It’s personal story time today.

I guess I should call this an Angry Table Tale. People keep telling me they miss these things so here’s one. Two actually. Because this is a long personal story, so I’m splitting it into two parts. Today’s the first part and I’ll release the second over the weekend. The split makes sense. Thematically I mean. Each part has a completely different takeaway, though I didn’t originally plan for that to happen.

I want to talk about what I’m going through with my AD&D 2E campaign, Chain of Stars, today. My campaign’s gone bad. Really bad. I can’t quit so I’ve got to figure out how to fix it.

Now, based on some side discussions I’ve had lately, there’s a lot of this going around. I know a few people whose campaigns have gone weirdly bad and that need fixing. Really, it happens all the time. Campaigns go bad. It happens. Hell, more campaigns go bad than don’t once they stretch on for more than a few months. I’ve actually got a theory that a lot of the crap that people call GM Burnout is actually just campaigns going bad in non-obvious ways and GMs not realizing it.

People have told me that my bloggy, stream-of-consciousness Random Bullshit articles — the ones where I think through a problem and let y’all listen in to my thoughts — people have told me that these bloggy, stream-of-consciousness articles are some of the most helpful I write. So I figure that identifying how my campaign has gone bad and working systematically toward a solution will help some of you out. Especially if my campaign has followed a very common pattern of going bad that happens to lots of people and often gets mistaken for burnout.

In order to tell the story of my campaign going bad, though, I’ve got to tell you a lot about how it started and what it was supposed to look like. I’ve got to take you through its inception which means showing you the thought process I followed when launching the campaign. Given that entailed doing a bunch of Scenario Design and Campaign Management visioncrafting, then I can count that whole story as a practical example of all that crap I’ve been talking about for months.

You see how this naturally splits into two parts? Kinda sorta? Because to set the stage for the second part, which I’m going to do first, I need to set the scene for the first part, which I’ll focus on second. Get it? No. It doesn’t matter.

Just know I’m telling you one long, stream-of-consciousness story with a split in the middle that’ll show you both how I built my campaign vision based on a bunch of external constraints and random details and how I’m building a plan for saving it from the iceberg I’ve run it into.

Cool?

Good.

But first, two caveats…

First, some of my players read this shit and that makes it hard to talk about the games I’m running. Obviously, I have to dance around secrets and I can’t show you everything about how the sausage is made. This particular story is gonna be tricky though because my players are having a great time. I know. They keep telling me so. Actually, they keep telling me this is the best game I’ve ever run for them. That ain’t bragging, it’s just quoting.

Now, there have been some issues. Mostly they’re scheduling and reliability issues and they’re totally on me. Due to sporadically canceled games, a couple of unfortunate hiatuses, and a fair few shortened sessions, we’re not making nearly as much progress through the campaign as anyone wants. But the actual game sessions we do play are keeping my players super happy. Unless they’re lying to me. Thus, it’s probably going to surprise them to learn I’m currently wearing the same facial expression that General Custer wore at Little Big Horn and I’m screaming for Major Reno to bring me my brown pants.

That ain’t to warn any of my players off reading this. Read on, MacDuff. Nothing here’s actually going to shock you and it’s not really as bad as I’m making it sound even if everything is way worse than I’ve let you see.

Second, some of you are going to take this shit — especially the second part — as thinly-veiled life advice. Worse, those of you who’ve been privy to some of the behind-the-scenes shit at Angry Games, Inc. or who’ve hung out for the candid, post-Live Chat and Live Proofreadaloud bullshit sessions or who’ve just been reading between the lines in my updates for the past year, you’re probably going to think there’s a whole other dimension to this story — especially the second part — and it’s all an allegory to do with stuff beyond my personal pretend elf game.

If you find yourself thinking any of that, first, remember that I don’t give life advice. All of this is only to do with pretend elf games. Second, as far as any behind-the-scenes shit here at Angry Games, Inc., well, I won’t lie to you…

Enough preamble, though. Let’s get to the story.

What Do You Do When You’ve Lost the Plot?

I’m currently running this AD&D 2E campaign called Chain of Stars. It’s a homebrew game in a homebrew setting that’s basically just a bunch of details stolen from Grayhawk and crammed onto my own little kingdom map.

For those that care about such things, I’m running it online via Fantasy Grounds with Zoom for communication. The four players have been sharing my virtual table for several years and editions and games and campaigns. It’s basically me running a personal game for fun with some of my best gaming friends.

