Like the title says I am trying to write up a couple of campaigns but I cannot figure out how many adventures is standard for one to use as a comparison.

I guess it depends for everybody. You could use published adventures as a model?

Look at a game designed to take maybe one session, such as "Escape from Mos Schuuta". Then look at "Long Arm of the Hutt", which contains a number of different episodes. Our group was particularly elaborate and took probably seven sessions to get through both of those adventures.

I've always seen a "campaign" as between the moment when the players create their characters and when they retire those characters.

For me, a campaign is a full story arc, from when the PCs don't realize what they're getting into to when they survive (or don't) all the immediate consequences. For example, I'd consider the separate trilogies to be one campaign each. You can easily have a loose end or two from one campaign lead into another, but most everything from the story should be wrapped up.

Alternatively, I've used "campaign" simply as a term to differentiate running two separate games in the same system.

A campaign can have as many adventures as you see fit. An earlier post noted that the separate trilogies could be a campaign in their own right....with each movie in those trilogies being a campaign in and of itself. Have a beginning, have an end, and when your campaign reaches that end, don't be afraid to say 'Thats the end of the campaign'.

Personally I'd more say the Prequels are one campaign, the OT another. The Prequel is more arguable because it does nave some significant chronological gaps but the OT to me is a campaign - everything flows smoothly on from adventure to adventure with only the occasional "let's skip forward a bit'.

I look at Campaigns as a single season of a television series, running between 10-20 adventures.

The first few Episodes establish key characters, functions, themes and the larger overarching plot.

The next 5 or so varies between mostly stand alones, individual character centric episodes, and a couple larger-plot episodes to keep the game on track. (This is a good place to drop in some canned adventures for those weeks when you don't have the time to prepare.)

The final few episodes resolves the larger plot, and wraps up any critical loose ends. What you do here is variable as you may want to wrap up everything or, if you want to be a total jerk, resolve the large plot but leave it on a major cliff hanger if you're planning to run another "Season" at a later date.

For outlining, I like to sit down and outline the entire campaign. Nothing complicated, just a list of Episode Titles with 2-4 sentence descriptors like you'd find in a television guide. I might add a little more if there's a key concept or set piece encounter I don't want to forget. (EX: EP II The Runner: The PCs must chase down a courier who has [McGuffin] before he can deliver it to [Major Villain] while competing with Bounty Hunters, an Imperial Special Ops team, and Rebel Heroes. Note: Rebel Heroes can be Luke, Han, ect if designed carefully... EP III Hunters Interlude [Just use Brinaloy adventure from WEG] EP IV The Pants of Jabba: The McGuffin from EPII is now being used by Jabba's cartel to do horrible things and the PCs must Impersonate the Hutt to get it back or destroy it. EP V: Beyond the Rim [Focus on Jimmy's character])

After I've got all 10ish adventures outlined like that I do a full write up of the first 2-3 and long (but not complete) write ups of the first 6ish. After I'm through the first two adventures I look at where the Players are, where I want them to go, and make note of any changes, then start work on the next adventure trying to stay at least an adventure ahead.

Occasionally if the players go too off the rails I will inject an additional adventure with the purpose of realigning the campaign back to the original plan.

I look at Campaigns as a single season of a television series, running between 10-20 adventures.

This is how I do it too. In fact, I am currently planning a campaign that I plan to GM around the new year. My first draft of a plan is set up like you see on the picture below.

The numbers to the far left are the chapters or episodes if you prefer to think of this like a tv-series. I am planning 20 chapters in this particular campaign. I use a chapter 0 to summarize what has been going on for the PCs because the campaign continues on from where I left off a while back, using the same PCs (they have about 120 xp from the first mini-campaign, which was intended as an experiment with the system).

The Stickies on the left outline the plot in each chapter in a single sentence or two. I use different colors depending on the theme of the chapter.

• Purple is for a chapter that advances the main plot directly.
• Blue is for a chapter with a stand-alone plot that ties in with the main plot by introducing a character or clues about the main plot.
• Orange is for a standalone adventure that might or might not be undertaken by the PCs for a "player" in the main plot introduced before.
• Yellow is for a chapter that focuses more than the other chapters on a single character.

I sometimes add more stickies to the right of the main stickie, most often if the chapter should have some clues not directly related to the main plot in the chapter, but that tie in with the main story arc. But also if I just need to remember to tie in a certain NPC, location or similar.

