Let’s forget all that boring crap I usually write about and just have some f$&%ing fun today!

A couple of weeks ago, I struggled through explaining what the word campaign actually means. In the context of tabletop roleplaying games anyway. That was before I actually figured out for myself that a campaign’s just a game that doesn’t end — or fail — before its third session. Wish I’d figured it out sooner. I could have saved myself a lot of work.

Anyway, while stammering my way through that crap, I mentioned the idea of continuity. That a long-running story or series or franchise — or, obviously, a tabletop roleplaying game campaign — needs some common thread to tie all the chapters or episodes or movies — or adventures — together. Something that makes them feel like they’re part of the same bigger thing. And something that primes the players’ brains into trying to connect everything together.

And then I said something stupid. I said I could probably come up with ten amazing campaign ideas that f$&% with traditional RPG continuities.

See, the problem is, my mouth likes to write checks that my game-design brain has trouble cashing. But because I run my mouth in public — at least, in front of tens of thousands of people — there’s usually a few hundred people ready to yell back, “I bet you can’t!” And since, morally, I can’t resort to violence just because someone says words at me, I’ve usually got no choice but to try my damndest to cash the check.

So here we are.

Continuity Games

Today, I’m not giving you any advice or instructions or rules hacks or even meandering, useless bulls$&%. Instead, I’m just going to rattle off ten campaign ideas. They’re not even really premises. Just ideas. Things you could turn into a campaign premise and then a full-on campaign if you wanted to. Why? Because I made some noises recently about the fact that, although a roleplaying game campaign needs a strong continuity to keep it all together, there’s lots of ways to skin a continuity. You don’t need to stick with the standard character-and-party continuity that games like D&D just assume.

Anyway, here’s some campaigns that run on alternate continuities. On things other than character-and-party continuity. Some are games I’ve run. Some are stolen inspired by various games and stories and RPG systems and s$&% like that. And some I pulled out of my a$&. Because I — stupidly — promised I’d come up with ten of them. So ten there must be.

But before I start brainstorming at you, I want to say a little more about all this continuity bulls$&%. To clarify a few things. And to warn you that some of these ideas are definitely not for you and your group.

The World Isn’t Divided into Good Continuities and Death Eaters

Let’s talk about black-and-white thinking. It’s a psychiatric term. And it’s also called all-or-nothing thinking. It’s a thought pattern most people fall into wherein they see things as either all-the-way one way or all-the-way the other. It’s a form of distorted thinking. It’s bad for you. Leads to all sorts of psychological difficulties: anger, anxiety, bad game mastering, and stress.

I only care about that bad GMing thing though because I don’t give life advice. I don’t even speak to psychiatrists except in the context of RPGs. Mostly because my players and readers drive me so f$&%ing nuts that I have to pay a professional two-hundred bucks an hour to keep me from going on a killing spree.

Take alignment. There’s lots of idiotic arguments about that. Even though D&D itself has finally just said, “fine, you know what? F$&% alignment. Ignore it. It doesn’t do anything.” Even though it is important and extremely useful. But fine, f$&% it.

Except no one f$&%s it. They fight about it. Why? Because everyone sees it as this absolute thing. If you declare your character lawful-good, you can never do anything even the tiniest bit wrong. Players feel like alignment’s a straightjacket. GMs feel like it’s an absolute law to enforce. Which is ludicrous. Lots of real-world people are lawful and many are good. There’s troubling evidence that people are way more lawful than good and so it’s easy for lawful-evil to take over, but pretend elf games…

Good-hearted people f$&% up. That doesn’t make them evil. Just human. And humans, by the way, aren’t all-the-way bad or all-the-way good. Everyone’s got the capacity for good and evil in them and most people do the best they can to be good. But it’s hard. No one succeeds every time.

Continuity’s like that too. I made a big thing about party continuity in D&D. That is, whatever else changes in your D&D campaign from one session to the next, the game will still be about the same party of heroes. But there’s lots of continuities running side-by-side in every D&D campaign. When one falls apart, the other continuities hold the game together.