There’s been some scheduling shakeups and a few unfortunate hiatuses due to ongoing health issues. Thus, even though I’ve been running the game for over a year, I hesitate to say it’s really been going on for a year or anything like that. Practically speaking, in terms of continuous play, it’s been a few months of broken play, which ain’t doing it any favors. Despite that, the players have been as kind and forgiving as any group of friends could possibly be and I am gamely trying to recover the campaign from the effects of the scheduling shakeups. Any Game Master who’s dealt with this shit knows what an absolute mess random scheduling shakeups make of a game.

That said, this story ain’t about the scheduling problems, although those problems certainly didn’t help what’s going on now.

You see, I’ve lost the plot.

When I say that I’ve lost the plot, I’m not talking about any kind of in-game sequence of events. Apart from some minor, meaningless details that have gotten lost in the shuffle —like the names of C-list NPCs and crap like that — the important backstories and outlines and notes are both indelibly lodged in my head to the point where I can recite them in my sleep and carefully recorded in longhand on actual, physical paper that is locked in the same filing cabinet as all my personal and corporate financial and tax records.

I shit you not.

So what does it mean when I say I’ve lost the plot?

You know that feeling you get in life when you suddenly realize you’re not where you expected to be and shit isn’t working and you have no idea how you got where you are and you don’t know when it happened because you had a plan and even though you’ve gotten distracted and some stuff has come up you’ve managed to mostly keep things going and so you can’t understand how you got so far off course or where you are but you know it’s the wrong place and that it isn’t working and you’re not happy? That’s what I mean.

Maybe I should have said, “I’m off course,” but I like, “I’ve lost the plot.” It emphasizes how I’m totally talking about pretend elf games and not about anything else at all.

That feeling always catches you off guard, doesn’t it, even though it totally shouldn’t. Because it’s a feeling you get only after you’ve been going through the motions for a while. When you’ve been just kind of keeping things moving and just getting by. When you’ve been saying, “Okay, I can’t give this my full attention right now, but if I can just do enough to get through tonight’s game session — because this is totally only about pretend elf games, remember — but if I can just get through tonight’s game session, I can sit down this weekend and really clean this up and be back on track for next week.”

You know what I mean, right? You get this, don’t you? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re the sort of Game Master who runs game-of-the-week campaigns or just invites your players to murderhobo their way through your hexcrawl sandbox or whatever. If you’re never really trying to do more than fill the next session — if you don’t have big plans and a vision and all that crap — then just building enough game to fill the next session is your standard operating procedure. That’s fine, by the way. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of gaming. I ain’t disparaging it just like I’m sure that no elitist grognard dumbass is going to slip into my comment section to disparage other people doing things other ways. Right?

If you do run with a vision and have a plan, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have a bad week eventually. There will come a day when you say, “I do not have the time, resources, or willpower to give my game its due, but if I can just get through the next session…” It happens to everyone. It only becomes an issue when that week becomes two and then three and then more and then, well, you probably know what I’m talking about.

It’s sadly easy to let one week like that stretch into weeks and then into months. It’s distressingly easy to think you’re keeping things running well enough that one good weekend of focused, committed work is all you need to get back on firm footing. It’s depressingly easy to lose track of how many weeks you’ve been doing that. It’s achingly, painfully, tragically easy to ignore the tiny voice that’s telling you that you’ve lost the plot.

That’s what I’m talking about in the general sense. What do you do when you realize you’ve lost the plot? Or, more aptly, what do you do when you finally have the g’nads to admit you’ve lost the plot?

To explain in a more specific sense what my losing the plot looks like, I have to take you back to the beginning. I have to tell you what the plot was supposed to be.

Born of Adversity: How My Campaign Started

If you’ve been paying any attention to anything I’ve ever said, it won’t surprise you to learn I started Chain of Stars with an actual Campaign Vision. I started by coming up with a very deliberate statement of how I saw the campaign playing out and what it was going to be about. That Campaign Vision was developed to meet a couple of Design Goals and those Design Goals arose from external constraints. In other words, I did all the shit I’ve been talking about in True Scenario Designery and True Campaign Managery.

There were two external constraints I had to work within.

First, Chain of Stars — which was, at the time, entitled Untitled RPG Campaign — first, Chain of Stars had to have an ending. It needed closure.

