The last time we were here – and here, in this case, is talking about what I’ve sort of unofficially dubbed “Campaign Descriptors” – the last time we were here, I talked about one of the most popular, well-known, and intuitive sorts of campaign type thingies: Epic Quest and Save the World type campaigns. Today, I want to talk to about the other most popular, well-known, and intuitive sorts of campaign type thingies: The Adventure of the Week. Funny thing about that is that those two sorts of campaign types are pretty much as diametrically opposed as poison ivy and underwear. Yes, those are opposites. One is something whose sole purpose is to cover your crotch. The other is something that absolutely should never ever, touch your crotch. And like poison ivy and underwear, Adventures of the Week are kind of the opposite of Epic Quests. Kind of. There are weird places where they CAN overlap. Which is why they’re Campaign Descriptors. Because you can do both at once. Sort of. It’s weird.

What’s also weird is that Adventure of the Week campaigns look a lot like Plate of Meatballs campaigns. But remember, meatballs are a shape. Adventure of the Week is a descriptor. And that’s important.

Actually, it isn’t really that important. But it’s still something I’m going to discuss because, well, I have to hit a word count SOMEHOW, right? Okay, I’m kidding. It is KIND OF important.

Okay, I admit I’m rambling here. But that’s because I really don’t have a whole lot of context to offer to these articles anymore. And, whatever else you might say about my Long, Rambling Introductions™, they do ACTUALLY provide something that looks sort of like context if you screw up your eyes and concentrate. But these campaign descriptor articles all have the same context. And so the introductions are becoming increasingly formulaic. It’s basically “here’s another sort of way you might classify a campaign and the issues that pertain to that particular campaign.” And then there’s some swearing and contrived jokes about poison ivy and underwear in an attempt to set up a running joke. And then, I admit that I’m rambling and it’s time to start the actual article. And then I slap down a heading and get to the actual meaty s$&%.

Meatballs: The Final Frontier

These are the voyages of the website Angry. It’s interminable mission, to explore gaming concepts, to invent new terminology and new ridiculous jargon, and to boldly split infinitives that no installation of Grammarly can ever endure.

Yes, that IS relevant. Because the source of that parody is extremely relevant. I’m talking about Star Trek. And, to be clear, I’m talking about Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. The movies? Enterprise? The JJ Abrams reboot movies? The streaming, steaming pile of Discovery? None of that garbage counts. And if those define your touchstone for Star Trek, you need to leave. Now. Go watch actual Star Trek. And notice, I didn’t even say “good Star Trek.” Voyager is not good. And I know Deep Space Nine’s status is arguable. But, whatever you might say about them, they are ACTUAL Star Trek.

The thing about Star Trek – the ones that count – is that each episode was a self-contained story. It was what we call “episodic.” And they were actually pretty much perfect examples of self-contained stories. Every goddamned episode, bar a very small few, began with everything being perfectly normal and happy aboard the spaceship or space station or whatever. A couple of characters would be interacting, and it was usually the characters who would feature most prominently in that episode, and their interaction would set up a personal dilemma or central theme. And then, suddenly, everything would go wrong. A crisis would happen. Red alert! Shields up! And after the inciting incident, we’d have our primary plot. The opening interaction would reappear in the form of a secondary plot. And then we’d spend the rest of the hour resolving the dilemmas and returning everything to normal. Roll closing credits. See you next week, kids.

And that is the perfect illustration of the Adventure of the Week type campaign. Each adventure is a self-contained story with a setup, a climax, and a resolution. Pluck any episode out of the mess, and you have a complete, satisfying story. That’s easy enough to understand. But already, your perimeter alert should be going off. You should be detecting a quantum instability in the jargonic matrix. Isn’t that exactly what I said a Plate of Meatballs campaign was? And didn’t I saw that was a campaign shape? And didn’t I also establish at least three times in at least three separate Long, Rambling Introductions™ that these campaign descriptors could be applied and mixed and matched to all sorts of campaign with few exclusions and mixed with different campaign shapes while campaign shapes themselves were totally exclusive of each other, and every campaign had ONE UND PRECISELY ONE?!