Most D&D campaigns have party continuity and character continuity and setting continuity and narrative continuity and thematic continuity and system continuity. The game’s usually about the same group of the same heroes in the same world playing through an ongoing plot and experiencing the same core emotional experiences and playing the same game. You could break any one of those continuities and it’d still feel like you were playing the same game. Hell, you could break most of them and still hold a campaign together.

Imagine, for instance, the party’s sucked — temporarily or permanently — into a far-future version of the game’s world. Basically, they go from D&D to Shadowrun. Magical fantasy cyberpunk dystopia. Maybe they’re trapped there by an eldritch horror they were going to have confronted. It pulled them into an alternate, far-future reality that won’t ever actually happen because the heroes can’t now defeat the eldritch horror what with them being trapped in an alternate reality. And that reality is unraveling and the heroes are going to unravel with it.

Same characters, same party, different setting, different plotline, different themes, different genre, and maybe even a different rule-system. But most players wouldn’t argue that you started a whole, new game. At worst, they’d say the game changed. Maybe into something they don’t like. Or something they didn’t sign up for. But they’d still probably accept it as part of the same campaign.

I’m only bringing this s$&% up because I’m about to spend 4000 words f$&%ing with game continuities in exactly that way. To demonstrate how a creative GM with a keen understanding of continuity can do crazy s$&%. Crazy fun s$&%.

See, pedantic nitpickers — AKA gamers — might point out that none of these ideas really break continuity. They’ll point out there’s still a continuous narrative. But they’re missing the point. Because a narrative only feels continuous because other things hold it together.

Besides, no s$&% I’m not really breaking continuities. You can’t break continuity and still have a campaign. But you can play with it. All I’m really doing is saying, “what can I do if I’m willing to break the default party continuity and rely on other continuities to hold s$&% together. And how many other continuities can I break along the way?”

Where Gamers Fear to Tread

Let me make this as clear as I possibly can:

This s$&% is not for everyone

Some of this s$&% is definitely not your standard D&D fare. Some of it’s not even meant for D&D. But most of these aren’t typical RPG fare of any kind. Which shouldn’t be surprising. Because the concept of party-and-character continuity is so central to almost all TTRPGs that most people don’t realize it’s even a thing. It’s like how it took forever for anyone to even realize there was something called air.

Beyond being weird and nontraditional, some of these ideas are going to outright offend some gamers. I know there’s whining crybabies who will flip out when I use the word permadeath. They’re the same folks who scream about how every game must have an easy mode because every piece of art must meet them on their terms. They can’t possibly be expected to meet anything halfway. Or just not participate in an experience that wasn’t meant for them.

But pretend elf games…

Point is, I’m not suggesting that you — any of you — use any of these ideas as the basis for an RPG campaign. Hell, you probably shouldn’t. Unless you think you should. In which case, do it. I’ve run several of these games. They worked out pretty well. They led to very memorable games. My players were skeptical at first. They were nervous as hell. A few of them tried to veto the games in question. But I didn’t give them a choice. I mean, I did. My players always have three choices: play what I run, don’t play anything, or run their own game. That’s not to say I don’t listen to feedback. If a player doesn’t like what I’m doing, I’ll listen and then decide what to do based on that. Sometimes, though, I decide to say, “well, that’s the game I’m running; maybe you’d be happier playing at some other table.”

Thing is, though, some of these ideas f$&% with the deep bedrock on which RPGs rest their foundations. And some players just can’t take that s$&%. They can’t handle not playing the same character every week. Or being told to go home and stay there until someone else brings their character back to life. Or play a 1st level NPC to tag along for the rest of the campaign. And that’s all fair enough. You can’t force a player to play a game they don’t want to play. And if most of your players don’t want to play, sticking to your guns means not running a game anymore.

Which isn’t really much of a punishment considering how much running games actually sucks.

