It's one of the most exciting, and terrifying, phrase that a campaign plot team can hear - "Let's rewrite the game setting."
Sometimes, your campaign has just continued on for too long. It's stale, old, and frankly no one is particularly interested. Some may say those running within it simply lack creative plot abilities, but it's more then that. Yes, you can come up with new and creative plot lines to integrate in to the campaign setting to add some oomph, but sometimes it is time to just let go.
First, what do I actually mean by campaign setting? Well, race/culture packages, maps, scout packages, the overarching power structures, etc.
WAR recently did a complete campaign rewrite. It took a full year and a tremendous amount of effort by everyone on the campaign team. We had our good luck charm - Bill C. - legendary man of mystery - so we knew that everything would turn out okay in the end.
WAR 2012/2013 Campaign Team (Jay, Dave, Ben, Bill, Mike, Scott, Jenn, and Bryan)
WAR's campaign setting of the lands of Dyllaria and Emuria have been in place since 1993, with the Kingdom of Stonegate and its towns established not long after. There were a number of reasons why we decided to make the change. I think we were too comfortable. It was easy to run within the setting we had, why change? It was like going back to a favorite book time and again. All the packages were there for us, all finished and easy to work within. We had a rich and vibrant history, full of heroes and villains. Completed culture packages, drawn from scratch so long ago, were familiar and well liked. We had beloved and hated NPC's, and a rich cultural setting - ingame areas full of backgrounds with significant depth and an actual past.
Everyone on the campaign team had a different reason for excitedly agreeing to the change. For me, I think my moment of realization came that something needed to change when the creature Fillaminartay, a Fire being I included in the Erlunn Elf Package, was released and ravaged one of our towns last year. I wrote the package in 2001. The years 2001/2002 saw the last big campaign update (I think) and that was the fleshing out of the culture packages and such. Was it cool that the things written in to the package came to pass over a decade later? Hells yeah. But then I realized - all those things we wrote in to the campaign so long ago, the place the campaign was intentioned to end up, had come and gone. The packages, save for yearly histories or some minor changes here and there, had been the same for over a decade.
They had stagnated and we had stagnated with it.
At the point we decided to make the change, I was completely uninspired. The resources that had once sparked so many creative and exciting ideas for me had become burdens. We were asking the plot teams to use them and we didn't even want to use them. No one cared, but we tried really, really hard. The plot teams were running within towns and backdrops they had no involvement in writing. They were trying to fit their own ideas and such in to a backdrop that wasn't able to handle it, so lots of plots didn't exactly make sense or fit well, despite their wonderful breadth and creativity. So much had happened ingame, so much of the packages were used, and it was difficult to track who had done what with them over the past 20 years. It led to a lot of confusion and frustration.
We were asking the plot teams, massively creative individuals, to work within a plot box not of their making. They had no investment in the campaign lines and no hand in creating the the world in which we were asking them to run.
Handy for us, we are a team of individuals that work very well with one another and build upon the ideas of one another. When the idea came up while we were brainstorming, everyone embraced it with open arms. It was the chance we had been waiting for. Was it intimidating? Yes. But everyone was excited, too.
Over the next few weeks I'll be doing a series of posts on how we went about changing our campaign - the good and the bad. The massive amount of planning, how we introduced and built the changes in to the current setting so everything made sense, and the problems we encountered. There were some significant bumps along the way, but in the end I think it was totally worth it. The campaign team is ready to rock this year, the plot teams have come up with absolutely amazing stories/ideas to run, and the pc's (I hope!) are excited to have new and unique angles and areas to pursue and explore.
I'll leave you, for now, with these questions to consider and I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you think it is necessary to ever rewrite/reset a campaign? If not, how do you keep it moving forward?
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