Well, yes. And that’s what I thought. Because the truth is I’m more Captain Kirk than Captain Picard. Or more Captain Sisko, I guess. Because I’m kind of impulsive and brash and make up a lot of s$&% as I go along. Really, to some extent, as I’m explaining this crap to you, I’m also explaining it to myself. As I figure it out.

In the previous article about campaign descriptors, I flung out a whole bunch of campaign types that would need future discussions. And, in pretty much the first example of forward-thinking I’ve EVER shown with this stupid site, I actually wrote them all down so I would actually remember to tackle them. Yeah, I know. I’m scared too. I don’t even know who I am anymore. And when I saw that I had mentioned Adventure of the Week, I realized I’d f$&%ed up. Because that was just me repurposing a shape as a descriptor. And then I realized it wasn’t. I realized there is actually a fundamental difference. Although most Adventure of the Week campaigns naturally settled into the shape of a Plate of Meatballs, they didn’t ALWAYS. In fact, I could envision an Adventure of the Week campaign in the shape of a Noodle. Or even a plate of Spaghetti. And then, I had to figure out what the hell the difference actually was.

And the difference is in the through-line. Or rather, it’s the unifying principle. And this is fundamental to set up campaigns that give you the best of both worlds: the episodic nature of an Adventure of the Week Campaign with the feeling of an ongoing plot that you get from a Noodle Campaign and the sense of working toward a distant goal in an Epic Quest Campaign. Because those campaigns happen more than you think.

So, what IS the difference? Well, the difference is in what connects the adventures – the episodes – together. A Plate of Meatballs campaign is one in which the adventures are truly self-contained. Every adventure presents its own motivation, climax, and resolution. And, except in very broad, general terms, it can’t pull anything from the campaign itself to unify the adventures because there’s nothing to pull. By definition, there is no unifying plot-line that runs through all or most of the adventures. That’s a Noodle Campaign. And that means every adventure must provide its own set-up and motivations and resolution. And the resolution must pretty much resolve everything with no significant loose ends. A Plate of Meatballs campaign is one in which the adventures could be played in any order – except for that experience level thing – and the campaign wouldn’t change one bit. It’s a campaign in which different players could, conceivably, drop in and out, and nothing would change. It’s basically Star Trek: The Next Generation. Except for the broad theme and motivation of “exploration and discovery,” every episode presented a new planet with a new problem, and the characters had a specific reason for caring about the problem that was part of the episode itself. Episodes didn’t draw on motivations or desires that had been established in previous episodes except regarding broad archetypes. And even when episodes did deal with Worf’s honor and pride or Riker’s ambition or Picard’s dislike for children, those motivations were reintroduced in the episode in which they were relevant. Thus, each episode assumed the audience had almost no prior knowledge of the show.

That’s a Plate of Meatballs.

Now, a Plate of Meatballs can be an Adventure of the Week campaign. In fact, it almost has to be. But an Adventure of the Week campaign doesn’t have to be a Plate of Meatballs. To whit: Deep Space Nine. Deep Space Nine introduced a bunch of new things to the Star Trek formula. Some of them weren’t very well received, admittedly. They introduced a bit of darkness and dystopia. But they also introduced continuity. There were several plot lines threaded through numerous episodes. There was the rebuilding of the Planet Bajor and Sisko’s role as a spiritual figure, there was the tension with and then the war with the Dominion, there was the destruction of the noble Ferengi strawman society by socialist bulls$&%. Ha ha ha. I kid. Communism is great. Please don’t delist my site, Google.

The thing was the episodes themselves were still self-contained. Each episode contained everything needed in that episode to get a satisfying story. And you could watch the episodes out of order. Sure, you’d get the sense that you’d missed some important events, but you wouldn’t be confused, and you could still appreciate the story as a stand-alone story. And characters could come and go. They did, in fact. But if you DID watch the episodes that pertained to a particular plot-arc in order, beginning to end, you also got a macro story out of it that was satisfying in its own right.

Ultimately, while the Plate of Meatballs shape refers to a structure for the whole campaign, the Adventure of the Week descriptor refers to a formula for how the individual adventures get stuck together. You can have both, sure. But you don’t have to have a Plate of Meatballs just because you want an Adventure of Week campaign.