You see when I proposed starting a new campaign to my long-suffering players, there was this heartbreaking moment when one of my players said, “You know, Angry, I love your games. Your adventures and campaigns are great and I love exploring your living, breathing homebrewed worlds. But we’ve started three or four different campaigns now and not a single one has had an actual, real ending. They’ve been abandoned or they’ve petered out or they got killed by player changes or scheduling issues or whatever. I really, really want to actually finish something.”

That hurt. Especially because it was totally true.

So, the first constraint was that Chain of Stars needed to run through completion. That’s why, as I hinted above, I can’t quit no matter how bad things get. I swore a promise to my players. I am going to keep it.

The second constraint was that the campaign had to wrap up in around six months and absolutely no more than nine months. I can’t really disclose where that constraint came from. Not right now. It clearly doesn’t matter since you already know it didn’t happen. At the time I was launching the campaign, though, it was super important.

Anyway, in terms of constraints, that’s what I was working with.

I can’t remember how, exactly, I settled on AD&D 2E for my system of choice. I do remember that I was the one that made that choice — my players just went along with it because they literally don’t care what I run as long as I run something — and I remember that it was the next choice I made and I remember it was ultimately a totally arbitrary choice because, frankly, I really don’t care what I run either. The ugly truth is that choosing your game system or edition is pretty much the least impactful, least important choice you’re going to make.

Except that’s kind of a lie, but I’m saving that revelation for the second part.

Anyway…

I don’t remember how I decided AD&D 2E was my system of choice for Chain of Stars, but that’s the choice I made next. Honestly, I was probably really drunk one night and feeling bitter about Wizards of the Coast and nostalgic about my childhood games and I ended up texting my players at 3 AM with something like, “You know, I love you guys but I’m over 5E and I used to date AD&D 2E in high school and I think I’m still in love with her…”

So I’d chosen a system. Meanwhile, I knew I had a solid deadline to finish the game by and I knew my players wanted an ending, so I decided I’d do some kind of quest-based campaign. Something with an actual goal. I mean, I could have done an open-ended exploration campaign or a dungeon-of-the-week game and ended with, “… and now that you’re all rich, you all decide to retire happily ever after, the end,” but that really didn’t seem to fulfill the spirit of my players’ plea for an actual sense of finishing something. The game needed an ending. Which was fine because I like working with quests and plots anyway.

What I didn’t have, though, was any idea for a quest or a plot.

Whatever system I’m running, I like to do things by the book. Mostly. Of course, I tweak shit and use my brain and make judgment calls, but I consider that more of a rules in spirit kind of thing. My point is that once I pick a system, I run it the way the designers tell me to unless and until an actual problem crops up.

Now, AD&D 2E is old-school D&D. It’s actually the edition that filled my formative gaming years. I started as a little Angry with Mentzer’s Basic D&D, but I graduated quickly to Advanced D&D, and the edition of the day was 2E, so that’s what I spent the better part of twelve years running. The thing about old-school D&D is that you can’t really do old-school D&D without doing random character generation. Which is fine because that’s what the rules say you’re supposed to do anyway.

Therefore, I decided that I’d take my players through random character generation and we’d end up with a party and then I’d build some kind of epic, campaign-spanning quest based on the idea that these four heroic randos were the right people to save the kingdom or whatever. In the business, we call that an Eigenplot for reasons you need an advanced mathematics degree to understand, and I wish I joking.

Do you see what I was doing? I was assuming the campaign was the story of a random collection of accidental heroes who saved the day because they just happened to be the ones with the right mix of skills, abilities, and backgrounds and they happened to come together at just the right time. They weren’t Chosen Ones or Destined Heroes, per se, they were just the right people for the job. Except I’d design the job purposely knowing they had to be the right people for it. Of course, it was implied that the Gods or Fate or Some Greater Power brought them together and I was totally happy to lean into that shit. It’s all very, “Bilbo was meant to find the Ring and so, you, Frodo, were meant to carry it.”

So, I let the players build whatever characters they wanted — based on whatever the dice let them build — and then I’d work out a very sparse, simple backstory with each player and then I’d figure out what the hell the quest was. The cleric’s player decided, for some reason, that Astrology was a neat Non-Weapon Proficiency — that’s what we used to call Skills — so I knew Astrology was important somehow. I had a peasant fisherwoman who’d inherited an ancient sword from an adventurer uncle the family didn’t like to talk about and so I knew the sword was important or else the uncle’s adventures were or maybe the fighter’s secret bloodline was. I had a dwarf living in exile and a wandering elf historian with a mastery of ancient languages.

