Executing A Short Campaign

I’m going to put my hand up and admit two things. We run short campaigns. We tend to think they are way better than those meandering on for years. We honestly don’t see ourselves losing much due to the shorter length, we gain a lot more and we also get to experience lots of different types of campaigns and games.

This article is about how we execute those short campaigns. Not because I think they’re right for everyone, but because I believe when people consider it they look at it wrong from the very outset thus muddling the decision as to whether they could be a part of their tabletop role-playing experience.

It’s Not A Short Long Campaign

When discussing this topic it becomes apparent that what people do is imagine their long, meandering, years-long campaign and everything that underpins it, hacking out two-thirds or more of it and looking at what’s left and deciding short campaigns are not for them as all the depth and storytelling would be cut out.

That’s the wrong way to look at it.

It’s like taking a 24-episode, seven series TV show and cutting it down to three seasons of twelve episodes without going in knowing you only had 36 hours rather than 168. That would fail. If you went in from the very inception of the idea knowing you only had 36 hours the result would be very different.

The underpinning of the whole basis of this article is if this is true of fiction it is perfectly true for tabletop role-playing campaigns.

What Is A Short Campaign

There is a definition problem which tends to mire all tabletop role-playing discussions. It’s worth clarifying some of these definitions so we can use them for the basis of our discussion moving forward.

I realise anything in this area can be hotly contested, just look at it as a way to frame the discussion.

We play short campaigns. They tend to sit around 8-12 sessions in length and have the feel of a limited series, mini-series, novel or a film series like Star Wars. We did do a 4E Campaign that was more like a traditional long campaign, as we played the same characters for a year or more over many more sessions than around 8-12. There was a trick to that though, in many ways, it was three short campaigns based on the game’s tiers and the middle section was a slog due to being well over our typical length.

For now, I’ll reinstate my argument made earlier with an addition. The short campaign does not lack depth compared to the long campaign if you approach it knowing that’s what your intended outcome is. It’s just different. I’d even go as far to argue what is added with long-term campaigns is a lot of stuff that could be edited out or is more lore porn, as in setting stuff, that has very little to do with dramatic storytelling.

To ensure we get the maximum return for a short campaign, I tend to take the following approaches..

Really Use Homo Fictitious

When your campaign is effectively a novel or a limited series you need to know what the story of each character is so you can bring it to a conclusion within the time you have.

A shortage of time is your biggest advantage when it comes to short campaigns. Yes, you heard that right. The very thing you had listed as a problem is an advantage. It’s an advantage in a tabletop role-playing game for the same reason its an advantage in fiction: focus.

You don’t have multiple episodes or even seasons to waste so how do you ensure you have focus? You maximise all the advantages of looking at your characters as members of homo fictitious with explicit premises which clearly flag the story to be told in the time allowed. If you do this the story of your campaign can often be deeper and more intense despite being shorter.

We have to keep exactly what homo fictitious is and what having a premise means short here for the sake of length. The key points are homo fictitious characters exist to tell a specific story that is embedded in their premise. They don’t exist to just be acted over an infinite period of time. They have a built in ‘narrative expectancy’ which is good for short campaigns.

You should check out the articles on these topics

Maximise Session Zero

If you’ve not got years to figure it out, you can’t spend lots of sessions working out what your campaign is about and getting everyone on the same page. The shared consensus needs to be locked in for session one or by session two at the latest.

All those at the table have to be on board with the core idea, premise, themes and set-up of the campaign because you don’t have time for diversions, wrestling with incongruities or random elements. So each person needs to be contributing to the whole, from the start and at every moment.

Key to this is maximising session zero.

Ensure you have a brief pitch document outlining purpose, theme and mood. This should be a page or two at the most. Ensure the characters are created as a group with no lonely fun. Even if one character has a secret, it shouldn’t be a secret not known to the players, only the characters. You don’t have time for that. Ensure each character has a story they exist to tell as you really don’t have much time to find it in the campaign itself.

The outcome of the session zero is everyone is on message, happy to be on message and is aware enough to help tell their character’s story, in the context of the challenges you throw in, and also help the other players tell their character’s stories.

It’s important to note that none of this is related to knowing what the story will be. It’s very much what not the meticulously laid out how.