This Week: Adventure!

Adventure of the Week campaigns are pretty formulaic. Which doesn’t make them bad. In fact, they can be extremely good for certain groups and certain formats. But let’s start with the formula itself. Every adventure begins with a problem that has to be resolved and a reason why the heroes should want to resolve the problem. In fact, they generally begin with the structure, “One day, everything is perfectly normal, and then this thing happens, and if you fix it, you’ll get this benefit.” For example, the heroes might be sitting around in a tavern when some dude approaches their table. It turns out, he’s an old friend, and he needs help because an ogre stole his bike. He reminds the party that they owe him a debt. The party needs to go confront the ogre and get the bike back, and then their debt to their old friend will be repaid. They do so. Problem solved, debt paid, adventure over. Then, next week, while walking through a bazaar a mysterious stranger sells the party a treasure map to a cursed treasure in a fabulous pyramid. And the party likes fabulous pyramids and cursed treasures, because maybe they are dyslexic, and they go off in search of the treasure. And then next week…

The hallmark of an Adventure of the Week campaign is a sort of start and stop motion. The world begins when the players sit down, and something happens. It ends when the adventure is resolved. And it doesn’t start turning again until there’s a new problem and a new reason for dealing with it. In between, the party is just lounging around a tavern, or they are traveling in their starship. The world only exists when an adventure is on, see? It only exists in the spaces between inciting incident and resolution.

So how is that different from any other campaign? Well, obviously, it depends on how you mix the descriptors. But, simply put, every adventure has very firm endpoints. There’s no mushiness, no flow from one to the next, no sense of “okay, we do this, and then when we win, we have to do this, and then when we win, we can do this.” The adventures can’t set each other up. They can’t be dominoes.

Why would you want a campaign like that? There are lots of reasons. The thing is, just because adventures are formulaic doesn’t mean they have to be identical. In point of fact, the formulaic nature makes it easier to make every adventure really different. The party might be exploring ancient ruins one week, rooting out an evil traitor the next, solving a murder the next, and then trying to evacuate a village as a volcano erupts in the next. The continuity between adventures isn’t a big deal. Mostly. We’ll get back to the continuity issue.

Another great thing about Adventure of the Week campaigns is that the only thing that matters is the exciting parts, the adventures themselves. And lots of players like the idea of showing up every week, being handed a goal, and then killing that goal and taking its stuff. Or whatever. Some players don’t really care about elaborate plots in complex worlds. They just want f$&%ing action. Frankly, I like those players. Because, as a GM, Adventure of the Week campaigns are also easy to maintain and fun to run. If I watch a disaster movie and then decide I want to run an adventure based on a volcano suddenly growing in the middle of a major city, I can do it. I don’t have to fit it into some kind of bigger jigsaw puzzle or worry about why the characters are there or anything like that.

And, believe it or not, because the adventures are self-contained, well-structured narratives, they can be more satisfying regarding story than a long-running campaign that takes three years to hit a real resolution. That is, they scratch the itch of players who enjoy a good narrative pretty well, especially if they are structured around a main plot and a subplot.

Mostly. Again, continuity. We’ll come back to it.

These sorts of campaigns are also really great if attendance is erratic and unreliable or if it’s difficult to get regular sessions on any sort of reasonable schedule. Especially if you can work it out, so each adventure fits neatly into one session.

And there’s a reason why organized play programs usually use Adventure of the Week type campaigns.

But What Does it All Mean

So, if Adventure of the Week campaigns are so great, why don’t I just marry them already? Well, because they lack something. Adventure of the Week campaigns tend to leave the players a bit disconnected with the larger world of the game and the events that are happening outside of their adventures. Moreover, because each adventure is mostly self-contained, the lack of overarching plot lines running between the games can weigh on some players who need more than just an endless string of unrelated problems to solve. And, no matter how much you differentiate them, the adventures themselves can start to feel formulaic. They can start to feel repetitive. Eventually, people do pick up on the structure. And while some players will thrive on structural regularity, other players will start to get the runs. Adventure of the Week campaigns are like high fiber diets. They keep everything moving, but too much movement is not always a good thing.

