Welcome to the next post in my series looking into planning campaigns and adventures for a role playing game. In particular I’m getting ready to start planning adventures for a party of adventurers in the Android universe for the FFG Genesys system.

I briefly mentioned in a previous post that FFG don’t publish scenarios/campaigns for their Genesys system outside of the initial taster scenario they put up on their website for each source book.

So if I want to run a one shot or campaign using the Genesys system then it’s all on me to come up with the everything (if I’m not using one of the available source books). This is a big thing for a noob GM like me, who has still to run a session.

Luckily as I’ve already established a lot of the work for me will have been done by FFG when they publish the source book for the Android universe. What is left for me to do is to come up with the campaign.

I keep bandying the term campaign around but what exactly is a campaign? The D&D Dungeon Masters Guide defines a campaign as:

“…When strung together, these adventures form an ongoing campaign. A D&D campaign can include dozens of adventures and last for months or years.”

It also gives the following advice in the opening of the campaign chapter.

“The world you create is the stage for the adventures you set in it. You don’t have to give more thought to it than that. You can run adventures in an episodic format,with the characters as the only common element, and also weave themes throughout those adventures to build a greater saga of the characters’ achievements in the world.

Planning an entire campaign might seem like a daunting task, but you don’t have to plot out every detail right from the start. You can start with the basics, running a few adventures, and think about larger plotlines you want to explore as the campaign progresses. You’re free to add as much or as little detail a you wish.

The start of a campaign resembles the start of an adventure. You want to jump quickly into the action,how the players that adventure awaits, and grab their attention right away. Give the players enough information to make them want to come back week after week to see how the story plays out.”

A lot of the campaign chapter is about planning the details of the world that the adventurers will be spending their time in. Which is kind of not relevant to this discussion and my current planning. Although once the Android source book is out the majority if not all of that has been dealt with.

With the definition that I have of a campaign what tools can I use from the comic book world to help with the planning of my campaign? I think that I can. If we treat adventures as an issue of a comic book. A campaign can be seen as similar to an ongoing series, miniseries, or maxiseries depending on how long you want the campaign to run for.

The miniseries and maxiseries have a definite end, whilst naturally the ongoing series just keeps going.

With a campaign length in mind I need to look at story arcs.

O’Neil defines a story arc as “...a story that takes several issues to tell.” Which in our context could be rewritten as “a story that takes several adventures to tell.”

How do story arcs map to the length of a campaign?

If the campaign is one of the finite lengths (miniseries and maxiseries) then the story arc would cover the length of the campaign. For instance a miniseries length campaign being the shorter of the two would most likely have just the single story arc. Whilst the longer maxiseries may have multiple story arcs. Naturally the ongoing campaign will have multiple story arcs, potentially interspersed with single one off adventures. Which may or may not be set ups for future story arcs!

When working with story arcs O’Neil gives the following bits of advice:

• ‘…reintroduce characters and locales if they haven’t appeared for a few issues when doing an arc…” Pretty good advice. Players may have forgotten, not made notes, whatever the reason, if a character/locale hasn’t appeared for a session/adventure or two, a brief description or role play to remind them won’t hurt.

• A rule from his miniseries section that is relevant to what I’m doing here (planning a story arc for a RPG) is “There must be a major change, development, or reverse in every issue. This is just another version of the ‘keep-the-story-moving’ dictum. Something important must happen in every issue of the series. Each must have at least one turning point or surprise. And in each, the hero must either accomplish or learn something.”

• “Each issue should end on a reason for the reader to continue buying the series” or in our terms, give your players a reason to keep coming back. O’Neil suggests good old fashioned cliff-hangers (those 1930’s serials were experts at this) or something a bit more subtle.

• “…incorporate a brief summary of what’s gone before.” A good GM does this at the start of each session naturally. Edmund does it on the Facebook event and at the start of the each session.

The first and least sophisticated is as O’Neil calls it the One-Damn-Thing-After-Another. It’s based on one of those 1930’s serials like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers or King of the Rocketmen to name a handful.

O’Neil actually looks at this in the story structure section, but I think it applies also to the more macro campaign level also. This is just a series of encounters with an antagonist (who will somehow evade capture, or get free for the next encounter). At the macro level we are currently looking at this structure is best suited to the shorter campaign length. As an ongoing campaign it would soon get boring and repetitive.

Then O’Neil introduces The Levitz Paradigm. Which looks great for an ongoing campaign. In the words of the Paul Levitz himself this is…

“a plotting tool I used in the Legion’s heyday to keep track of the many fluid plots and subplots.  The physical ‘device’ is pretty simple, and the theory is one that was rapidly evolving in super hero comics in the ‘80s but which has deep roots in soap opera.”

I’m just going to save my fingers and quote from the man himself off his post. It’s not the most detailed explanation but google and O’Neil can cover the details in more depth for us.

“If the ‘paradigm’ was anything beyond a charting tool, it was a few (sometimes ignored by me, sadly) guidelines:”

“start your secondary plots low and raise them slowly (maybe as a C or D plot before it gets to be a B, much less an A).
every time you visit a plotline, it needs to progress in that visit (if it’s boy meets sheep, one of them should end the scene in an emotional moment, for example).
vary the number of beats before you escalate to an A.

And all of this is, of course, secondary to basic plotting rules like making stakes important to the characters, and flowing plots from the characters themselves.  Or one that I’ve grown fonder of in my recent years of teaching, that what reveals/defines character is choices, particularly choices with costs.”

Within the context of planning a campaign subplots are our means to “set up or introduce the main plot.” So during an adventure an npc may give a bit of information that is relevant later to a future adventure.

I do like the idea of nicking the subplot use from comic books of using them also to expand the world the characters are in, and make the npc’s more three dimensional by showing snippets of their lives. Which could at a later point turn into a story arc that the players get involved in.

O’Neil asks us to remember “Subplots are plots. They must advance toward a resolution, or at least the illusion of a resolution.”

So now I have some tools for planning a campaign from the comic book world. But could I also learn from the video game industry and how they create games like Skyrim or Zelda Breathe of the Wild? Is there cross over with what I have talked about here? This is an area I need to research. In the meantime the next part in this series will be at the adventure level, and planning an adventure.