This here is a continuation of the personal story I started a couple days ago about how I totally wrecked my AD&D 2E campaign and how I plan to fix it. Except not really. Except kind of really.

First, my campaign really isn’t totally ruined. It just feels like it is. It still needs fixing though. Because it ain’t making me happy.

Second, there’s a lot less personal story this time around and a bit more analysis of Game Mastering behaviors that make good campaigns go bad in ways that are weirdly hard to analyze or articulate. Which I firmly believe is a problem that lots of Game Masters suffer from.

The point is that you do need to read the first part before you read this part. That’s how two-parters work. Duh. So go read the first part if you haven’t already. This will still be here when you’re done.

Now for the bad news. I said the other day that this was gonna be a two-parter. I lied. I didn’t mean to, but it happened. This is now a three-parter. On outlining, re-outlining, drafting, and rewriting, this gradually became less about the personal story and more about how Game Masters get burnt out on campaigns and what to do to undo the burnout and get your passion back. Which I think is immensely useful and worth taking every second it needs to get it right.

So, now this is “how it started,” “how it went bad,” and then “how to fix it.” The only consolation I can offer is that you’ll have the third part in just a few days because it’s already half done. At least you won’t have to wait long for the end of the story.

Right then…

What Do You Do When You Lose the Plot?

The other day, I told all y’all about how I’d lost the plot in my ongoing AD&D 2E campaign Chain of Stars. While I was able to say that losing the plot has nothing to do with the game’s outline or story, I wasn’t really able to tell you what losing the plot actually is.

Now, that’s not my fault. Losing the plot is actually a really vague problem to have. This sucks because it’s actually a very common problem to have when you’re engaged in some long-running endeavor. Like, for example, when you’re running a long-running game about pretending to be an elf for your friends. Which, by the way, is the only thing I’m talking about here.

When you’ve lost the plot, it means you feel like something has gone wrong, but you can’t really articulate what’s actually wrong or why or how it went wrong and you sure as hell can’t really see what to do about it. It’s just this sense that shit’s gone wrong. Usually, you recognize that you’ve lost the plot when you suddenly remember that you had some kind of goal or plan or vision and it seems like, after months of work, you’re nowhere near it and you’re not getting any closer to it.

What the hell am I doing? This is nothing like what it’s supposed to be. How did I get here? What do I do now?

Here’s the thing…

Losing the plot isn’t actually a problem. It’s not a specific thing that’s gone wrong and needs solving. Instead, it’s just your dumbass brain suddenly recognizing that there is a problem somewhere — possibly several problems — but without being able to clearly finger what they are or how to solve them. Consequently, losing the plot is really stressful. It’s something you want to fix, but can’t because it’s not something that can be fixed. Losing the plot is like a Check Engine light suddenly blinking to life on the back of your GM Screen.

Worse yet, when you know there’s a problem but can’t really pin it down, it usually feels like the problem is everywhere. Everything’s gone wrong. When the problem is everywhere and everything’s gone wrong, it feels like the problem is too big to fix. So you get overwhelmed.

Or you assume the problem is you.

Last week I told y’all that I firmly believe that a lot of the crap we call GM Burnout is actually just GM’s losing the plot. They know something’s wrong, but they don’t know what or how to fix it, so they assume the problem is them. “I’m just burnt out,” they say, and then they try to fix themselves, which never works, and the game eventually dies.

Hence why I think this shit’s actually worth analyzing to the degree I’m analyzing it.

To that end, I’m going to spend extra time today talking about the sort of totally normal, innocent behaviors that can add up to losing the plot and then give you some examples of how I made every one of these mistakes in my now totally-not-doomed-and-yet-somehow-doomed AD&D 2E campaign.

Next time, I’m going to give you a five-step process for finding the plot once you have the stones to admit you’ve lost it. Because admitting it is hard for reasons that’ll also become very clear in a few paragraphs.

How Do You Lose a Plot?