Truth is, Adventure of the Week campaigns don’t work for everyone. But if they work for you and your group, have at it. They are fun as hell. And there’s really only TWO big issues to be aware of to run such a game.

The Recipe for Adventure

The first thing you have to do to run an Adventure of the Week campaign is get really good at writing one-shot adventures. That is, you have to write adventures that have everything they need, from beginning to end. Most importantly, the adventure must provide all of the motivation it needs in the adventure itself. It’s not enough to have an incident that points the heroes toward a resolution; you also have to include the reason why they care. You can’t draw on anything from the past. And if you do draw on anything from the past, you have to reintroduce and explain it. When the old friend shows up, you have to be ready to tell the players who he is and how they know him and why they feel they owe him anything. But the nice thing is that you can do that even if the players have never met the guy before. You just weave his introduction into the exposition and let the scene play out. Players in Adventure of the Week campaigns very quickly get primed to roll with the sudden revelations of events from a past that never happened or off-screen events they never experienced.

The adventure also has to completely resolve itself at the end. You can’t leave a loose end or sequel hook or anything like that. You can’t set up the next adventure. Otherwise, your Adventure of the Week campaign will gradually stop being an Adventure of the Week campaign. Now, that’s okay if you do it on purpose, but if you’re running the Adventure of the Week campaign because your players enjoy it, or the reality of scheduling has forced it or for any other good reason – and you should always choose your campaign type for GOOD F$&%ING REASONS – if you’re running the Adventure of the Week campaign for good reasons, you don’t want to let it get away from you. That means every adventure has to end and wrap up all its plotlines and have its celebratory cake party and whatever else.

In short, to some extent, you want to assume that every adventure will include a completely new group of players – even though it won’t – and you want to imagine that the players will never come back at the end of the adventure. Get that into your head, and you’ve got a good Adventure of the Week campaign. And you can also run a great convention game or organized play event at your local game store.

It’s Not a Non-Campaign

The second thing you have to worry about when running an Adventure of the Week campaign is continuity. Yeah. I know. I made a big point about how continuity is almost nonexistent in an Adventure of the Week campaign. And I stand by that. But there’s a big difference between MOSTLY nonexistent and ALL nonexistent. Mostly nonexistent is slightly existent. With all nonexistent, well, you get the picture.

The thing is, if you erase all the continuity from the game, you’re not running a campaign anymore. Something has to tie the adventures together. It’s just not the adventures themselves. What do I mean? Well, one of the things that provide continuity in many campaigns is the connection between adventures. Adventures set each other up. Or several adventures represent steps that need to be taken before one big adventure can be done. Or the resolution in one adventure causes a problem that starts the next. Adventure of the Week campaigns can’t rely on any of that. They are totally self-contained.

Now, the characters themselves usually provide the necessary continuity. That is, the adventures star the same protagonists and – to some extent – they do remember their adventures and their relationships grow and change, so that’s something. And, unless your players have serious attendance problems or you’re running a drop-in, drop-out organized play campaign, you can’t avoid that or shut it off. And, of course, the setting often provides some continuity too. The campaign is the Ongoing Adventures of the Adventuring Adventurers in the World of Adventure.

But that isn’t always enough. Especially with sporadic attendance problems or drop-in, drop-out players. In cases like that, you need something else to connect the adventures. And that thing isn’t a plot line. Because, again, that would imply motivations and story developments carry from adventure to adventure. Which they don’t. Right? Instead, the thing is generally a game or setting feature. For example, the heroes are the crew of a starship that flies from planet to planet having adventures. Or they are a group of heroes for hire with a home base in a particular city. Or they are members of a particular organization.

The unifying element – the continuity element – can actually be quite helpful in establishing the formula for the adventures. Most of the adventures, for example, might begin with the heroes detecting a new planet and flying over to check it out. They beam down, and then… adventure! Or they get a call that their services are needed. The client explains their problem and provides their first lead. And then… adventure! Or they are briefed by their superior officer because they must go on a mission to do a thing. They get outfitted for the mission, head off to the mission drop point, and then… adventure!

