In my Mothership open table, a character named Manny Vasquez recently died. One of the other PCs, Dürmig Ableton, decided to use one of his downtime actions to arrange a memorial service for Manny — a chance for everyone who had worked with him to share their memories and commend him to the wisdom of the stars.

I loved this idea, but it was also problematic.

Sure, we could play through the memorial service with the four players who were currently at the table, but what about the other twenty players who are currently active in the campaign and their characters? In fact, even Manny’s player wasn’t at this session! (Dürmig had heard the news of Manny’s death from one of the other PCs in the session, who had been working with Manny when he died.)

What Dürmig was really proposing was a communal event that, ideally, everyone playing in the open table could choose to participate in.

The problem is that I’ve tried organizing community events like this before — where a bunch of open table players all get together — and they’re pretty antithetical to what makes an open table work: The whole point of the open table, after all, is flexible scheduling so that you’re NOT trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules. Therefore, not only have I found that events like this often never come together at all, I’ve seen the efforts to coordinate real-world and game-world schedules actually wreck the entire open table and end the campaign.

(This may be difficult to understand unless you’ve seen it in practice. Basically, characters and/or players got put on hold waiting for the communal event to happen. When the event inevitably got delayed because of the logistical issues, people went into a “holding pattern” where they were waiting for the event to happen. Attendance dropped at the other sessions, which killed the forward momentum of the table and even caused whole sessions to be canceled. This caused players’ commitment to the game to flag, which increased the attendance problems while also making it harder for everyone to come together for the now much-delayed communal event, and the whole thing slipped into a death spiral.)

So with these practical and existential problems in mind, how did we handle Manny’s memorial service?

RUNNING THE EVENT

For context, here’s a few key facts about how this open table is being run:

• We have a dedicated Discord server where events are scheduled. The players’ also have channels for chatting with each other between sessions.
• This is supplemented with an e-mail list, which I use to let people who aren’t habitually checking Discord know when new sessions have been scheduled.
• Time is synced between the real world and the game world, generally at a rate of 1 week in the real world being equal to 1 cycle in the Tempest Cluster.
• There’s a system of downtime actions which we resolve at the beginning of each session. Among other things, this allows PCs to “catch up” to the game clock.
• In my campaign status document, in addition to tracking open table headlines, I’ve also found it useful to track Major Events and the date they’re occurring. It then becomes relatively easy to see, during downtime resolution, which characters are “passing through” a major event and make sure to insert it into their narrative.

With these structures in place, I then did four things to run the memorial event.

First, as I mentioned, Dürmig spent a downtime action getting the event set up. This was during a session, so we played through this and established the broad details.

Second, I asked Dürmig’s player to make a post to the campaign Discord detailing the invent and inviting others to join and (in this case) share their memories of Manny. I also promoted the event to all of the players in the campaign via our e-mail list.

Third, I included the memorial service on my Major Events timeline. It’s very different from the other sorts of events I’ve tracked there (e.g., a major terrorist attack on the station where everyone lives), but the key thing is that it’s getting “triggered” for each PC as they pass through that moment in time. This gives us a chance to play through (and likely add to) the event, making it a living part of the campaign experience.

Fourth, I encouraged those players — if they hadn’t already — to go to the Discord and share what their character does at the memorial service. (This can be a little wobbly if you ask them to do it after the session, so you may find it most effective to take a “break” so that everyone can hop on their phones and roleplay the moment immediately.)

The result is an event that plays out multiple times over multiple weeks (or even months) of real time. It naturally results in the event being revealed/created/built in a nonlinear fashion, but with each pass through the event the group is collectively adding layers of detail and interaction to it. Meanwhile, no one is left waiting for the event to happen, nor is anyone forced to skip the event unless they want to.

FINAL THOUGHTS

To date, I’ve only used this technique to resolve what you might refer to as “low stakes” events: Attending Manny’s memorial service, for example, is a communal event, but its outcome is not going to fundamentally shift the forward trajectory of the campaign. Things might be different if there was, say, a bomb hidden in Manny’s coffin or if the big, shared event was something like the evacuation of the station.