Me, though? I am not interested in a players’ opinion of something they haven’t played. I’m not even interested in my own opinions of things I haven’t played. So, if one of the ideas below appeals to you, try it. If your players want to balk, they can balk after they’ve played twelve sessions. Or six. Or ten. Whatever. I prefer to test ideas for twelve sessions unless they’re utterly unplayable. In which case, I abort them after trying to play the unplayable for three sessions. But no sooner.

If you go that route though, be ready to throw the game out after the probationary period. The players really might not grow to like the campaign. Everyone handles continuity shakeups differently and there’s nothing you can do about it. Just like you can argue logically something’s totally realistic because of this or that obscure physics fact, but that won’t get people to imagine it.

Now, let’s look at some Crazy Campaign Continuities.

Character Continuity: The Chosen Ones

I said D&D’s all about party continuity and not character continuity. It’s the party — or the idea of the party — that survives from one session to the next. Even if the party’s membership list changes — if PCs retire or die or players leave the group or join the group late — the campaign’s still going.

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if the continuity really did come from the characters?

The PCs are The Chosen Ones. Destined to overthrow the great evil or resurrect the fallen god or bring balance to the Force or whatever. At least, they’re the only ones who have a chance at it. Why? Because the PCs are demigods. And, consequently, they’re the only humans — or demi-humans — that gain levels. Seriously. You heard me. Everyone else in the world is stuck at 1st level. They’re just normal people. The PCs are capable of achieving tremendous power. Of course, demons and monsters come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and CRs. Which is why the world needs demigods.

But here’s the thing: only the initial PCs — the first set of characters the players create — get demigod status. There’s no new demigods after session one. If a PC dies, the world’s lost a demigod. And the dead can’t come back in this world. So, it’s basically a permadeath elimination campaign. The goal’s to get enough survivors through the campaign to do whatever the heroes are destined to do.

Of course, you don’t need to make it a permadeath thing. You could allow the other demigods to resurrect a fallen ally. At great risk and cost. Go to Hell and drag them out. That kind of thing. But the ritual to bring them back, it’s got a hefty cost. Everyone who participates in the ritual gets level drained. And the resurrected hero comes back with as many levels as the participants agreed to lose.

Until their character’s brought back — or through the rest of the campaign if you don’t allow resurrection — a dead demigod’s player can either stay home, stay and watch, or play a 1st level hanger-on or sidekick or ally. Players can make as many of those 1st level losers as they want. The game’s going to be a meatgrinder for them. All they can do is try to influence the outcome with whatever handfuls of gravel they’ve got to throw.

MacGuffin Continuity: The One Thing

What if the continuity’s not about Chosen Ones, but a Chosen Thing. The One Thing to Rule them All.

So, there’s a thing, right? A shard of creation. An artifact forged at the dawn of time. The seal that holds the world together. It’s got a purpose. And it’s got to be safeguarded and shepherded through the ages until it can fulfill its purpose.

Meanwhile, the unwitting players create characters who — in the first adventure — end up in control of The One Thing. They don’t know what it is, but it’s clear lots of people want it. And those people are terrible people. They’ve obviously got terrible plans.

By the way, when I say unwitting players, I mean the players don’t know what the campaign’s about at the start. They have no idea what’s coming. They just think it’s a normal D&D campaign and have to figure out that it’s not.

Early on, the PCs learn of a way to protect the thing. There’s an ancient vault they can store it in. Or a powerful NPC. They’ve just got to get the One Thing to safety. Fine and dandy. Over a month of play, they do so. And then, campaign over. Or is it…

The GM invites the players to start a new game. They make new characters. In the first session, it gradually becomes clear that the world’s the same. It’s a few decades later. And the dungeon the heroes are trekking through? It’s the same vault. They find The One Thing and realize it’s not safe anymore.

From that point on, the game follows The One Thing through the gameworld’s history. The PCs shepherd it from safe location to safe location, gradually learning more about it. And if they lose control of it, or die, the new PCs spend their first adventure recovering it in the crapsack world that resulted. Whenever The One Thing gets lost, hidden safely away, entrusted to someone else, or whatever, the players make new PCs and pick up the story a few years on.