The unifying element becomes a stand-in for that beginning that says “everything is perfectly normal and happy, and then one day…” It allows you to gloss over what happened between adventures, anchor the players in the adventure, and get the game started. And because of the nature of Adventure of the Week campaigns, the unifying element should be pretty stable. It shouldn’t change much. It can be endangered, sure. But it must be out of danger at the end of the adventure. Everything has to go back to normal. Because, again, you can’t have s$&% carrying over from one adventure to the next.

Unless…

Noodles of the Week

And now we get back to the difference between Plates of Meatballs and Adventures of the Weeks Campaigns. There’s a bunch of tricky plurals for you, Grammarly. Good luck.

As I noted above, you can – in theory – have a plot line that connects some or most or all of the adventures in an Adventure of the Week campaign. Yes. You can do that and still run an Adventure of the Week campaign. Despite all my insistence on self-containednes. It’s just a matter of boiling the plot line down into a game of Whack-a-Mole instead of a game of Chess.

Let’s say, for example, you want to have an ongoing plot thread about a group of evil cultists trying to conquer the world for Orcus or someone. If you’re running an Epic Quest Campaign, you’d establish their big plan and figure out the steps needed to counter plan and defeat them and to gather the weapons needed to kill Orcus, right? And the party would constantly be moving toward destroying the cult and killing Orcus.

In an Adventure of the Week campaign, though, you’d do it differently. Instead, the adventures would involve the heroes discovering a particular plot by a particular cultist in a particular location, countering that plot, defeating that cultist, and then moving on. Until next time. Think Sailor Moon. Yes, I’m referencing Sailor Moon. In that show, each week, one of the show’s villains would come up with a new way of draining the life energy from groups of people. Sailor Moon and company would discover the plot. They’d thwart it. A monster would happen. They’d fight the monster. And the villain would escape back to the Negaverse to come up with another plot.

That’s a basic Adventure of the Week structure right there.

The basic idea is that the players don’t so much advance the plot with each adventure. Instead, they hammer the plot back down into its place. Because an Adventure of the Week campaign is really all about just constantly restoring peace and normality to the world. Hence, Whack a Mole. And that’s what an Adventure of the Week Noodle Campaign would look like.

Of course, all of your options with shapes and plot threads are open with an Adventure of the Week campaign. You can have a single plot thread that comes up every adventure – the Negaverse is at it again, Sailor Scouts – or you can alternate between plot thread adventures and stand-alone adventures – now that we’ve dealt with the Cigarette Smoking Man’s alien cancer thing AGAIN, we can go hunt down this werewolf in Pennsylvania, Scully – or you can have several plot threads and flit between them throughout the campaign – Ferengi episode? Skip. Stand-alone. Stand-alone. Skip. Sisko is actually a sci-fi author in the 1930s? F$&% that. Oh! Dominion war. Good one. And those multiple plot threads can involve specific villains, organizations, locations, or even character traits.

The only thing you really can’t do is actually advance those plots. Otherwise, again, you lose the Adventure of the Week feel. That’s why those plot lines are best stated as problems that can pop up and complicate the character’s lives.

That said, you can actually have significant developments. And you can even resolve plot threads. Remember, these campaign types aren’t a straightjacket. Just a way of understanding how to put a game together. You can loosen the straps on the Adventure of the Week now and then and do some pretty cool things. For example, occasionally, Sailor Moon would actually manage to wipe out one of the Negaverse’s lieutenants. Yay! Big victory! And then a new lieutenant would fill the power vacuum and fuel another set of Adventurers of the Week. The format of the show would shift accordingly and then settle into a new routine. And then, when the season was coming to a close, Sailor Moon actually killed the Negaverse itself. Or the Queen. Or the Dark Force. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Likewise, you can occasionally build an adventure around a more substantial victory related to a plot point. Shake up the format a little, as it were. Give the players a victory. A sense that they had a more permanent impact on the world. And then settle into a new formula with a replacement villain. And when the campaign feels like it’s run its course and you’re ready to the retire the players and move on, you can have a big adventure that ties up the campaign’s major plot thread. It’s just that those big episodes – especially the final episode – aren’t so much things the players have been building towards as opportunities that present themselves in the moment.

They are just really big moles that need to be whacked down. And the biggest one of all will break the machine.