I lied to you. Kinda. Again. I do that a lot and I really should stop. But, look, I’m a professional and I only lie to you for good, rhetorical-device-related reasons. Or when I think it’ll be funny.

See, I said that losing the plot is a vague, nebulous symptom of a problem somewhere. That is true, but it’s also not true. It turns out that, actually, there is one concrete, discernible thing that always lies at the panicked, palpitating heart of this whole losing the plot thing. There’s one cause for every problem that leaves you feeling like you’ve lost the plot. Knowing that’s the key to finding every plot again no matter how it got lost or where it’s gone.

To understand the heart of the losing the plot thing, it’s helpful to understand some of the behavior patterns that often lead people to losing the plot first place. Moreover, if you can catch yourself doing the things I describe below, you can actually keep yourself from losing the plot. And an ounce of prevention weighs the same as a pound of feathers or however the hell that dumbass aphorism goes.

Patterns are the Problem

Before I describe the three most common ways Game Masters lose the plot, I’ve got to stress that every one of them is a totally normal, totally human, totally common thing that perfectly rational, normal, human Game Masters do from time to time. In fact, each and every one of them is part of the whole Game Mastering job — because, remember, Game Mastering is all I’m talking about here. The individual actions aren’t a problem until they become habitual responses or behavioral patterns. That’s when they take shit off course.

I should also note that it’s extremely easy to fall into these habits and behaviors because that’s literally how your brain’s wired to work. I wouldn’t be writing this shit if I hadn’t spent months letting the habits turn toxic and wreck my life. My Game Mastering life, I mean. That’s all this about. If you spot yourself in anything I’ve written below, congratulations, you’re a perfectly normal human just like all the rest of us. So maybe don’t slag on yourself for it, okay?

The point is that sometimes we’re forced to take certain actions in response to shit that happens. That’s fine. When those actions become automatic behaviors or habitual patterns, they can lead us pretty far astray and it’s really hard to see that happening until you’re far enough off the mark that it’s impossible to ignore how much you’ve effed up. That’s why losing the plot is usually a very sudden, shocking realization that everything somehow went really wrong.

Just Getting By

I hinted last week that losing the plot often comes from a few too many sessions or weeks or months of just getting by.

This behavior pattern starts innocently enough. Usually, it starts with a bad day or a stressful week or a few too many things to deal with. So, when it comes time to review your gaming notes, write your recap, prep your session, or run your game, you just don’t have the energy or the willpower or the time or the inspiration to do whatever you’ve got to do right. So, you do just enough to get you through whatever you’ve got to get through, and you promise yourself you’ll make up for it later.

We’re all Game Masters here. We all know what I’m talking about. “I don’t have time to build this encounter the way I should. I’ll just print off a couple of stat blocks and wing it for tonight.” “I don’t have time to review my notes. I’ll just slap together a quick recap from memory and then send my players a good recap over the weekend.” “I don’t have time to prep the dungeon, so I’ll just run some town interactions and a random wilderness encounter on the way to buy myself a week to do it right.”

Again, this is totally normal and totally human and sometimes totally necessary. I wish I had an hour every week to prep for every hour of actual game time but I have a life outside of gaming and there ain’t enough hours in a week. Sometimes you gotta just get by.

The issue is that all you’re doing here — as a Game Master and nothing else — is pushing stress into tomorrow. You’re just saying, “I don’t have enough time to do this right, so I’ll do it half-assed and then demand next week that I do twice as much work to catch up. I’m sure I’ll suddenly, magically have all the time in the world because the numbers on the calendar changed.”

Again, this is normal and human and we all do it now and then. We all have to do it. The price is that next week sucks. You gotta do what you gotta do, right? But if you don’t pay the price next week — if your next session comes around and you’re still in the same boat — you’ll end up just getting by again. And again. And again.

Now that doesn’t seem like a huge deal. After all, if you keep pushing off just one week of work, you’re still only one week behind, right? Effectively? Yeah, no. This shit compounds like interest. You know it and I know it. Unconsciously if not consciously.