No Myth of Reality

You’d be surprised how little you need to know about what constitutes the reality of a campaign before you start it. There is no need to have an all-encompassing myth of realty established for your campaign. It’s actually best not to as you’re not going to have lots of time to poke around in every corner. You don’t need a lot of setting details and this is how many pieces of fiction start.

Take our current campaign. It’s based in a setting that has volumes of ‘lore’. If you need to know it’s White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse but with Fate Accelerated. How did we get over the metric tonnes of lore in terms of not having the time and it not weighing down the game? We treat it like the new Doctor Who show, in that none of that old lore exists until we decided it was useful. So in the first case only what the characters brought in existed.

Once the game started we established how things work as we went or brought in lore elements that enhanced the story being told rather than existing just because it should. It’s proven 90% of the established lore is irrelevant to proceedings.

Characters only need to understand the reality they see or need to make decisions, you’d be surprised how little that is at any particular time. You’re constructing a work of fiction in a short campaign, not a simulation of an actual place, setting or reality or some sort of setting guidebook.

Everyone Is A Writer Who Edits

This is the fancy way of saying everyone should be helping get to the point, but it is based on everyone realising they are a writer in this endeavour. As once you get out of approaching the characters correctly, a good session zero and keeping the myth of realty down it’s all about practical decisions in play and everyone is responsible for those.

Playing out scenes is important, but taking an approach to the game that involves endlessly acting out your characters ‘acting signatures’ over many scenes is something you don’t have time for. Just role-playing is fun, but just endlessly role-playing just for the sake of it is not something you have time for. You should be role-playing conflicts or scenes that have some intention behind them to go somewhere.

Everyone should be happy to cut out things that aren’t important. Would this be edited out if this was a TV limited series? Yes, then cut it. Certain things just don’t have to be role-played. Some things characters can just get and have and don’t need precious time to establish it being true.

Our games don’t have shopping trips. Equipment isn’t even a thing. We don’t really do maps. Hell, sometimes even a sense of how things are geographically spaced isn’t important if you’re glossing over travel anyway. You are looking to get to what is important, not spend hours of game time getting to what’s important. Travel is just a tracking shot at most and not just across the land you can even apply this to a dungeon. Figuring out how to get to something important isn’t the focus of the game avoiding endless hours of ‘figuring things out’.

Everyone as a writer at the table should be accepting and an advocate of these shortcuts so they can focus on getting the point and to where the truly interesting things happen. It’s amazing how much shorter campaigns are when freed of this guff like a lot of fiction is.

Play With Narrative Structures

Works of fiction often use narrative structures to get a high amount of story in a small amount of time. You should do the same thing. Don’t just wait for the story embedded in the characters to emerge, everyone at the table needs to actively make sure it’s happening.

If there are background elements that need to become exposed run a flashback. We’ve done that in a superheroes campaign as the decisions made by the previous generation was important to a couple of the characters. Get it out there.

Start with the ending and then have everyone at the table work towards the ending. Since everyone knows the ending they need to collaborate on their storytelling to ‘stick the landing’. This can get things out.

You can even do both, we’ve ended sessions on a cliffhanger and then had the next session be flashbacks to moments in the characters lives that impact the decisions they will make in that pivotal moment. All created on the spot. It gets stuff out there.

Hell, we’ve even done variations on the reality TV thing with various narrative constructs to allow the characters to ‘monologue to camera’ this allows internal, deeply personal thoughts to be expressed that might normally be hard to get on the table.

Basically, you shouldn’t be focusing on ‘setting stuff’ in your sessions but making decisions to get the character’s story out and progressed.

Reduce The Lore Porn

If there is a plague upon storytelling that infected human thought in a way that parallels the Internet it is lore porn. Accumulated ‘lore’ about a fictional work is not the same as storytelling and the absence of lore does not weaken storytelling. Quite the opposite.

In a short campaign, you don’t have time to generate or focus on lots of lore porn. Not doing that will not only shrink your campaigns by design it will also save you a lot of time in preparing.

Instead of generating lots of lore, focus on adding persistent colour. If you want to keep seeing at as lore think of it as concentrated, high energy bytes of lore. They’re a bit like sound-bytes but for lore. You shouldn’t even worry about lots of this colour being known in advance. You should only know in advance the minimum to start. The reason being everyone at the table will be establishing these lore bytes as the sessions progress.

It’s probably quite clear this the smaller, in the moment application of no myth of reality.