I took all these random character details and let my imagination run wild for a weekend and started coming up with quest and plot ideas. A few very specific moments popped into my imagination that I knew I wanted to use if I could. One of them has already happened, so I can share it as an example.

I had an astrologer cleric and an elf historian, right? And I knew the elf’s player was really into maps and cartography and exploration. Well, suddenly, I had this vision of the two characters realizing that something that looked like a star chart was actually a map of terrestrial locations and would somehow reveal the place where a MacGuffin was hidden. It just seemed like a neat puzzle so I wanted to make it happen.

Later, when I decided the campaign was going to involve some open-world wandering to different locations to recover the several pieces of the MacGuffin or whatever, I used that puzzle to tell the players where the Dungeons of the MacGuffins were hidden. That helped me design the map of the kingdom which, because of physical borders like mountains and shit, is actually distinctly circular so ancient locations could be mapped with symbols that looked like constellations on something that looked like a star chart.

In the end, I used all those random details to develop the quest-and-plot outline for a twelve-adventure, six-to-nine-month campaign. It was a really fun activity. It was like someone handed me a box of Lego bricks and said, “Okay, build something cool, but you have to use exactly 200 Lego bricks and you have to incorporate at least ten of these specific Lego pieces in a very prominent and visible way.”

I am actually really proud of what I came up with. I can’t wait until the campaign’s finally over so I can share the whole story. It’s really awesome. That’s why, a few weeks into the game, when one of the players said, “Wow, Angry, it’s obvious how much love you’ve put into this campaign. Thank you,” I came really close to feeling an actual emotion. I was almost moved.

Which is why it sucks so much that I’ve lost the plot.

A Campaign Cannot Live by Quest-and-Plot Alone

Now, all that shit above’s basically just the flufferdoodle story bullshit. It’s all quests and plot points and a few specific challenges to incorporate where and when I can. It’s the normal sort of campaign plotting any Game Master might do for a plot-driven, epic quest campaign, right? It was just coming up with plot points to turn into adventures as and when I needed them and which I’d adjust in response to the players’ victories, defeats, and choices as well as whatever whims hit me.

But at the same time I was coming up with all of this, I was also becoming increasingly obsessed with an aspect of campaign and adventure design that I’d felt had been tragically ignored in the tabletop roleplaying game space for far too long. Hell, I’m still in the clutches of that obsession. It’s gradually worked its tendrils into everything I’ve been doing for the last year or more. It’s worked its way to my goals for the Slapdash Engine, it’s helped me map True Scenario Designery, it’s become a subtle part of my plans for the bunch of hacks that will add up to Town Mode that I’m hoping to release this year, and it’s also the central part of a big-ass secret project I can’t really discuss but which I’m calling The GUT of Adventure Design.

What aspect of adventure design is this? Broadly speaking, it’s the aspect of Gameplay Structure. It’s like if you were to map out the campaign and all the adventures in it and all the encounters and scenes in those adventures, what shapes would all that shit take? Gameplay Structure encompasses everything from dungeon design to open-world exploration and gameplay loops and critical paths and act-and-chapter structures. Basically, Gameplay Structure is the heart of Scenario Design.

Given that I was stuck with some pretty tight constraints — I needed a complete campaign with a solid beginning, middle, and ending and I needed it to fill a very specific number of sessions — I decided to focus heavily on the structure. I wanted to see what I could do, design-wise, by deliberately building around a very specific Gameplay Structure. I was experimenting. I was tinkering. And given that I was working heavily on Slapdash Alpha II at the time and gearing up for True Scenario Designery, it was extremely useful tinkering.

I figured I’d need a three-part map to pull this shit off. First, I’d need to map out the campaign’s overall Gameplay Structure. Next, I’d need some kind of plan for the session-by-session play modes which is something like what video games call a Gameplay Loop. Finally, I’d need a way to map this crap to the actual gameplay sessions.