Do this too much and then one day you realize you’re way the hell off track and you won’t know how it happened because, after all, you were keeping up. You were only ever one little week behind.

Firefighting and Flailing

Firefighting and flailing are two very similar, very normal, very human actions that we Game Masters — this is only about gaming — end up doing every so often that can turn into losing the plot if we do too much of them for too long the wrong way.

Firefighting is what you do when some unexpected problem pops up and you’ve got to deal with it. Some immediate, urgent — or immediate-and-urgent-seeming — problem demands quick action so you do what you’ve got to do to solve it. Then you move on.

You have to firefight. It’s part of your life. Your Game Mastering life. Shit happens. Games get canceled, notes get lost, files get corrupted, the Internet goes out, some player flips out and starts a huge fight, some player gets their character killed, or, worst of all, some dumbass player makes some unexpectedly stupid-ass in-game decision. You’re the Game Master and the Campaign Manager and all that crap so it’s on you to handle whatever happens.

So how’s that a problem? Well, it’s a problem for two reasons. First — and you’ll see below why this is a big deal — first, firefighting requires quick, impulsive action. You see a fire, you put it out. Firefighting ain’t goal-driven.

Second, most Game Masters forget that firefighting is only half the battle.

In real life, if your kitchen catches fire, you don’t just blast the flames with a fire extinguisher and then go back to doing what you were doing, do you? Well, maybe you do, but intelligent, rational people don’t. They check for damage, sweep up the mess, and replace or fix or throw out whatever needs replacing or fixing or throwing out. You’ve got to do the same thing with any Game Mastering fires you put out, however small they seem.

Imagine your campaign gets hit by a scheduling meteor. Blammo. You try to reschedule and try to get everyone on the same page, but it doesn’t work, and ultimately you have to cancel three sessions. A month of gaming’s just gone. It sucks, but it’s life. All you can do is set a date for next month and pick up where you left off, right? Fire fought and problem over, right?

If you’ve ever had to cancel a month of sessions in a complex, plot-and-character-driven mystery campaign, you’re going to need emergency gluteal reattachment surgery after reading that because you’re laughing your ass off. “No, Angry, it does not work like that.” I know. That’s my point.

Yeah, you dealt with the immediate problem by canceling sessions and setting a new start date, but now you’ve got to look at what damage the fire’s done and start cleaning it up. You might need to commit extra time to review your notes before you relaunch. You might even need to reread some of the game’s rules if you’re not super familiar with the system you’ve been running. You’ll definitely have to find a way to remind the players of all the important information they’d gathered previously. You’re also going to need to give them time and space to find their characters again.

That’s firefighting. It’s dealing with crises as they arise. It’s part of life and part of your Game Mastering job. But if you have to fight a few too many fires in short order or if you don’t do the necessary checks and cleanups and repairs after the fire’s out, you can end up losing the plot. Especially because bad firefighting usually causes more fires to flare up.

Consider, again, that canceled month of games. Say you don’t take the necessary cleanup and repair time to recenter yourself and refocus and re-engage your players. That might leave you or your players feeling a little detached or wrong-footed. Just a bit. Now, it’s two weeks later and you’re feeling a little under the weather. You’re not sick, just tired, or maybe you think you might be coming down with something. You wouldn’t normally cancel your game over something like that, but because you’re still feeling disengaged after that huge scheduling debacle, maybe you’re okay with taking a night off. Or maybe it’s one of your players who would normally turn down their friend’s invitation to a movie on game night. But they never quite got back into the game and so they think, “What’s one missed session? It’s no big deal.” And so they skip out.

Now, what’s flailing? Flailing is like firefighting, except it’s a panicked — and sometimes random — action in response to a poorly understood — or imagined — problem. Say, for example, there’s a bunch of scheduling issues in rapid succession. Firefighting is canceling, rescheduling, and recovering. Flailing is when you conclude that your players aren’t having fun or else they wouldn’t be canceling and so you desperately rewrite your game to make them happy again. Or when you conclude they’re canceling out of disrespect for you and so you send out some angry e-mails and institute in-game penalties for attendance issues.

