Hi all, I've got a little bit of stuff here for you today. 

For a lot of us DMs, the basic deal is we create or use a single module/adventure/path and then we sorta tack on a second one and so forth, doing a little bit of work to combine and give them some kind of connectivity in between. They aren't planned out over long arcs with all that nitty gritty stuff, but a lot of time we try to follow some sort of overall pattern.

The most common pattern, and one most people are familiar with because it is used very heavily in books and films and tV shows that have come out over the last 40 years especially (and is drawn from the eurocentric tales that ultimately helped to flesh out much of D&D as well) is that of Dr. Campbell's Man of a Thousand Faces, or the Hero's Journey. following his publication, the cycle was picked up and used as a framework for a lot of shows and films and books by writers because it sold, since the producers and such liked those stories and so it became ingrained into the art forms.

For those who don't know it, here's the Journey: . It is a basic model for writing a myth that works especially well for the kinds of typical stories that D&D (which at its core centers Western Cultural Mythos aspects) uses. However, it is not the only one, and it doesn't fit for all kinds of stories. THere are several other possibilities. Two of them were built around the nature of the Heroine, and one is older than even Campbell's and influenced his development of his cycle for mythic aspects, but was deeply familiar to Tolkien, who used that one for his own work.

These other three are The Heroine's Journey, the Virgin's Promise, and Fairy Tales. 

Both the Heroine's Journey and the Virgin's Promise draw from the stories about women, through a feminist critical lens, and identify certain patterns in the exact same way that Campbell did, and what comes out is a very different kind of story that is far more personal and yet still as timeless. In the Case of the Heroine's Journey, it is still a mighty change to the world, but the change focus is often on the way that the Heroine must confront aspects of her own self -- it is always a story and stories tell us how to move forward. The Virgin's Promise, however, is a different kind of story, and has a different kind of flow, which is centered around the taking back of personal power from society at large.

For Fairytales, the best similar source is not the Aarne-Thompson scale but rather Propp's systemic listing, and it is this one that influenced Campbell. It has a very different structure from the hero's Journey or the others, with 31 points and more developed structure for BBEGs and NPCs that appear. It also happens to allow for a more flexible and fluid style of story telling that some would argue is less rigid and formulaic and more organic. These different patterns and cycles all drive a larger scale setup that completes a framework on which one can hang any kind of story -- some folks will make a face at putting a Paladin through Virgin's Promise, of course, until they look to the Troyes or Malory or afterward versions of Lancelot and realize it been done before, lol.

So what is the point of sharing all of this, I know the one or two of you that made it this far are wondering. Well, they are tools for creating frameworks -- a way to create a story that stretches out over time and gives the players that sense of being real heroes and whatnot as they move on, and also gives you a framework to hang all those adventures one, while also providing lots of spaces and places for the important role play and character development stuff.

In short, these are the things that create memorable stories -- the stuff you tell even a dozen or twenty years down the road about.  My first time using these structures was 1987 for a huge campaign that I only had about 6 hours a month to do, total. We still talk about that one campaign today. It wasn't anything exciting: defeat the BBEG, done. But there was a build up to that, a tension in it, a sense of discovery about it, and since then, unless it is a pure Dungeon Crawl campaign, it is what I have always set up.

In the early 2000's, I started to do what has been my overall goal: layered stories, or Massive Thematic Campaigns. Just combining the Virgin's Promise and the Hero's Journey alone gives over 50 encounters worth of storytelling, and provides both general progress and personal development in a way that allows you to mix more than one Big Bad, or multiple kinds of basic plots all together, to achieve a huge story.

I say Encounter, but each one of those can be a single encounter or a series of them --if one were to try that six encounters a session thing, lol. They are story beats, or moments where something happens, essentially, and the intensity and frequency of them can have a huge impact on how your overall campaign feels -- especially for you, since you can begin to weave in the connective tissue that makes them all work long before you even begin to play the game.

Just as importantly, this cycle is something Players are already primed for -- it becomes easy for them to take the baits and story hooks and it also gives you chances to set up side stories, errands, and little things that are not connected, for variety and spice. This happens because these stories are already in ou blood, our minds, and we tend to go with them when presented.

If you go to the image where the three I started with are shown side by side, you start to see where you can interweave them, and with just those three, you can interwave three big plots together, or put one within the other, or even nest them -- The Virgin's Promise is an entire part of the the Larger Ordeal of the Hero, for example, giving you a lesser bad guy.

You can set each element of them up to be a different one of the seven basic plots: Vs. Society, Vs Nature, vs Monster, vs Quest, and so forth.

Now, if you are still with me and not scoffing, note that the original Dragonlance modules followed this. That the original Queen of the underdark series that introduced the Drow used it by taking existing adventures and putting them together in a new way and building to something. That the old Slavers and Saltmarsh ones did the same -- and the reprints and new versions built off those early arcs and in some cases even changed them or smoothed the bumps out. This is part of why those are all considered some of the best adventures that were ever put out. They followed the pattern and they gave the Players the ability to part of the story in a way that is only possible if you know and understand the cycles.

