toward the cultists finalizing their plans and taking full control of the town and its surroundings.
I framed the campaign around the PCs being hired by local merchants to make sure that the village and the nearby wilderness would be safe for caravans scheduled to set out in the coming weeks. That premise and the cult’s advancing timeline gave the campaign both a clear “win condition” and an obvious “fail state.”
Those terms might sound strange here given that most RPGs don’t have winners or losers. There’s just play until a group stops playing. But in a campaign with a set expiration date like this one, a concrete goal that PCs are progressing toward – one that they can fail if they aren’t proactive enough or are out-maneuvered by their adversaries – means that things were always moving toward a conclusion. Mind you, that wasn’t a predetermined conclusion: as we established, the PCs could succeed or fail on the merits of their action and the whims of the dice.
The rough estimate of the campaign’s length also helped to set expectations. While we blew past the three session minimum estimate, the knowledge that the campaign wouldn’t last forever kept my players and me largely on track (though the squishier aspect of our timeframe meant that we still had plenty of time to argue about whether a fresco would survive a few hundred years exposed to the elements).
Not every session will be your best ever. They don’t all need to be.
The second session of the campaign felt great. The PCs discovered a wizard transformed into a frog, identified a key suspect in the conspiracy, rescued villagers taken prisoner by monsters hiding in an abandoned building, and got the townsfolk to turn on one of the key conspirators hiding in their midst.
It was so great that I wasn’t sure how we would manage to top it in the next session. I actually felt a sense of apprehension and wondered how much longer I should run the game for if it felt like things had peaked in just the second session. “How will we top Session 2?” I wondered.
The third session was much slower, with the sleuthing and intrigue replaced by combat and dungeon exploration. There was no dramatic reveal of another architect of the conspiracy concealed in plain sight, and nothing that made me as a GM feel particularly proud.
But it wasn’t a bad session. Returning to that idea of scope and goal-setting, the session accomplished exactly what I needed it to: it helped the PCs progress toward their goal, even if the progress was more incremental than it was in the prior session. If anything, the slower pace helped to make the excellent sessions stand out more.
Prep what you can, when you can
Preparation, abbreviated to “prep” in RPG parlance because we all agreed that this hobby needs more abbreviations and initialisms, is another aspect of running a game that can easily overwhelm GMs. How much and what material needs to be ready for each session? Should you read monster stat blocks or room descriptions? Do you remember the grappling rules? Wait, did your characters level up last session?
In a larger campaign spanning many months of play and many pages of setting and adventure material, I probably would have been paralyzed by those questions. But the scope of the campaign I pitched and the material I was using saved me here. Morach is roughly 40 pages, and the module can be broken down into easily digestible parts: there’s the town and its NPCs, a small dungeon that’s roughly five rooms, a larger dungeon just outside of town, and the climatic set piece dungeon way off in the wilderness.
Knowing my PCs and the pace of the game, I was confident that we’d see two of these locales in a single session at most. That meant that I could read sections of the module over on my commute home and be ready to run them when they came up at the table. I didn’t need to memorize every room key for every chamber the PCs could wander through.
In fact, each of those locations I mentioned before subdivide down into smaller sections: the two larger dungeons are both split into above-ground and below-ground levels, and each of those levels is dense enough to carry a full session. That compartmentalization meant I was never overwhelmed in my prep.
Final takeaways
The key thing that allowed me to run this campaign to completion was nailing down a specific scope. I knew roughly how long I wanted the campaign to last, what the party’s focus would be, and the scale of the world available for them to engage with and explore. By keeping things under control and within the scope I set at the start, I was able to do something I hadn’t done before: I finished a campaign. What’s more, the lessons I learned will help me tackle larger and more ambitious campaigns in the future, and I hope they help you do the same thing in the future.