Now, I was fully aware that this whole thing was a giant experiment and there was thus a better-than-even chance it wouldn’t actually come together in play quite how I wanted it to. I was also fully aware that I was working with a tabletop roleplaying game and therefore any sort of perfect, precise plan was impossible. In short, I knew that I was just sketching some loose guidelines I’d try to fit my game into as I built and ran each adventure. I’m mentioning this not for my benefit, but for yours. Lots of y’all seem to forget that this is how roleplaying games work. Every plan, every framework, every guideline, every difficulty assessment; it’s all just fuzzy ballpark estimation.

Anyway…

Obviously, I’d chosen a MacGuffin Hunt for the major quest and, because I love combat, I knew I’d end up with a Final Boss for the climax. Hell, I’d probably put bosses in most of the MacGuffin Dungeons.

Meanwhile, I’m a huge fan of synchrony between the Gameplay Structure and the Narrative Structure. You know, using the feel of the gameplay to emphasize shifts in the narrative? So, of course, my eyes fell on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and, to a lesser, extent Dark Souls. Actually, that’s kind of redundant since Dark Souls and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past basically do the same exact trick in the same exact way. They’re like poetry; they rhyme. Of course, the in-level structures are a little different. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past echoes its act-and-gameplay structure in each of its dungeons while Dark Souls has From Software’s characteristic loops-within-loops thing, but I’m getting really in the weeds here.

The point is, I decided to rip off the single best Legend of Zelda game ever made. Structurally, I mean. See, Link to the Past has a five-act story, and with each act, the gameplay structure changes. The first, third, and fifth acts are Linear Gauntlets. The second act is a Labyrinth. The fourth act is presented as a Labyrinth, but it also approaches an Open Structure even if you follow the numbering order of the dungeons.

I decided I’d do the same thing, but with three acts instead of five since I didn’t have much time to work with. I’d start and end with Linear Gauntlets and then shift to an Open Style for the middle act. I’d mark the transitions with major plot revelations and, for most of the adventures, I’d focus on Labyrinths and Branching Paths.

Roughly, I figured there’d be two adventures in Act I, five adventures in Act II, and one or two adventures in Act III.

In terms of Gameplay Loops, I split the action into Adventures and Interludes. Most of the Adventures were going to be dungeon crawls, but I’d probably have a chase or an event-based adventure here and there as well. The Interludes would encompass both the players’ interactions with the world and their travel between the major locations in the kingdom. Of course, there’d also be some travel in many of the adventures, but the big cross-country travel would be more about transition than adventure.

I also decided I’d try to limit Interludes to either a half-session or one session each and each adventure would fill two or three sessions. Thus, I roughly figured most of the game would follow this pattern…

• Interlude: Travel to Town near Adventure Site (½ to 1 Session)
• Interlude: Explore Town and Prepare for Adventure (½ to 1 Session)
• Adventure: Delve Adventure Site (2 to 3 Sessions)
• Interlude: Post-Adventure Town Business (½ to 1 Session)

I knew the math didn’t quite work for the number of sessions I’d have to work with and the number of adventures I was planning, but I also knew that every adventure wouldn’t demand three interludes around it, so I figured it was close enough for an experimental rough approximation.

A Campaign is Born

Thus, I had my campaign vision. The players would have a few linear adventures to get them together before a big revelation would set them on an open-ended MacGuffin hunt across the kingdom. Then, they’d use the MacGuffins to beat the Final Boss and save the day. Roughly. There’s actually a little more to it than that, but I can’t spoil things for my players. I’m drastically oversimplifying the ending, for example. It really isn’t as simple as “Use MacGuffins to beat the Final Boss.” There are some serious choices to make that play into the campaign’s themes.

They’d spend a session or two interacting with the world and traveling across the kingdom, then spend two or three sessions delving a dungeon or having some other adventure, then they’d do some more interacting and traveling before doing the next adventure. In six to nine months, they’d kill the demon and save the world. My players would be happy, I’d have kept my promise, and I’d have a kickass bunch of articles to write about adventure structure and campaign design and shit like that.

Fast forward to today. It’s more than a year later. My players are having fun, I’m having fun, the world has come alive, there have been a lot of great moments of emergent play, the game is stalled in an endless Interlude between Act I and Act II, not that the acts mean anything anymore, I’m treading water, the campaign is an albatross around my neck, and I’m not happy. Something’s wrong. I’m not quite sure what it is or how to recover from it, but I can’t quit so I’ve got to figure it out.

In short, I suddenly realized that I’d lost the plot.

So, what do you do when you’ve lost the plot? Come back this weekend and I’ll tell you.