Condense The Level Ranges

If your game uses levels the tendency is to go long so you can cover all the level range or more of it. The trouble is this can often be a myth anyway as players get sick of characters, campaigns tend to not last the ‘long game’ anyway, etc. Quite often the truth is you have to admit it’s not going to happen and target the level range you want.

If you are playing a game with levels, some games help you in this regard. As an example, 13th Age condenses the twenty levels of Dungeons and Dragons into ten levels. This means a campaign were characters spend an average of two sessions at each level is only twenty sessions long.

Your other option is to play a game that isn’t as focused on ‘power progression’ or is focused on character change rather than ‘power progression’. Different games deliver on this in different ways to the point ‘progressing through a range of power-ups’ is very flat to non-existent. 

Saga-Based Storytelling

The ability to cover a lot of temporal space is not limited to traditionally long campaigns. You can do it in short campaigns you just need to use saga-based storytelling. One of the best known for this the original Star Wars trilogy, it told the stories of the main protagonists by picking out three important moments. The characters progressed between those points in time. Another great example is The Witcher TV series which tells the story of Yennifer over decades. You could literally do that with a tabletop role-playing campaign.

Imagine a space opera campaign, with saga-based storytelling with three episodes of about three sessions each. You suddenly have yourself quite an epic campaign that could move on significantly in time.

If you’re playing a level-based game you could decide the game was going to take place over a decade, tell the story in five parts with each part being 1-3 years apart and assign a level to each part. 

Some games adopt a saga-based structure from the outset, such as Ars Magica, a game about mages and their covenants told over decades of time. These sorts of games do have a tendency to favour being structured around the traditionally long model – but it does not have to be the case. As you could structure it like Star Wars, having solid 2-4 session affairs, each of which could be months or years apart,  when the covenant is young, experienced and old to get the full feel.

When A Plan Comes Together

The power of these ideas isn’t each one individually but all of them together. 

Due to using homo fictitious and session zero you have characters with a clearly flagged story that needs to be resolved. Key is the fact you know what but not how to get there or what the ending will be. It’s more a burning question. You’ve also prepared and done session zero so everyone knows all this stuff equally and on board with the shared idea of the campaign.

Due to know it’s a short campaign everyone has a rough idea of how long they have to stick the landing. It can extend, but within reason, you have a target.

You’re keeping the game lore lite through only needing to worry about the myth of reality the characters need to operate and the story needs to function. This will be ridiculously less than you appreciate. The whole group is on board with creating lore bytes as necessary to add colour and depth while not obsessing over detail. You’re not weighed down by the time investment setting and lore takes. Importantly, if you’re session zero went well those lore bytes will be 100% on target and save you having to come up with everything.

Everyone is accepting of their role as a writer. This mains playing scenes is important but not the only focus of actual play. Writing with a sense of editing is also important. Don’t role-play endlessly based on playing signature musical notes – play out scenes written in the moment with the intent of progressing the story. Edit out minutiae that doesn’t really add anything. Similarly, everyone is fine with the various writing conceits of getting to what’s important rather than spending lots of time just getting to what’s important. 

This is the responsibility of everyone playing. 

After that, it’s about playing with narrative and rules structures to maximise the time. You may be using narrative structures to get key information and story beats out there in ways that wouldn’t happen under the norms of actual play structures. You may be tweaking the rules to or making decisions during set-up to condense things like levels or jump over sections of the level range. Hell just start at a higher level if the campaign demands it. You might decide to handle conflicts as full-on fights or with different rules to make them work as challenges or singular actions demanding on what the fiction demands. Need events to take place over an extended period of time? Just go for it.

All these things blended together to make the shorter campaign happen, they ensure it has more story than a longer campaign quite often as it is intentional and it demonstrates how shorter fiction can translate into a campaign.

And, Finally…

As I stated at the start of the article it’s not my aim to persuade everyone short campaigns are better, but it is my aim to refute the idea some people have that short campaigns almost aren’t possible. This is often based on the fact they look at it through the lens of shrinking their long campaign but keeping all the principles and operations on which it is based exactly the same.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. You have to approach it entirely differently just like you would a work of fiction if it was shorter. 

Ultimately, this approach puts our group in a very good place. Intense, focused campaigns with everyone in the same shared space, with intense story outcomes and we get to play multiple campaigns and games over time with a lot less effort than people believe.

As in they literally don’t believe it in some cases.