Campaign Postmortem

I’m working to get a new campaign off the ground. As I’m doing this the discussion of what went wrong on the last campaign has come up. I’ve been thinking about this. I want try and avoid what happened to the last one.

This isn’t the first time a campaign I’ve been a part of died. I’ve hit all of the old reasons: time got away from everyone, life moved on, people moved, had a kid, or the DM gave up gaming. These things happen to all of us. The reason I’m looking at this one is it felt different. There was a lot of guessing as to why it fell apart.

I wanted to write down what I came up with. Partially to help me, but also to see if it helps someone else.

A Bit of Background.

We were playing Rappan Athuk. I was one of the players in this group. DM duties went to a friend of mine who had run the dungeon before and really enjoyed it. Everyone was excited to play because we hadn’t played an RPG in a while. I don’t know what the typical experience of this module is but here is ours.

We created a first level party for Sword and Wizardry. Used a roll four dice keep three method and discussed amongst ourselves what the types of classes we needed were.

I’m told there are multiple ways to get involved in this adventure ours was this. My character won a deed to an old keep in a poker game. We then went up to claim it for my family, who were minor nobles. We traveled to the area, walked to the keep, and found it occupied. While on the journey there we heard rumors of other problems and threats in the area that we all assumed were hints at future adventures.

The keep was well laid out. There were multiple ways in and different paths through the keep once inside. There was a decent set of monsters. We faced a lot of goblins. We found their leader and learned they were part of a cult. We found a magically locked room we had to figure out how to get into. There was decent treasure, a couple of random standout encounters that were well designed and fit into the area, and a decent NPC encounter.

After a couple of levels and a setback or two we took the keep and started getting it back in fighting shape. We hired builders and mercenaries to stand guard over it. Then we set to investigating the rumors in the surrounding area. One of these rumors led us to a cave under a hill. Entering there we found a large sprawling complex. This is where the game started to falter.

The complex, called the Mouth of Doom, was full of hallways. There were some traps and a few monsters. A couple of large rooms with some things that were set up to thwart us. We’d lost a PC but they player rolled up a new character and we kept going.

We mapped the first level and decided to head deeper in. But before we continued it was decided that we change systems and play Pathfinder. So we spent a session creating new characters.

This is when I realized I didn’t want to keep playing. I just didn’t. I politely bowed out and said on the nights where we play Rappan Athuk I just wouldn’t show up. Everyone was okay with that and the game moved on without me. From this point I can’t speak to what happened.

I can report that they did play some more. At first they played pretty regularly. Every second or third week. They would gather and play and I would go and do something else. I’m not sure why, but they started meeting less and less frequently. I take that back, the group at this point was only three people and one of them ended up going on a long vacation with his family. With him away the others didn’t want to play with just a DM and two players.

Then they just sort of stopped playing. Even once the other player had returned from vacation they just never really played again. They met for maybe one or two sessions.

What Happened Next

I write reviews for Meeplegamers.com and occasionally I would get an RPG to review. I asked the group and everyone agreed that we could get together and try one of these games. We agreed to do it as a one or two night game. I’ve been a part of a couple of these and they were fun.

We started talking about maybe trying to play an RPG again. I thought this meant that they would be playing Rappan Athuk and I would be sitting out again. It never happened.

I watch some RP streams, LA by Night, the Dragon Friends, and Weave. As the talk of RPG’s continued I wanted to play too. The group kept not playing and I started writing a campaign document for Through the Breach. Since my group wasn’t seeming to go back to Rappan Athuk I decided to pitch them the idea of a new game. I wrote up a brief description of a couple of possible games and settings and sent them out as an email.

People responded and we got together for our regular night and everyone pitched in their ideas and opinions and we picked a game we’ll be playing moving forward. During this conversation about what to play next the question of why we weren’t playing Rappan Athuk came up.

That’s when I started this project.

Is it the DM’s Fault

It’s easy in a situation like this to pile on the DM. It was their game so it had to be their fault. I was even a part of this camp when everything started to go wrong. I decided it was how he was running the game.

I don’t know exactly why we blame our DM’s. Maybe it’s just easier to shift the blame to them. They weren’t running a good enough game. It takes the burden off of ourselves. That’s an attractive option. It can’t be my fault. I’m a god damned delight. Thus, the DM, who put so much, work, time, and effort into setting this up is to blame. It had to be them.

I’m not saying that it’s never the DM’s fault. Sometimes it just drops on their shoulders for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s completely fair that they were to blame.

However, it’s still worth a look.