Kymrel, as a software developer, I tend to think in logical outlines. Your method speaks to me.

When "writing" a campaign I do one of two things*:

1) Blatantly rip off a published campaign series and liberally adapt it for my needs or 2) get an "amazing" idea and write up my own (which tends to be based on history, for instance I've run the Russian-Afghanistan war three times now in different genres).

When writing my own story (not liberally adapting something) I write 3 things:

1 - The opener. This will be the first adventure (maybe the first three depending on how creative my juices are flowing). This will be a few key scenes and the rough timeline of events. This will also be where I try to set the tone of the campaign and so try to make sure it has a few high points of flavor.

2 - The Rough Timeline of the over-arching plot. This only gets a few spots of fleshing out where I come up with how particular adventures will be introduced or "need" to end**. Though this will remain fluid and changeable since no plan ever survives encounter with the players.

3 - Sometimes I'll figure the key scenes for the ending, usually though this gets developed as the story progresses and more often than not is "by-the-seat-of-my-pants" during the last sessions.

* For various definitions of "writing". I don't do much, sometimes it'll be a few words or just one to remind me of my thoughts. I'm lazy that way.

** "Need" is a terrible word, but it does kind of fit. I never need and adventure to end in a certain way, but rather I may get an idea of how to end it and then see if the PCs do it that way or not.

Kymrel, as a software developer, I tend to think in logical outlines. Your method speaks to me.

Same here. I could totally see a campaign being developed as a series of tickets in Jira or Pivotal Tracker

Same here. I could totally see a campaign being developed as a series of tickets in Jira or Pivotal Tracker

Trello is free. ;-)

Watching Star Wars, I will sometimes idly muse about how Governor Tarkin might remind the assembled Moffs in the Death Star conference room about how they should clean up their tickets, make sure that finished tickets have been marked as done, and that as soon as the Death Star's systems have been passed through QA, they should be marked as "Ready to deploy" so everybody will know the station is fully operational.

I tend to structure my campaigns based on the most compatible type of media. I used to do superhero games a lot, and each sessions was an "issue." The overall campaign would be open-ended, but every 12 "issues" or so involved a major plot/fight/villain.

I also did an Indiana Jones-type game for years (the heroes were treasure hunters employed by the Vatican) that I structured after the pulps: each adventure was an individual "novel", running 1-3 sessions.

When I've done fantasy games, they're usually "novels" (of maybe 6-12 sessions), with the grander ones organized as "trilogies" (often with a break for a different game after the ending of each book).

From 2002 to 2013, I ran a Star Wars campaign that was shaped like a TV series. We did four seasons of 22 episodes each (actually, the last season ran to 26 episodes to wrap everything up), with a break to move to another campaign (our group now has three alternating GMs) between seasons. After Season One, I started breaking up into the "initial order" of 13 episodes (with a mid-season finale/cliffhanger) and "additional order" or "back 9," with a huge, potentially campaign-ending finale at the end of each season.

Next up, I'll probably use a similar model (although perhaps with shorter "cable"-style seasons) to run a FIREFLY campaign using the EDGE OF THE EMPIRE mechanics.

When I'm planning a "season," I usually plot out the beginning and a potential ending in a fair amount of detail. I'll also come up with a few probable adventures for the middle, but I try to give the players a lot of free reign starting out. For example, in my Star Wars campaign that started in 2002, I knew how the players would be forced together, and had a rough idea of stories to force them to stay together for about three sessions -- by which time I hoped they would WANT to work together.

Since we were staring out fresh, I had no finale in mind yet, but since I knew what each player wanted, I had 2-3 potential story ideas that would center around the hook for one character, and hopefully draw in at least one or two of the others. It worked well. It always helps to let the characters take center stage (after all, isn't the entire first third of RotJ just to keep Han's player happy?).

Our first season ended in shambles, and it was all because of player decisions: my intention was that the PCs would wind up with an artifact that would help kick off the Season Two storyline. They were competing with a bunch of villains who didn't really trust one another, and my assumption was that they heroes would play the villains off one another. Instead, though, they chose to fight ALL the villains. And LOSE. Stil, it was a great story engine: one player ended the season captured as a bounty (which meant we all knew how the next season would start), and the heroes wound up with their ship being stolen, which provided another major plot arc for the second season (as well as escalating the ship thieves from second-level mooks to major nemeses).