The campaign ends when the players manage to do whatever needs doing with The One Thing. Or the bad guys use it to destroy the world. Or destroy The One Thing. Or whatever.

Setting Continuity: Legacy of Adventure

Time skips with new parties playing in the world that grows from the previous party’s screwups are always great. Here’s an idea along those lines inspired by a rogue-lite platformer thingy called Rogue Legacy.

Basically, it’s a generational campaign. Start with a small village on the frontier with some nearby dungeons and monsters, play there for a while, and then retire the party. Skip ahead a couple of generations and the village is now a town facing threats old and new. Make a new party and adventure from there. Then, retire, time skip, and play again.

Obviously, each generation builds on the last. If the PCs die trying to save the village from a dragon, the next generation is probably a hidden encampment near the ruins of the village where the survivors managed to start new lives. And maybe the PCs are descended from the previous heroes. Maybe the players can even write their own little retirement stories after each chapter, explaining what their characters did after settling down and who they married and s$&%. And maybe they can pass on durable magical items and relics from one generation to the next. So that, while each generation starts with 1st level PCs, they’ve got powerful gear to act as a sort of macro advancement.

…with System Discontinuity: Legacy of Gygax

And here’s a variation of the previous idea I’ve always wanted to run but never found the time or the willing group.

Same setup. Generational campaign. Time skips. Later PCs are descendants of earlier PCs. Yaddah yaddah yaddah.

The twist is that each age of play — each generation — uses successive editions of D&D. The campaign starts using AD&D 1E rules — or Basic D&D or White Box OD&D — and then moves on to AD&D 2E, D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, and D&D 5E.

Player Continuity: The World that Never Was

These time-skipping ideas capitalize on the fact that the players remember things their characters don’t. That is, when you switch parties or switch generations, the players remember all the s$&% that’s happened in the game so far. It’s generational knowledge or legends that become common knowledge or whatever. You’ve got to accept that s$&%. You can’t ask the players to pretend they don’t know what they know. It’s just f$&%ing stupid to try. Which is why GMs who make a big deal about metagame knowledge are bad GMs. You’ve just got to lean into it.

That brings me to a campaign I ran years ago that lasted for over two years. And which we never actually finished.

A magical artifact spits out some amnesiac PCs. The players made their characters, but they weren’t allowed to write backgrounds. Or, rather, each was allowed to write down one significant event that shaped their character’s personality. That was the only thing the PC remembered.

Naked and screaming, the characters wake up after this artifact spits them out in the catacombs beneath a magical megalopolis. A city-state run by wizard guilds. One that had been ruled until recently by the archmage that built it. But she went missing and the power vacuum created a lot of interguild intrigue.

Every time a PC died, the artifact spit them out again, naked and screaming and otherwise no worse for wear. Except sometimes they’d be a completely different character. The players could always choose to make a new character when they got resurrected. And sometimes, randomly, they had to.

Each time they made a new character, they could add a memory to their little deck of memory cards, but the old memories were intact. And moreover, the character remembered everything the previous character had done since the start of the campaign. It thus became clear that the character’s souls were being recycled, memories intact, and occasionally crammed into a new body. But that new body had some memories of its own.

In other words, the players were playing the characters’ souls. Which persisted across magical reincarnations. The truth was a little uglier. The PCs were actually bound to the artifact because they were the reincarnations of some ancient heroes that used the artifact to trap an eldritch abomination beyond time and space. And the souls were finally starting to remember s$&% from one life to the next. Moreover, the body-switching came from the fact that the artifact was actually pulling past incarnations from history whenever a body was just beyond reconstitution. And gradually, the world’s history was being erased. Fortunately, the heroes didn’t live in the universe with the history that was being erased. They were in an alternate timeline. And every death unraveled the real reality a little more.

It got complicated. Good luck writing your own version of that s$&%.

Organizational Continuity: GIMF Joe

You don’t need time-traveling or time-skipping or extradimensional abominations to play with continuity. There’s easier ways to do it.

