IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE
Session 11B: Garden of the Sickstone Elementals
The arrow flew straight and true, striking one of the goblins in the back of the head. The pure force of Tee’s draw smashed the arrow through the creature’s skull, so that the tip of it emerged out of its eye.
If you’ve been reading these campaign journals for awhile, one of the things you might have noticed is that Tee frequently shoots enemies through the eye.
Is this some sort of special feat? Or does the player just like making called shots?
No. It’s nothing mechanical. It’s just how I ended up describing some of her kill shots. This started all the way back in the prelude sessions:
After defeating them (Tee skewering one through the eye and Agnarr cleaving them both in twain)…
But another of the reptilians walked in and started squawking: Tee drove an arrow through his eye, pinioning him to the rock, and Agnarr followed through with a devastating decapitation.
This wasn’t something that I had planned for. It’s one of a hundred different things I said in describing the early combat scenes of the campaign, but this is the one that resonated with us: Bam. 
Tee shoots something through the eye and it brings us joy and laughter.
It’s a running gag. They’re small things, but I think they really help to tie a campaign together. They’re a great example of the things which can help elevate a long-form campaign above episodic one-shot play.
Honestly, though, I don’t think you can plan for these. Or, if you can, they still won’t be nearly as effective or satisfying as those developed organically through play.
But you do have to be aware of them. You have to pay attention, spot the moments when these running gags have the opportunity to emerge, and then make the effort to cultivate and reinforce them over time.
You have to read the room.
These gags can be almost anything. The first time I ran Eternal Lies, for example, it was the character who managed – through pure luck and circumstance – to never be present when the supernatural elements manifested during the first half dozen or more sessions of the campaign. Once the player called this out, it became a consistent light-hearted moment whenever the rest of the group would begin rambling about what they had just experienced.
As these examples hopefully demonstrate, running gags don’t need to be huge, overblown, mood-killing things. Nor should they be overly frequent, as they will quickly kill the gag and sap the joy from it. But used with moderation and care, they become shared joy, a sense of community, and a lovely contrapuntal beat.
PLAYING WITH THE GAG
Here’s a couple of other things you can do with running gags, although they require great care and surety in their use.
Breaking the Gag. There may come a point when it’s most effective to end a running gag. In my Eternal Lies campaign, the character eventually did witness the supernatural firsthand. The player, rather cleverly I thought, chose to let the gag persist a little longer, but now the tone of the gag had changed: It was no longer a humorous Sculley-esque tolerance for the lovable crazy people she was associating with; it was a desperate and increasingly willful denial that she was using to cling to her sanity.
Eventually the time came for the gag to end completely. When the horrors which surrounded them had so completely and deniably impinged themselves upon the character that she had no choice but to break and accept what was happening to her.
And this really demonstrates the power of a good running gag: That final break – that final, mad acceptance of the supernatural – was made more powerful by the tradition which had proceeded it.
The trick with breaking a running gag, of course, is that you want to make sure that you’re not doing so cheaply or frivolously: The payoff you’re getting needs to more than outweigh all the future good that the gag could bring. (Or it needs to be so utterly necessary and demanded by circumstance as to be undeniable.)
Sharing the Gag. After they’ve been well established, some running gags that “belong” to a particular character can benefit from another character “guest-starring” in them. For example, once everyone firmly associates shooting people in the eye with Tee, it can reduce a table to tears of laughter when the normally bumbling Dominic suddenly does so almost by accident.
Here care must be used because you can end up watering the gag down. Tee shooting people in the eye has become a strong character trope in the campaign; if everybody starts shooting people in the eye, the gag loses its distinctive character (pun intended).
This is not, of course, to say that running gags can’t belong communally to the whole group. Some do. But others don’t. You need to make sure you understand what makes the gag work (and what makes it rewarding) so that you can cultivate it properly. Otherwise it’s like over-watering a cactus.
You lost half a paragraph, I think:
> Tee shooting people in the eye has become a strong character trope in the campaign; if everybody starts shooting people in the eye,
Tee obviously shot me in the eye before I could finish writing that sentence.
I played in a campaign once with an odd running gag: the cleric kept accidentally killing children. Note the lack of any scare quotes around the word accidentally. These were genuine accidents.
I wish I could say more, but I joined late, and the only incident I was present for was a mishap involving a botched nonlethal attempt with the back of an axe against an attacking orc child.
The cleric later adopted an orphaned baby dragon, whom she managed not to kill. Not long afterward, the cleric was one-shot by a wyvern. I’m still not sure whether that was irony or karma.