The campaign I am going to be launching soon involves five different and distinct forms of the above -- I am using all of them.  For the Virgin's Promise I have a Princess who the players will help become the Empress. For the Heroine I have several sub stories that are tweaked to meet the needs of each of the characters so that they all have their own stories. Fairytales surround a side bit that involves a set of recurring competitors and a God that has gone mad, as well as the Feywild. And the binding story is a somewhat traditional BBEG story that leads into a hunt that will expand the world as the players know it and present the toughest, most challenging encounters I have ever written should combat be a part (and it will be). technically, it is a bait and switch, lol -- they think they are going after the BBEG, but there isn't really one and they will have killed him long before then.

Not gonna lie, the hardest part for me was interleaving the stories among and through each other so that they end at different times throughout the larger campaign, while all of them feed into the bigger story.  And I have a lot of side quests and errands in case they decide not to go for the easy bait, simple hooks, or other things because I try hard not to railroad but also don't let them get away with whatever they are doing, lol.Sometimes they get themselves arrested so I don't have to invent charges, lol.

But when you are planning out a campaign, consider using these -- and if you are thinking "well, yeah, but campbell has been done to death" remember that you aren't kidding -- stories following that pattern have been told for at least 10,000 years, lol. And a lot of them are still being told today, so there's something really worthwhile there. But that is also why I tell you about Propp and the other two. Tolkien used the effort to blend the traditional Fairy Tale along the Aarn-Thompson model with the classic myth pattern that Campbell used, and what we got influences Fantasy literature today so deeply that it is a shock to try and escape it.

This kind of complex, massive scale storytelling is also not as hard to do as it sounds -- the monomyth or Hero's Journey can be done in 18 encounters. It can be as simple as rough notes on index cards. The key is to always link them together into a cohesive whole.

And for that, you need a basic Plot structure. This is really easy, and has several different uses -- not only do you organize the cycle above into it, you organize each of the little encounters you do around it -- or two of them, or three of them, or whatever. The point is that there is a constant flow within the story and then as part of the story itself. And that is as easy as this: Things build up from a beginning to a middle climax and then slowly return to a resolution of the things that is not quite the same as where you started. The ever so traditional Beginning, Middle, and End. 

How granular can you get with this? Well, i have for the last four years run a very basic set up: dungeon in the middle of nowhere, a distant big town, a couple local villages. The world literally ended and characters went to the edge to stare into the vastness of space. The dungeon was the creation of a mad lich who had made a bargain with an Archfiend so that he could live as long as the Archfiend got souls from those killed in the dungeon. All of that is coming to a close as the player groups face down the Archfiend.

But every three rooms of the dungeon followed the beginning, middle end and plot cycle above.  I almost did each room, but that was a lot harder when the basic layout is 99 rooms and they all resent with new stories each time the whole place is cleared. The map never changed, but the rooms did, lol. all of it was part of a larger set up as well -- so large that each step was a time when they cleared the entire dungeon (seven times in total, btw). Each time they revealed a little more about the secret of the Lich, and when they finally killed the lich they triggered to the Archfiend and his host coming through, which is the penultimate climax.

And yes, it does involve a pig. Wasn't supposed to, but it did, and we ran with it and so the end of the world revolves around a pig in an act of improvisation that still fit the larger story because I knew the broad strokes of it all.

This next campaign is much larger, and more involved, and it is possible because of this way of taking these traditional systems and weaving them into a whole new story that is layered, personalized, and even uses some of the older modules that have long been loved by my players and I -- and I am revisiting old games that I did in the process, but they have a new life to them. I am even sprinkling a few of the recent adventures in there -- so I don't have to do all of it myself, lol.

That is how you get a Massive Thematic Campaign from even the smallest idea -- and how you take those cool ideas for one you had and make them into something far bigger and more exciting.

If, of course you want to. Some folks just like the dungeon of the week stuff, and that is okay as well.

Thanks for lasting through it all. I hope this helps someone.

That was quite a TED Talk. Neat read though.

Thank you!

Here is a Hierarchy layout for planning for the next campaign, to see how I used three of them.

And this is what it ends up looking like once I rename the sections and set it out:

Note how at one point there is an option for me: if the characters get captured during one adventure, they have to break out of jail (which is while traveling). If they are not, they have to flee the scene. If they are spit up, I have to run an extra couple sessions.

This allows me to avoid railroading. It does mean more work.  You may also note I mention some odd stuff -- there is a third plot layer going on, and I have things set up so that those who want a romance storyline can have one -- using a romance specific one of the story build.

Finally, at the pinnacle level, I have a chance for them to meet the biggest of the big bads -- and it is set up much earlier in the series when they meet Vellum -- how they respond to him affects that final campaign. Then there is an option -- they can choose to start a new campaign, with new options because of things they made possible, including the introduction of satyrs and centaurs and goblins as Pcs,  or they can choose to retire, or they can choose to go on one last cosmic adventure, and possible become Power of the World themselves -- which is retiring them as well.

This is at least two years, playing twice a month.