Start, for instance, with a government agency or other organization. Maybe a rebel alliance. The adventures are standard, mission-based crap. Get briefed, get equipped, do the mission, get debriefed. But each player creates a roster of three specialist characters. At the start of each mission, each player picks one character to send along. They choose based on the character’s skills and which character they feel like playing and also which character needs the XP. You gotta get those mission hours in if you want to stay on your game, after all.

The players always have three characters in their portfolio. If a PC dies, it gets replaced. If the player wants to make a new PC, they’ve got to retire an existing one.

I used this idea myself a couple of years ago to run a single campaign for about two-dozen players. Each player had just one character. All members of an adventurer’s guild. The players would sign their characters up for different missions and I’d offer four or five missions a month so everyone got a chance to play at least once each month.

Ship Continuity: Upper and Lower Decks

Here’s another one I’ve run before. And I know I’ve talked about it before too. I built it specifically for a science-fiction roleplaying game system called Alternity. Not the recent reboot from Sasquatch Games, but the original written by Bill Slavicsek and Richard Baker and published by TSR in 1998. That was back before WotC bought D&D and its whole design time.

Alternity was one of those generic systems. You could run any sci-fi game from near-future cyberpunk to infinity and beyond. It even had options for contemporary paranormal investigations and time and dimension-hopping. But the default setting was a nice, Star Trekky space opera.

Alternity offered an amazing starship combat system. The best I’ve ever seen. And yes, I’ve seen whichever game you’re going to ask me about. Alternity did it better. Now, when I say starship combat, I mean the sort of naval starship combat you saw in Star Trek. Good Star Trek. Before JJ Abrams s$&% all over it. And definitely before his production company in partnership with CBS and Paramount started stabbing it in the heart and wouldn’t f$&%ing stop. Not even when it was reduced to an unmoving, s$&%-covered corpse.

But I digress.

Naval starship combat. You know what I mean. Every ship’s got a bridge crew and each crewman has a job. Tactical, sensors, piloting, engineering, operations, communication. Alternity did it great. Of course, like all RPG systems with modern settings, Alternity’s characters were highly specialized. Which makes sense. I mean, skill specialization is just a thing that goes along with the advancement of technology, art, culture, and every other aspect of civilization. Self-sufficient farmers don’t invent smartphones.

I wanted to do the standard Star Trek setup. Spend half the time on the starship and half the time on the ground. Bridge crew and away team. Inspired by a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called Lower Decks — and absolutely not by the execrable failed parody cartoon piece of crap of the same name — I built a campaign in which each player had two characters: one member of the bridge crew and one member of the mission crew. And it worked great.

Well, for a little while. My players didn’t like sci-fi and didn’t like Star Trek, so after a few months, they threatened to walk if we didn’t go back to standard D&D.

F$&%ing players…

Negative Continuity: Marmota Majora

Now, let’s talk about negative continuity. That’s a TV screenwriting term — and TV Trope page — that refers to a series wherein everything resets at the end of each episode. The world doesn’t evolve. It doesn’t change. Bart Simpson never gets any older. Bonnie Swanson never has the kid. And no matter how many times those bastards kill him, Kenny’s always fine at the start of the next episode.

This s$&%’s really common in animated series and television sitcoms. But serious shows also flirt with negative continuity. Take Star Trek for instance. Yeah, it wasn’t so obvious about resetting its continuity, but, really, its continuity didn’t much matter. You could watch the episodes in any order. Very few events from prior episodes affected later episodes. Star Trek: The Next Generation did have a few continuity changes and a few multi-episode arcs, especially toward the end, but it was still 99% episodic. That was one of the things that set Deep Space Nine apart. And even DS9 didn’t find its continuity for a while.

But I’m not going to sell you on some episodic, dungeon-of-the-week and claim it’s an alternate continuity on a technicality. Because if you take the resetting a little more literally, you’ve got yourself a time loop. Lots of movies and games and TV shows these days play with time loops. At some point, something happens and the characters get sent back in time to the start of the episode. Or the player gets sent back to the start of the game. The only thing they’ve got is their memories of their trip through the story so far. And they’ve got to disentangle what happened.