If/when such events arise in the future, I’ll probably use similar techniques of mixing nonlinear Discord resolution, but will need to experiment with other techniques to make it work right. A few things I’ve considered include:

• Special Event Session! I’d use this if the PCs can/should be positioned to affect the outcome of the event. The goal here would not be the futile hope of getting everyone in the campaign to show up on the same day, but rather to run a specially flagged session where the PCs who show up are the ones at the tip of the spear. (Other PCs may still be able to participate in the session’s “pregame” via the event’s Discord thread.)
• Default anyone not participating in the event by such-and-such a date as having been away from the action. (In the Tempest Cluster campaign, for example, we would just assume that they took a low-paying job off-station when the event happens.)
• Alternatively, with the canonical timeline/outcome determined (by a special event session or otherwise), we can now transition the non-linear resolution techniques described above as everyone else figures out how their character was affected by what happened during the special event.
• Multiple special event sessions. This can work if the event is designed in such a way that its outcome is being affected by actions taking place in significantly different places at the same time. For example, maybe every session in March is resolving a different facet of a crisis, with the outcome from all tables being synthesized at the end of the event

As I say, these are currently just thought experiments. But they do open up some really fascinating opportunities I’m looking forward to exploring.

FURTHER READING

Open Table Manifesto
Open Table Headlines
Tempest Cluster

Here’s a piece of bespoke terminology that I often teach my players: low stakes test.

It’s not at all unusual for a roleplaying game or storytelling game to gives PCs a resource that they can use to improve their action checks. This might be a meta-currency, charges from a magical item, or some kind of exertion mechanic. Some games will even make this a central element of the resolution mechanic. (In GUMSHOE, for example, spending points from your skill pools is the only way that your character’s skill will have an impact on the check. This is less true in the Cypher System, but most checks will still see the PCs spending points through Extra Effort.)

The trick is that, when I’m GMing, sometimes I like to interrogate the system for stuff that would be kind of a rip-off if the players decided to spend limited resources on the check. If it’s a situation where I can clearly describe the stakes of the roll before the roll is made, no problem. (The players can decide for themselves whether it’s worth spending resources on.) But sometimes this would be awkward, inappropriate, or anticlimactic.

For example, the PCs might all be searching a room together and I want to figure out which of them finds the hidden tiara. I could make an arbitrary decision, roll a flat random check, or even elide past the question of who actually finds the tiara, but in this case I want the focus, reward, and/or factoring of skill that comes with an action check.

If I call for Find Hidden checks, however, one or more of the players might decide this is worth spending Perception Points on, which I know would be silly because they’re guaranteed to find the tiara – the check is just providing focus, a little bit of color, and a potential roleplaying prompt for one of the players (“Look what I found!”).

This is where the low stakes test enters the picture. Instead of saying, “Give me Search checks,” I say, “Give me low stakes Search checks.” This just literally means, “This check isn’t a big deal and I don’t think it’s worth spending points one.”

Players can, of course, still spend points on a low stakes test, but now I’ve done my due diligence and nobody will ripped off when the true stakes of the check are revealed.

It’s a small difference, but I’ve found – once I’ve taught the players what it means – that it greatly streamlines these interactions. (Some of my players probably think this is actually a published term of art in the games we play: It’s not at all unusual for me to include it when I’m explaining the rules of the game.)

MEANWHILE IN MOTHERSHIP…

In Mothership, every failed check causes a PC to suffer one point of Stress. This is a fantastic mechanic which constantly ratchets up the tensions and helps provided perfect pacing for every session, but it also largely removes small, incidental checks from GM’s toolkit.

I know some will cry out that this is, in fact, the point. I get it. But after a dozen or so sessions, I was still feeling handicapped by the loss of these checks.

So, once again, I’ve introduced the concept of a low stakes test, this time indicating to the player that they shouldn’t mark Stress if they fail the check. And, once again, I’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining these table interactions, even when I’m running an open table and have to frequently introduce new players to the terminology.

This is very much a finesse technique (like the ones I use when collecting initiative), but it’s another example of how small improvements in your GMing can really add up.

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I like handouts.

I like them a lot.