Those are extreme examples, but they get the point across. Firefighting is taking quick, but sensible actions in response to an obvious crisis. Flailing is taking desperate, panicked action to solve a poorly understood or imagined crisis. It’s basically overreaction. It’s flooding the house to deal with a candle that got knocked over.

Here’s the nasty thing about flailing, though. Remember how I said that losing the plot is realizing that there’s something wrong that isn’t easy to identify or articulate? Well, guess what’s a really easy response to that kind of shit? That’s right, flailing. It’s super easy to feel that lost the plot feeling, look for the biggest thing shaped like a problem, fling a panicked solution at it, and then pat yourself on the back for averting disaster. It’s actually really common to go through a cycle of losing the plot, flailing, and then, a few weeks later, losing the plot again.

Acting on a Whim

You can probably see how just getting by and bad firefighting and flailing are really just you doing your job wrong. As a Game Master, I mean. They’re things you’re forced to do by circumstances beyond your control or they’re things you do by accident or they’re things you do wrong. Naturally, that shit’s going to cause problems later. None of that’s true, by the way, but it’s easy to imagine that’s how it all works.

This last thing, though, acting on a whim seems like exactly the sort of thing that good Game Masters are supposed to do. That’s part of what makes it so insidious.

Acting on a whim means doing something at the table that wasn’t part of your plan or vision or whatever. It’s adding some random detail or element to the game because it seems like a good, fun idea or because it’s a good response to the players’ actions or because it seems like a harmless distraction or any one of ten thousand other justifications. It’s deciding the shopkeeper’s afraid of owls so they respond comically to the wizard’s familiar. It’s adding a roadside encounter while the party’s traveling between towns because the idea for it suddenly hits you. It’s dropping an adventure hook you didn’t plan to introduce knowing you’ve got plenty of time to write the whole adventure up before the next session and that you can work around it.

It’s good to act on whims. It’s not just good, actually; it’s useful. When you’re portraying an NPC and suddenly find yourself saying something you totally didn’t expect or didn’t plan, that means the NPC’s taken on a life of their own in the holodeck in your head. Usually. I’m assuming you’re not just blurting out silly bullshit for a laugh like that owl thing. Don’t do that. If it really is the world coming alive in your head, that’s a good thing. The more alive the world is in your head, the more life you’ll breathe into it for your players.

Meanwhile, inserting encounters, plot points, and hooks off the cuff is one of the ways you dynamically adjust your game’s narrative and gameplay pacing. You’re supposed to do that. It’s an important tool.

There’s a downside, though, to this acting on a whim bullshit. That’s why, “Always say, ‘Yes, and…'” is actually really crappy advice. Even actual — well-trained — improvisational actors don’t always say, “Yes, and…” They know there’s a point when you have to stop adding premises to a scene so you can play with the elements you’ve already got and then bring them to a conclusion. Scenes have to progress. They have to end.

Remember how I said that firefighting and flailing aren’t goal-driven? Neither are your whims. Every time you add some random element to your game because it seems like a good, fun idea, you’re crowding out something that was actually part of the Campaign Vision or the Scenario Design. Even if you’re not, you’re still distracting yourself and your players from the Vision or Design.

Have you ever seen an Endless Town Session? Have you ever run one? Those are the sessions that start innocently with you — the Game Master — saying, “I’ll let the players have a session here in town interacting with the world and then we’ll move on to the next adventure,” and then, six weeks later, that session still hasn’t ended and you’re running garden parties and shopping trips and adjudicating the cleric’s volunteer work at the local hospice while the barbarian and the rogue are running a numbers racket down at the fighting pits by the dock. You just keep running scenes and adding details and bringing the town to life and the players keep engaging with it all and now you’re running Fantasy Sims instead Dragons in Dungeons.

