Effort and Reward

I’m discovering how much work it takes to jump-start a campaign that’s lain dormant for over a year. Our Friday evening group has played many sessions of Delta Green, Outgunned, and The Hooded Man during that span. But now it’s time to get back to our Degenesis campaign, which I put on hold after 91 sessions.

We’ve had breaks in this campaign before, but this one feels different for me as the GM. For one thing, I’ve got an ambitious adventure in the works, one that’s been in my mind in one form or another for about three years now. There are aspects of the adventure that I still haven’t defined, but I’m at the point now where I’m just tired of delay, and I feel like I have to run it. I’ll fill in the blanks as I go.

But 91 sessions is a lot of events and drama and characters to recapture and inject back into our group’s collective bloodstream. I’ve taken copious notes on every session since the start of the campaign. Well, almost every session. Some of the notes are quite fragmentary. For a couple of sessions I didn’t put down more than a few mysterious bullet points. “Reach next village but don’t ask about the secret path” isn’t all that useful.

All that said, stitching together a high-level history of the campaign is time well spent. I’m remembering how the players really dug into the mystery of Altair the Baptist’s death. How the Apocalyptic Kyra Bloodclaw was quietly impressed with how the Sons of Lucatore treated her as a prisoner. How Ifa the Hunter’s caravan was ambushed just outside Toulon, and the Sons burned with anger after surviving it. How the Battle of Toulon unfolded through hours of fierce block-by-block combat and ended in strangely personal encounters. On and on it goes.

This campaign has been a mix of adventures I’ve created from a whole cloth, plus published adventures modified to suit my needs. Taken as a whole, it’s unique. There are many Degenesis campaigns, but this is ours. It was not consumed by us, it was created by us together, around a table in person (with the exception of those dark Covid months).

And now as I’m prepping for the next chapter of this saga, I come across a blog post from Keith Senkowski. He’s talking about Pendragon, but he could be referring to any game that requires investment in some measure of setting or rules engagement up front:

But, that busy life is exactly why I don’t want to play those games. Why I want the hard thing that challenges me. I only have so much time, so I want that time to be in the depths. Not a shallow pool that just looks deep from a distance.

There are times when I really enjoy a lightweight game as a palette cleanser, much as I might watch a lighthearted comedy after a full season of Deadwood. But when a campaign requires investment of effort up front, in a way that really helps players and the GM lock into the game world, that’s time well spent. For me, nothing beats a long-term campaign in which the players really can sink their roots into the soil of a setting and grow something amazing.

But first, their GM has to get that campaign history finished.

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