What Went Wrong

Since the conversation happened there was a point afterwards where I felt it necessary to express my opinion. When doing so, I reminded the DM as well as myself of all the other times I had played with them. The different modules that we had dipped into. Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil or The World’s Largest Dungeon. These are huge funhouse dungeons filled with traps and beasts. They are laden with difficult encounters and outrageous treasures. They had both been tons of fun.

Why didn’t I like Rappan Athuk?

As I started to think about this I went through and detailed all of the things that had happened in the adventure. The first part, clearing the keep, had been fun. I enjoyed the puzzles of figuring out which entry way to take, which monsters to fight, when to set up ambushes, and the story hooks that promised later surprises.

The keep was great.

There was never a session of clearing the keep that felt stale or stagnate. Figuring out the safest way through while taking advantage of the different avenues into through the structure were a joy. I remember so many specific instances of what happened in there. Things I don’t want to spoil in case you might one day find yourself clearing that same structure.

After we cleared the keep we started looking into the rumors that abound of the area. Everything from bandits to dragons were talked about in hushed whispers at the nearest inns and trading posts. Where would we go first?

Near the keep was a hill that held the entrance to a cave complex. We decided to go there. Into what I would later learn was called the Mouth of Doom. According to the locals a group of bandits had turned it into their base of operations and were striking out at travelers and caravans.

This is where things turned.

You see, the Mouth of Doom, was mostly empty. Long stretches of barren hall way, abandoned rooms, and traps. Most of the encounters were traps. And there still wasn’t a lot of them and they weren’t that clever. They were mostly just pits. We spent a long time mapping tunnels and finding nothing.

We spent maybe too much time trying to inch our way through the dungeon trying not to set off one of the infamous Rappan Athuk death traps. Super hard challenges that could wipe out your entire party with a single bad dice roll.

In truth, there were none of these.

We’d heard stories about how epic and dangerous Rappan Athuk could be. There had been evidence of that in the keep. It taught us to take our time and advance slowly, methodically through the halls to prevent ourselves from being caught out and killed.

It never happened. Not once in the Mouth of Doom did I feel threatened or in danger. I would drop in the occasional pit and feel annoyed, but never worried. There was never an encounter that made me think we weren’t going to win.

After weeks of slowly moving down one tunnel after another I was done. I didn’t want to go back into Rappan Athuk, it was dull.

I asked a couple of the other players what they’d thought of the level. If they could remember more than I could. But they couldn’t. It was all the same empty rooms to them as well.

They even described what came after and said they go to a point where in order to advance they had to mine through walls.

Rappan Athuk had performed the greatest sin of all; it was boring. That’s why I stopped, not because of the DM, though he got the blame, the module itself was just dull.

Looking at the Dungeon

I was very curious about why people remember the dungeon the way they do and so I looked into it. I read reviews, watched videos, and even hit up the wiki. In this a couple of things kept coming up.

First: Every review I found loved the adventure. They talked about the creative encounters, well written story, and challenge level. They all loved the challenge level. This makes sense, it’s a hard module. Having beat it or even just advanced a long distance is a badge of honor.

Second: They all talked about how it had been one of their first adventures and were so excited to see other people playing. They were going to get to share this adventure with new players. I get this. I love it when I hear someone else talk about the Undermountain, Pool of Radiance, or any of the other big modules I’ve played through.

The final thing they all seemed to talk about was the best parts of the adventure. They all talked about the middle and the bottom. The only upper level anyone talked about was a graveyard that apparently has multiple entrances. No one talked about the Mouth of Doom other than to show off the map since it was an early level and they didn’t feel it was spoiling anything.

I think this is where the problem comes in. Back in the day I played a lot of these funhouse dungeons. I remember fighting epic battles and getting awesome treasures. I remember all of the fun we had stomping around these sand boxes. However, when I calm down and really think about those times. I mean really think. I remember a lot of empty space.

Different DM’s have treated this empty space differently. My friend Scot ran the Undermountain for three different groups that I was a part of. He kept meticulous notes from one campaign to the next. He filled multiple poster maps of empty space with communities, monsters, warring factions, and deadly traps.

I’ve also had DM’s who left that space empty. Other adventurers had cleared these spaces and we followed in their footsteps. The tension was in the anticipation of what was around the next corner or next random encounter.

Both of these ways are perfectly valid. There really isn’t a right or wrong way to do it. However, we knew going in what we were up against. We that when Scot ran the game we had to be more careful because he’d fill every nook and cranny with details. In games with less stuff we knew to be more casual about the exploration.

With Rappan Athuk everything we knew about this place was that it was super deadly and murder came from the shadows at any moment. Unfortunately, by the time we had started moving through the tunnels they were actually empty. We were acting as if the tunnels were full to tunnels that were empty.