The really nasty part is that, on the face of it, everyone’s having fun. You probably are too. If this shit wasn’t fun, you wouldn’t be running it and the players wouldn’t keep showing up. But remember your Campaign Vision? Remember your Scenario Design? Remember how passionate you felt coming up with that shit? Remember how excited your players were when you pitched the game? Wouldn’t that be more fun? Isn’t that why you came up with it in the first place?

What’s worse is you get some really crazy dopamine feedback loop bullshit happening when you fall into the trap of acting on a whim too damned much. As a Game Master, you’re inclined to reward engagement. Players are inclined to respond to rewards. So, you create some engaging detail, the players engage, you reward that with more engaging details, they engage more, and now you’ve built a sort of engagement Skinner Box. It all feels good to play but, after the game’s over, some of your players start to think, “That was fun, but, what did we actually do for that four hours? Are we getting anywhere?” You probably start to think the same.

Acting on your whims is a necessary and useful Game Mastering tool and a good Game Mastering practice. In moderation. Because it’s also one of the tricksiest, nastiest, sneakiest ways you can lose the plot. You can end up with sessions full of interesting moments and fun interactions that everyone loves while the game grinds to a halt and everyone loses any sense of meaningful progress.

And that brings me to the secret heart of this whole losing the plot thing.

What You’ve Really Lost

It’s a simple, psychological fact that human beings crave a meaningful sense of progress toward… something. Humans have to know, deep down, that what they’re doing is getting them somewhere worth being. Call it self-actualization and sit at the top of the Maslow Pyramid. Call it one of the Twelve Rules for Life. Stick a pin in your frontal cortex because there it is. You need a purpose and a sense that you’re moving toward it.

If you’re the sort of Game Master that works with a Campaign Vision or a Scenario Design or whatever — and lots of you are — that shit is your Game Mastering Mission Statement. It’s your sense of Gaming Purpose. It’s your Goal. It’s the reason you sit down and run your game every damned week.

Even if you’re not the type to write down a plan, you still likely start every campaign with a vision in your head. Even if all you mean to do is run a dungeon-of-the-week campaign with some of your favorite modules, somewhere in your head is this vision of you searching through your module library looking for the best ones to share with your friends and figuring out how to link one to the next and so on. You had a vision. You know how that game was supposed to go.

So, what happens if you spend all your time firefighting and flailing? You’re keeping your game from blowing up, sure, but you’re not really moving toward a goal or fulfilling a vision anymore, are you?

What happens if all you’re doing is just getting by? You’re filling sessions, sure, but are you getting anywhere close to where you meant to be?

What happens if you just endlessly act on whims? Everyone’s having fun and your games are full of gaming moments, but are you getting anywhere worth being? Are your players?

Losing the plot means recognizing that your actions and your goals are no longer connected. You’re just doing shit. It might be totally fun, totally engaging shit, but it isn’t meaningful shit because it’s not getting you anywhere worth being. You had a dream or a vision or a plan that you cared about once and nothing you’re doing anymore has anything to do with it. So nothing you’re doing actually matters and you can’t enjoy it no matter how happy your players seem to be.

You see now why I’m convinced that this is probably how a lot of Game Mastering Burnout happens? The symptoms are the same. The difference, though, is that, if you think you’re burnt out, there’s nothing you can do. You’re fatigued. You’re exhausted. You’re bored. The only solution is to withdraw.

But losing the plot? That’s fixable. It’s curable. And I’m gonna tell you how in the next and final part coming in a few days. You’ll have it by the middle of the week.

Before I sign off though, I want to reassure you again that these traps that seem so clear and obvious when a sexy gaming genius like me explains them are actually really easy to fall into very naturally. I’m going to do that by giving you some examples of how every one of those behaviors has contributed to my losing the plot.

Let me just say, though, that this last section is purely for those of you who want to read a thousand words of my castigating myself for a series of increasingly desperate fuckups. You’ve gotten all the useful, helpful information you’re gonna get today. Next time, you’ll find out how to fix all this. If you skip the last thousand words, you’ll lose nothing of value.

