As I have done more and more planning for different campaigns, I find that beginnings and endings to have to be the most solid points. Without these two points set in stone the wild twists and turns that the players throw at me have a knack for throwing me into a tailspin that takes quite a bit to recover from.
I usually work on the end of a campaign first. When I work on an ending I’m not trying to nail down a final encounter but a tone or a single image that will cause the whole campaign to resonate. When I plot out the adventures in the campaign and show where they’re going I have that beacon to lead the group towards.
An aspect I try to incorporate into all of my campaigns is a plan for success. By this I mean that, while this is a wholly contained campaign that I try to make as complete and awesome as possible, I’m also looking to where things go from there. When the party slays the village-menacing dragon, what happens next? Sure there is a party, butchery, and scalecrafting, but there is now a huge predatory power vacuum and a horde of riches that are available.
Personally, I like having my first campaign with characters be epic and have the ability to grow. Creating a bigger bad that the players will have to deal with after the first one is dealt with makes sense and leaves the route open for extending the campaign. For my own story telling methodology, I find it more satisfying when people are growing, becoming better at what they do, and using this expertise to overcome bigger and bigger obstacles.
Fixing the Corner Before Fixing the Whole
I’m looking to have my players protect a small place from a threat. This provides stakes for the players to roleplay with as well as a place to build upon. The threat needs to be bigger than what a general citizen can handle since the party is doing the adventure instead of a small mob of enraged people. The horde of goblins that are terrorizing the outlying farms is a good starting point and can lead to the fun adventure of finding out why the horde of goblins is there in the first place.
Starting characters in many systems are barely more capable of doing astounding things than the normal citizenry that the characters are pulled from. While keeping this in mind, I make the adversary a significant character that preferably has ties to at least some of the player characters. The adversary being a major, but not ultimately crippling, part of the bigger big bad for the world allows for the players to triumph and still have things to do.
The useful thing about having a bigger bad that the players could be going against if they decide to continue on is that I can seed as many plot hooks into the story as I need and I don’t have to pull on all of them at once to pull the players this way or that before the end of the campaign. This allows me to make the next campaign even more interesting for them and they’re already invested in it.
Hinting at the Aftermath
In the campaign that I just started, I have a first act that is in play that the players all know about. The end of the campaign will be a player based decision set on a deep space construction yard. This will be a fairly epic thing, especially considering a few of the steps they’re going to have to go through, but it also isn’t the final thing the players can do. Depending on what the players decide, there are several directions the players could go after the ‘end’ of the campaign, if they want to.
The functionality of having a big end scene or final adventure generally plotted out in your mind is that you can use it to shade everything that goes into the sessions before hand. From clues being left for the players to side quests that make sense as a secondary plot, when you know what the end point is, you can tailor these more specifically to what you intend to do. It also allows you to have a way of ending the campaign in a satisfying fashion when the players are hinting that they’re ready. I have been in many campaigns that have just died from disinterest, the most recent being the Dungeons and Dragons 4E campaign I was in, and none of them have has a satisfying conclusion in place and ready to go. With a specific concluding encounter you can offer closure for a player in a campaign that has gone on for a long time.
When I GM I have an idea for a general story that would get told and I want to have that play out. Rarely does it go exactly the way that I envision which is precisely the reason why I do it. Having side quests and diversions, as the players want, is great but being able to bring them back to a central theme is a resource I’ve found to be campaign saving more than once.
If you’ve got great suggestions for nailing down ending points in your campaigns or adventures, share them with us in the comments below.