I view RPGing as like so many things in life:

Without no plan, you're sunk.

With no flexibility in that plan, you're just as sunk.

Probably the single worst RPG experience of my "career" (and I've been playing for over three decades) was a D&D game where the GM (who was an experienced GM, but not an overly-experienced D&D player) has intracately plotted out an adventure and forced us to go through every scene he wrote. In the end, we we trapped in a flying fortress (modeled on the Death Star) for something like 3-4 sessions as he forced us to fight our way across the beautiful map he had drawn, room by room. Even when multiple players talked to him about this, he persisted. I don't think we finished the game, but, more than fifteen years later, those of us who played it still talk about it in haunted tones. "You weren't there, man. You can't understand..."

From 2002 to 2013, I ran a Star Wars campaign that was shaped like a TV series. We did four seasons of 22 episodes each (actually, the last season ran to 26 episodes to wrap everything up), with a break to move to another campaign (our group now has three alternating GMs) between seasons. After Season One, I started breaking up into the "initial order" of 13 episodes (with a mid-season finale/cliffhanger) and "additional order" or "back 9," with a huge, potentially campaign-ending finale at the end of each season.

This is quite a tall accomplishment. Do you have any documentation of this campaign... like session summaries or a narrative of the adventures? I love reading that kind of stuff.

If not, would you mind giving me a quick summary of what it was that occupied 92 episodes of SWRPG? That had to be epic!

No good movie game is too long and no bad movie game is short enough.
- Roger Ebert

Make your story as long as it needs to be. I've done one night one-shots around a bar fight and I've done year long epics that shook the pillars of heaven. It just depends on what I'm trying to say.

To me, there are two types of campaigns: serial and episodic.

A serial campaign has an over-arcing story line, like a serial TV show. Babylon 5 , seasons 1 through 4, for instance, is a campaign. Each season is part of the whole and covers major plot points that eventually lead us to the end. Each episode will move us along the track of the season but they may or may not be an integral part of the campaign story. (Episodes that are not expressly integral to the resolution of the campaign are filler episodes.) With a serial campaign, like Babylon 5, characters might come and go, but eventually the story will be resolved. It certainly is nice if the original characters that started the story are the ones who finish it, but a good GM will make sure every character was important and "necessary" to the completion of the tale.

Star Trek (take your pick) is a different kind of campaign. It is episodic instead of serial. Each episode can and often will stand alone. They are complete in and of themselves. A season is simply a string of adventures with no real connection to each other aside from the PCs. This is the sort of campaign that begins with character generation and ends with "retirement." Characters can come and go with no real regard as to how they fit in. Players can come and go and characters can come and go with no real need to make sure they fit into the story because there is, generally, no story linking everything together. This is a very flexible campaign for players who can't always make it to game night or want to have more than one character and play what they like on a whim each session.

I prefer the Babylon 5 campaign because I like the idea of the meta-story. Often times when I am coming up with this type of campaign, I know two things right away: how it all begins, and how it all ends. The middle is something that I'll loosely outline as the story moves along. I'll have major plot points that I need to work into the story that will get us all to the end, but I leave a lot of room for filler episodes. A lot of my filler episodes, however, will have clues or NPCs that will touch on the overall campaign story. I keep a certain amount of flexibility in how long the campaign will end up being as far as the number of stories/episodes/adventures because my player base is very fluid.

I kind of prefer a balance between the two styles, between Trek and B-5 (Neo-Doctor Who style?) - where there is a general direction I'd like to see the game move, some goals the characters would like to see accomplished, and some recurring bad guys I'd like to use.

But as far as an "A->B->C->The End" story goes? Naw, not so much for me.

From 2002 to 2013, I ran a Star Wars campaign that was shaped like a TV series. We did four seasons of 22 episodes each (actually, the last season ran to 26 episodes to wrap everything up), with a break to move to another campaign (our group now has three alternating GMs) between seasons. After Season One, I started breaking up into the "initial order" of 13 episodes (with a mid-season finale/cliffhanger) and "additional order" or "back 9," with a huge, potentially campaign-ending finale at the end of each season.

This is quite a tall accomplishment. Do you have any documentation of this campaign... like session summaries or a narrative of the adventures? I love reading that kind of stuff.

If not, would you mind giving me a quick summary of what it was that occupied 92 episodes of SWRPG? That had to be epic!