The Dumbass Things I Thing to Lose My Plot

Last week, I told you how my campaign started. To provide you a concrete example of how every dumbass behavior above can totally wreck a great campaign, let me tell you how badly I’m running my amazing vision into the ground. Then you don’t have to feel bad about your own relatively minor mistakes.

First, let me get the obvious out of the way. Most of you know I’ve spent the entire last year bouncing in and out of a very serious depression and dealing with a bevy of health issues and financial problems. I’ve also fallen terribly behind in my work — that’s why you’re reading yet another Feature five minutes before my midnight deadline — and I’ve been taking absolutely piss-poor care of myself. Unsurprisingly, then, there’s been a lot of weeks where I’ve said, “I do not have the time, energy, or willpower to prep properly for this amazing campaign but I don’t want to cancel another session so I’ll just come up with something to fill a shortened session and make up for it next week.”

I hit my absolute just getting by nadir a few months ago as the game transitioned from Act I to Act II. Let me tell you about that.

At the start of the game, the four unlikely heroes met at a roadside inn and learned that the road to the west was impassable due to goblin raiders. The heroes included the astrologer cleric who was headed west to deliver a letter to a traveling scholar in the next province over. Since they were all kinda sorta going in the same direction, the heroes teamed up to kill the goblins and befriend a sprite. A nice, normal way to start a fantasy game, though the swordswoman learned some neat things about the history of her sword from the elf historian and from the ruins the goblins were camping in.

The party might have broken up in the next province except that the cleric’s traveling scholar had moved on in search of some more ancient ruins — enticing the elf and the swordswoman — and that some scary culty dude was chasing her and leaving a trail of bodies behind him — upsetting all the reasonably good-aligned heroes. So the party stayed together to chase down the scholar, deliver the letter, and warn her that she was being stalked.

They found the scholar’s corpse — and her dwarven bodyguard’s corpse too — in the ruins of a stellar observatory that had been managed a thousand years prior by an order of priests. They discovered the priests had been excommunicated with extreme prejudice by a host of angels tasked with meting out the god’s justice. One of the priests, in a fit of conscience, had left a message about how the priests had done something terrible but that it could be fixed and that some things were hidden in some places that were important for reasons and there was something to do with a constellation that doesn’t exist or something. Whatever. There was a handy map disguised as a star chart, though, so that was neat.

They also found a very distressing note that basically said, “For undisclosed reasons, your cosmos will expire on the 18th of Patchwell this year. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Then there was a flashback adventure wherein the dwarf told the party about how his clan had been wiped out by a demon cultist and an army of orcs fifty years ago.

That all set the stage for the open-ended Act II wherein the players would visit five MacGuffin dungeons to see if they could figure out what the hell was happening and if there was anything they could do about it.

Now, inspired as I was by The Legend of Zelda, I had some big ambitions for my MacGuffin dungeons. They weren’t going to be huge, sprawling things, but nice, tightly-designed, well-structured examples of dungeon-designy goodness. That meant they were each going to demand some real effort. Had I started working on the one I knew the heroes would be visiting first before they hit the end of Act I, all would have been fine. But I didn’t. That’s when the very serious just getting by delaying tactics started.

Fortunately, the party helped me by starting a fire so I had to do some firefighting.

For some reason, instead of following the orgy of clues and maps I’d given them to the actual adventuring sites, especially given there was something that looked very much like a ticking clock on the entire universe, they came up with a giant list of research and headed off to the wrong side of the kingdom to look stuff up at the library. The dumbasses.

I can’t tell you how much that pissed me off. These players have played at my table long enough to know, first, that I will seamlessly weave every bit of expository information necessary to win the game into the actual gameplay and that, second, I will never, ever allow the heroes to solve a problem by thinking, talking, or reading instead of adventuring.

So there’s a firefighting moment. I had to insert this whole side thing about my valiant heroes going to the fucking library to read a bunch of books instead of doing any of the super cool adventures I’d planned to build. And somehow, I had to make that boring-ass non-adventure horseshit actually fun somehow.

