Dungeon Mastering recently published a good article about the art of the short campaign. As someone working on both the theory and design of a long campaign I was excited to read a fresh take on the topic of campaign length: it reminded me of my successes and failures running long campaigns, and of the limited success I enjoyed with a short campaign. I have a few ideas for how you can adapt a game designed for sprawling campaigns (i.e., any edition of D&D) to a smaller group, shorter session length or more limited campaign scope, and the article particularly reminded me of some ideas I have about running “serial” campaigns.

One thesis of Yax’s article is that, given scheduling restraints and the challenge of pulling off a long campaign, your game can go rules-lite. This is an excellent option, especially for experienced gamers who can easily shift gears between rules-lite systems by virtue of their general role-playing ability, but I also think that almost any system can be adapted to “short play” by virtue of campaign design. Here are a few considerations for a short campaign played using a system most often associated with long campaigns: [...]

Before you even decide to serve as Dungeon Master (or Game Master, or Storyteller, as the case may be) you need to take stock of where your group stands and what you hope to accomplish. According to Making the Campaign, our goal is to create a “series of encounters and/or adventures using the 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules which will provide a satisfying long-term gaming experience for your group.” Comprehension is the first of the Seven 7’s oc Campaign Design…but what do we mean when we talk about “comprehension?” [...]

Welcome to Making the Campaign: my goal is to help fellow campaign designers design a successful campaign. For the purposes of this discussion “campaign design” refers to crafting a setting and series of encounters and/or adventures using the 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules which will provide a satisfying long-term gaming experience for your group. I think these tips might be useful to those who use published settings, or those who play games other than D&D 4E, but I want my frame of reference to be clear to my readers.

Campaign design requires a lot of work and nothing discourages a Dungeon Master more than seeing their design work wasted on a failed campaign. One way to avoid a failed campaign is to think about your design in terms of The Seven C’s: Comprehension, Conception, Collaboration, Construction, Consummation, Continuation and Culmination. [...]