In the end that made the upper levels of the dungeon boring.

We played for a couple weeks in a row where all we did was map empty hallways. We didn’t face any monsters, find NPC’s, or deal with treacherous puzzles. We hit the occasional pit trap. That was exciting the first time. Then it wasn’t anymore.

I don’t know how much deeper we had to go to get to stuff that wasn’t empty hallways. I talked to one of the players who kept going after I left and he said the last game they played they had been teleported into a large section of maze where every ten foot section had been walled off. They had been separated and needed to find everyone. They spent a large chunk of a section tunneling through one wall a day in order to get to the next nearest person.

I’m sure that someone reading this has had a different experience with Rappan Athuk. I can’t speak to your experience. I can only talk about mine. That said; I’d love to hear what happened to you and how the dungeon was different than what we experienced.

I’m sure my DM will be able to tell many similar stories about when he went into the depths of Rappan Athuk.

The Dungeon Master

I know I’ve said a lot about how we had knee-jerk reaction and blamed the DM. However, I think there were a couple of places where he sort of teed up this problem.

After the fact our DM told me that one of the reasons he ran Rappan Athuk was because he felt that it was the best written adventure he’d ever used, he thought it would be fun, and he wouldn’t want to beat his head against the table while playing D&D.

He doesn’t like D&D. He has a lot of problems with the system and decided that since everyone wants to play D&D he’d capitulate and run this dungeon he loved. This sounds like a pretty good compromise.

There are a couple of problems that come from this. One of these is that if he isn’t having fun, he might not notice that someone else isn’t having fun. I was not enjoying myself. I didn’t like the system we were using. When we switched systems and I was sitting there rolling a new character, I just wasn’t looking forward to it. There’s a post here that explains why I don’t play D&D anymore. You can check that out.

This is the other problem. Our DM made the assumption that we all wanted to play D&D. This wasn’t true. We all wanted to play a roleplay game. He suggested D&D because he decided that it was what we wanted to play. To be fair, everyone else was perfectly fine with this. They all enjoy D&D and wanted to play. I wanted to play with my friends and was willing to play Swords and Wizardry. Basically, Our DM made a lot of assumptions about something he didn’t want to do but decided to suffer through.

Final Thoughts

I think there’s a lot of blame to go around. I should have said something to the DM when I wasn’t having fun. I should have noticed in myself why I wasn’t having fun. I decided it was how he was running the game and just walked away. If I had thought about it for a while I might have noticed why I wasn’t having fun. I might even have spotted the DM wasn’t having as good a time as everyone else.

The module as we encountered it was flawed. That style of adventure was fine for the early days of D&D but anymore I want a bit more going on. I don’t think too many people are willing to sit around a table and explore empty hall for several hours. We’ve gotten a lot of entertainment options at our fingertips these days. People want their fantasies to have a plot.

Personally, as a writer, I’m all for that. However, there are people who feel D&D should be run the way it was back in the day. You went to a place because there was treasure, you fought monsters because they had the treasure, and you explored tombs and dungeons for less lofty goals. To steal from Burt Reynolds we did it for the glory, for the money, and for the fun. Mostly the money.

Rappan Athuk is glory, money, and fun. I want a plot. I want an episode of TV, a good film, or nice story. I can’t speak for everyone in my group, but part of why I walked away was glory, money, fun aren’t enough anymore.

The DM, as near as I can tell, wasn’t having a good time. I’ve been the DM not having a good time. Back in the day. When that happened I addressed it to the players. I wrote a letter and sent it out to see what everyone thought of the campaign and minded if I changed things. Not everyone does that. My friend assumed everyone was having fun.

Even after I left he joked that the only reason I did it was because I didn’t like Pathfinder. He never expressed his dislike of D&D. He assumed that we wanted to only play D&D. He should have asked. Should have told us what he wanted and would have preferred to play. I also should have corrected him on his assumption about why I left.

Why Write This

As I said, I did this for myself in a lot of ways. I wanted to organize my thoughts and see how I should move forward in starting my own campaign. One of the things I’ve already done was give my players options. I sent out an email where I listed a selection of settings and rules sets. I’ll probably share it around here at some point. Maybe next week.

I’ve also approached one of my players and asked him to let me know if he sees people getting bored. I want to know if I’m missing it.

I also think it might help someone else to think about these things. Maybe you’re in a campaign that isn’t going anywhere fast and you’re not sure what to do. I know I’m not really giving answers but maybe you can find your own here.

Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough.

I think I’ll stop here.

Thanks for stopping by, let me know what you think. I’d love to hear.