Do I need to mention how that led to more delaying tactics so I could just get by while I sorted that mess out? Do I need to say how I also didn’t properly sit down with my notes and figure out how to modify my plans properly to accommodate that side trek the way a good firefighter would have?

Now the library trip entailed the party heading the wrong way across half the kingdom through several important settlements and that gave me lots of opportunities to act on whims while flailing like a hyperactive frog puppet on a roller coaster high on crack.

The thing is, I pride myself on my ability to bring my world to life and fill it with real-seeming human people. It’s a high point for players in my games in general and this group of players in particular. Again, I’m not bragging, I’m quoting feedback. My players like interacting with my world. I’ve talked in the past about this trick I use called the second story and I’ve even cited examples from this very campaign.

While the heroes are trying to find some magical MacGuffins to… do something that’ll fix something for some reason and while there’s a demon wizard running around, there’s also some A Song of Ice and Fire — or Game of Thrones if you prefer — style political bullshit playing out. A bunch of lesser feudal lords and their knights are jockeying for power while the king’s away with many of his major lords at war with orcs. The players keep running into the fallout from that crap.

Honestly, this is where acting on a whim always kills me. I love weaving this second story nonsense into my games and, whenever my players engage with it, I reflexively reward their engagement with more of it. So they engage more and I give them more and so on and cetera and finitum.

So my party’s already wandering off in the wrong direction on a side trek I don’t want to waste more than the bare minimum amount of time on and I keep distracting them with the kingdom’s nonsense political machinations. Not the best plan, is it? Yeah, I’m totally the best Game Master ever. A real sexy gaming genius.

Unsurprisingly, my campaign ended up in the mire of an Endless Interlude. We’re stuck between Act I and Act II in the gulf of a boring side quest I didn’t plan and distracted with endless interaction that advances absolutely nothing. So it’s only natural that I started flailing.

Actually, I’m not sure whether I was flailing or indulging a whim or whether I’d just finally had the stroke my doctor keeps warning me about, but suddenly, this NPC soldier warned the party that an ambitious lord had set an ambush to kill the party on their way from one settlement to another. That was news to me because, while Lord Varsh was kind of a dick, he wasn’t an evil murderer and he wouldn’t actually send his soldiers to murder the party and also because I hadn’t actually designed any kind of ambush encounter.

I shit you not. This literally happened. The heroes were talking to this soldier, his words were coming out of my mouth, and suddenly I said, “By the way, Lord Varsh’s men are waiting to kill you on the road to Castle Amberwall so watch out for that,” and I still don’t know why he said that. I suspect I was desperately trying to do something — anything — to drag the game from the quagmire of an Endless Interlude into something resembling actual Adventure again while also trying to scare the heroes out of any further political dabbling.

That wasn’t my only flailing though. I did a lot of flailing. That evil cultist? The one who’d murdered the scholar and then disappeared? He recruited some henchmen and went on a murder spree. Worse, still, he’s heading to the library to kill the astrologer cleric’s surrogate father figure. Apparently. That was me trying to turn this library side trek into an actual adventure with stakes. I can’t explain why it’s an utterly terrible idea without giving away too many secret details my players can’t know, but understand that it’s roughly like if Ganon decided to go kill Sahasrahla in the Eastern Ruins personally so that Link gets to fight the final boss of the game before he picks up his first Heart Container.

However that shit turns out, it will get the campaign out of it’s Endless Interlude.

The revelation that the cultist was on his way to the library with murder in his eye and demons in his pocket was the last thing that happened at my table. It was the final moment of the last session I ran a week ago. A few days later, I was trying to prep for the next session and reviewing my notes, and suddenly I found myself saying, “What the actual hell is going on? This is a complete frigging mess! How did this happen? I had a plan! A really awesome plan I was totally excited to run! Now I’m just doing shit and shit keeps happening and the game’s completely stalled out and it’s nothing like the game I want to be running! I don’t even know what to do with this steaming pile of game.”

In other words, I realized that somewhere, somehow, I’d lost the plot.