The sci-fi adventure game Outer Wilds or Outer Worlds — because I can never remember which one is f$&%ing which but they’re both good — Outer Wilds/Worlds is a time loop game. You start playing, have some fun, the universe explodes, the game restarts, and you’re like “what the f$&% just happened.” And it’s on you to figure out what the f$&% actually did just happen. And then stop it from happening over and over by Setting Right What Once Went Wrong™.

And you can do the same thing to your players.

The game starts like any old game of D&D. The players make characters, go on some adventures, play for a month, and then, boom, the world ends. You — the GM — explain nothing. Instead, you hand the players copies of their character sheets from the start of the campaign and restart the campaign. Exactly the way you did the first time. They can ask any questions they want. Don’t answer them. Just run the game. And when the clock runs down, the world ends, and you start again.

Okay, by itself, that’s not much of an idea. The point is to keep resetting the game until the players figure out how to stop the world-ending calamity. Something that blows up space-time. Now, early in the first adventure, in their first pass through the loop, the players are given strange artifacts by a mysterious NPC. He’s the Time Wizard. He’s stuck In the Void. His power to project himself into reality is limited. And he used that power to give the PCs magical devices he could use to reset them whenever the Calamity happens. The first time the world ends, the PCs feel the thingums turn on. And then, boom. And then the campaign starts again. Except this time, they already have the thingums. That’s their first clue.

The players go back to the place where they met the Time Wizard the first time. And he can give them some limited clues, but he can’t tell them much. His power weakens every time he resets the PCs. He can just point them in a direction and keep resetting them until he’s got no power left. Eventually, the PCs can piece the clues together and prevent the Time Crash and then they wake up one last time at the start of the campaign but the Time Thingums are gone.

I Don’t Even Know What to Call It: The Day the Multiverse Burped

Here’s my last idea. It’s great if you want something really gonzo. Let me tell you about Lee Garvin’s Tales from the Floating Vagabond. It was published by Avalon Hill in 1991 and written by the amazing Lee Garvin. Sadly, Mr. Garvin passed away just a few years ago after falling on bad times and despite a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised some $15,000 to help him and resulted in the darkly, morbidly hilarious Killing Lee Garvin card game. Which he himself, appreciated the irony of and was involved in the making of.

TftFV is described as “ludicrous adventure in a universe whose natural laws are out to lunch.” And if you’re a fan of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, you’d love TftFV. If you can find a copy.

Rather than describe the premise of the game — you’ve got the internet, you can check it out — let me pitch you a campaign.

Start with a good, generic, action-oriented RPG. Savage Worlds would be great for this s$&%. But any system that covers lots of different genres and settings will work just fine. Have each player make a character. Whatever character they want. From whatever setting. And whatever age. Soldier from the Napoleonic war? Fine. Maverick space-fighter pilot? Absolutely. Cyberpunk hacker? No problem. Weird West Cthulhu-hunting gunslinger? Definitely. Fantasy gnome bard? F$&% off. But, seriously, anything else is fine.

One day the multiverse burps. No one knows why. Probably some mad scientist in Dimension C-137 built a basement hadron collider, fired it up, and tore a hole in reality. The resulting space-time rift goes mostly unnoticed, but a small number of individuals are set adrift across the cosmos. Several such individuals coalesce together on some reality or another. The PCs. United only by the fact that they’re space-time vagabonds, Chet Awesomelaser, Xenya Amazonia, and Fizzlecrast the Bard drift from adventure to adventure, from portal to portal, each time hoping the next leap will be the leap home.

Or maybe they all just met at an extradimensional dive bar that carelessly opens portals into random realities just to attract customers.

And There You Have It…

Ten awesome campaign ideas based on weird continuities. Some originals, some Angry classics, and some flagrant homages to other games and syste… what?

What do you mean there’s only nine? I could have sworn there were ten.

F$&%.