Premium Subscriber Post: When Awesome Campaigns Fizzle Out

So I’ve been thinking. Yeah, dangerous, I know. And I was thinking about a campaign I wrote that I can no longer run for a variety of reasons. Maybe you can do something with it. Have fun. I’ll even get you a copy of my notes if you contact me (understanding that I plan on publishing the first adventure). This used to be my Tuesday group if you want to go back and read some of my previous posts.

I had a campaign I was writing. Very cool. The party finds a cache of these scrolls, called the Nether Scrolls, that teach the basic foundations of magic, allowing them the knowledge (for wizards or sorcerers) to be able to cast spells beyond 9th level, to create magic items, knowledge of cosmology and how the different planes function, how to create constructs, and how to create artifacts. Cool, right?

The party has an inscription, though, that they can’t decipher, and need a specific scholar who specializes in ancient Netherese to help with reading it.

Que the first adventure: finding the scholar. I titled it “Lost in Translation.” A play on words, as the scholar had been kidnapped by a rogue element of the Red Wizards of Thay. You see, I found a plot hole in the Forgotten Realms lore. During the Thayan civil war, one of the wizards had been attacked and presumed dead. I of course decided that this wizard escaped via the clone spell, and plotted his revenge.

According to the Forgotten Realms Lore, all of these other rogue wizards had been killed in the civil war. I decided that he’d plot a way to re-take Thay and rule it himself. How? By searching for the magical power that ancient Netheril had possessed.

I had set up the caches to be from 5 different Netherese Arcanists (old versions of wizards). The group was racing to get the scrolls before the Red Wizards got them. Additionally, another group, the Shadovar, a holdover from ancient Netheril, were also after them, especially after the fall of the city of Shade.



See where I’m going with this? It was going to be an epic campaign.

What happened you may ask? Well, a few things.

1. The group kind of disintegrated – all of the original players could no longer play, stopped coming for a variety of reasons (work, school, etc…), or took up the mantle of DM for another table.
2. The replacement players’ characters, at the point of the last original player’s departure, had no real investment into the story – Sure, they went along with what was going on, but they were of the opinion of “Why are we doing all of this again?!”
3. The campaign devolved into a large side quest – because of the actions of a particular player’s character, the party let go of a quest item. This forced the party to go through a If You Give a Mouse a Cookie type chase to get to the guy with the quest item. It was fun, but without the original players and characters, the fun of the sidequests had lost their luster, so to speak.
4. I was disappointed – this was a big one. Due to everything above, it got to the point where even I was asking the question: What’s the point?

Looking at all of this, there was only one option: start over with the new, revised group with a new story to tell. As my subscriber list consists of at least one of my players, I won’t be detailing that story here!



The good news is that my Tuesday group is doing well in its current configuration, being made of people across the country (as well as a Canadian player), all playing virtually via Roll20.

The group knows that this is a temporary group, awaiting the day when I get my second Covid vaccine, enabling in-person play again. But that is still a ways away, and when I get the first one, it’ll still be 6 weeks until I can go out in public.