I have to say, it was pretty cool. I don't think it's the most sessions I've done in a single campaign, but it's definitely the longest calendar-wise (as opposed to the good old days when we used to play once or twice a week).

The game was set in my own region of space, the Taldor Sector, which was a protectorate of the Republic (era = between Episodes I and II). That allowed me to bring in what I wanted without having to worry too much about conflicting continuity. One PC was a native of the Sector, and they all met initially while heading to Ord Mantell (which I "relocated"), one of the main entry points of the sector.

The three PCs who ran from beginning to end were Jake Blackstar (a gunslinger merc on a mission of vengeance), Ni-Lah Sun (a straightlaced Jedi apprentice sent to the Sector to help her learn that everything isn't black and while) and Sakar (a Zabrak pitfighter who was a former slave on the road to being a freedom fighter).

The last spot was almost a running joke, sort of like the drummer in Spinal Tap. The longest run was for a Y'Bobor Ka'ha (a fledling Bothan crimelord). When his PC left, we cycled through a few other characters (an alien mechanic and a Hutt negotiator) before settling on Suentius Po, a Jedi Knight, primarily in the final season.

The PCs were originally based on The Sunrise Crusader, a freighter they discovered in the second session. The ship had been abandoned on an ice planet, and the previous owner had died and left the ship to his administrator droid. The NPC droid was technically captain and owner, but really let the players pursue their agendas.

A lot of the first season alternated between heroics (instigated by the Jedi) and mercenary money-making jobs (prompted by Sakar), with Jake caught in the moral middle. Y'Bobor largely provided comic relief.

The PCs busted up a slavery ring, ran afoul of bounty hunters, and brought down a renegade Jedi who had become a pirate kingpin. In the finale, they became embroiled in an archaeological dig that led to their first encounter with one of the "Bando Gora death masks" (in my campaign history, a group of Sith who had dodged the Battle of Ruusan fled to the Taldor Sector and became high priests of the Bando Gora death cult).

The next few seasons are a bit of a blur, but as the story progressed, the players gained more influence and resources. By the end of Season Three, Jake had killed his nemesis, almost fallen to the dark side, and set himself on the road to redemption by trying to rehabiliate the Taldiran Border Defense, a group of Old West-style mercenary lawmen with a storied history within the Sector.

Sakar had -- unwittiningly, initially -- become the leader of an anti-slavery movement called Freedom's Hammer. At first resistant, he eventually embraced his career as a freedom fighter and game up some of his dependence to a) find love and b) become a full-fledged rebel leader.

Ni-Lah graduated from Padawan to Knight, and then to Sector Watchman. As a neutral and mutually respected party, she was integral to many political events in the sector as an arbitrator.

Through the middle two seasons there were two major story arcs lurking in the background:

1) Realizing that there were a dozen Bando Gora masks, each with a dark side spirit stilled tied to it, Ni-Lah and her allies tried to collect as many as they could, competing with her half-sister, Isaura Harth.

2) Meanwhile, the Sector, which had become a protectorate of the Republic 300 years ago, was steadily moving toward a vote to decide whether to continue the status, petition for full membership, or secede.

The Season Three finale found the PCs all operating separately: Jake killed is nemesis during a publicly televised gunfighter competition (so I guessed I messed up some of the timing on his arc), and Sakar murdered a former friend who had become a corrupt Senate (and slave trader) under Palpatine.

Meanwhile, Ni-Lah, who was supposed to deliver a vote of "stay with the Republic" had a series of visions that if the Sector stayed with the Republic, it would be consumed by war, leading to her swining the vote toward secession at the last minute. This invoked the ire of the Republic and the Jedi Council, (and, in our continuity, provided one of the sparks that ignited the Confederacy of Indepedent Systems.

On to the final season later...

I see 2 basic types of adventure.

There is the 1 session adventure. Which is bascially a story arc meant for the players to get through in a single session.

Then there is the multi-session adventure. Which has multiple parts to it, maybe designed to finish one section per session.

Take Long Arm of the Hutt. The intent of that story I think is to finish all of Ryloth in one session, then one session on Geonosis, and finally the Grand Finale when you kick Teemo's sorry butt and take his milk money.

Depending on how fast your players play, you may make your segments longer or shorter.

Think of it like a stage play. Break the story you wish to tell into sections you think you'll be able to do in a single session.