If you’ve seen the Alexandrian remixes for Eternal Lies or Dragon Heist, then this won’t come as a surprise to you. Those campaigns are fairly representative of what my games look like: There will be dozens or even hundreds of handouts. Photographs, letters, lore books, artifacts — anything I can get into the players hands enhances the experience and becomes a tangible touchstone for what’s happening in the game.

In running a single adventure — like Left Hand of Mythos — keeping track of the props is pretty straightforward. Over the course of a campaign, though? Things can get more complicated.

It’s not at all unusual for my players to pull a sheet of paper out of their notes and say something like, “Hey, this letter from Lady Scarlet to Thornai that we got thirty-seven sessions ago — can we pull that from the evidence bag and dust it for fingerprints?”

Now, somewhere in my notes is likely the information I need to answer that question (i.e., who handed this letter before the PCs snagged it). But where, exactly, is it?

Well, almost certainly keyed to whatever location they found the letter in.

… and where is that?

Damned if I know. It was, after all, thirty-seven sessions ago.

What I’ve learned to do is put tracker IDs on my paper handouts. That way I know where to look up my notes about them later on.

I use alphanumeric codes for my scenario notes. For example, scenarios in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign include:

• BW03B Alchestrin’s Tomb
• BW06 Chapel of St. Thessina
• CC07 Porphyry House of Horrors
• NOD2 The Secret Meeting

And my current Night’s Black Agents campaign has scenarios like:

• CS03 Paymaster
• CS06 Dragovir Monastery
• PP01 Arkady Shevlenko
• SJ02 Serbian Mafia

These are just generally useful for keeping stuff organized, but are particularly useful for tracking props. In pencil, I lightly write the alphanumeric code somewhere on the prop. No matter how much later the prop surfaces, I can just reference the code and know exactly what notes I need to reference.

If you don’t want to use scenario codes, another option might be maintaining a master handouts index, listing every prop you’ve prepped and the adventure it comes from. The tip here isn’t the specific method of the tracking; the tip is that having some way of knowing the provenance of your props becomes important as you begin running rich, complicated, long-lasting campaigns.

When I’m running a campaign for a dedicated table, I try to make sure that the pacing is effective and engaging for the players, but I don’t worry too much about whether any specific scenario takes one, two, or a half dozen sessions to complete. (Among other things, it’s not at all unusual for there to be two or three different scenarios active in any given session.) I’ll still try to give each session a good conclusion, of course, but the campaign is not going to live or die depending on whether the PCs catch the ethereal troll serial killer in one session or three sessions: Wherever we happen to be in the action, we can wrap things up for the night and then pick up where we left off when the next session begins.

But sometimes you’re on a time limit.

A good example of this is a one-shot. If I’m running an adventure at a convention, for example, I can’t say, “To be continued!” There is no next week! I’ll likely never have a chance to play with these players again, let alone wrap up our story!

Fortunately, there are several techniques we can use when we need to hit a deadline.

ONE-SHOTS

Let’s start by taking a closer look at what it takes to run a true one-shot. How do we make sure everything wraps up in one session?

Prep an appropriate amount of adventure content.

The easiest way to blow your time limit is to prep too much adventure material. Ain’t nobody getting down to Level 5 of your dungeon in a four-hour session.

The appropriate amount of content will vary by system and circumstance, but my general rule of thumb for a four-hour session is generally five or six “meaty” pieces of content. Examples of this include a 5-Node Mystery or a 5+5 Dungeon.

Use a session timer.

I almost always keep a timer behind my GM screen that’s counting down to the end of the session. It’s very useful for maintaining pacing in any session, but it’s invaluable when you’re on a time limit.

I use a dedicated timer — rather than my phone or the like — because I want it to be visible at all times, so that I’m constantly aware of the temporal pacing of the adventure.

Running long? Start with aggressive framing.

Roughly two hours into a four-hour session, I generally want the PCs to either be in or heading towards the third meaty piece of content. If they’re still in the first or second node, it’s time to push down the accelerator with aggressive framing.

Aggressive framing means seizing suggested courses of action — don’t let players dither in their decision-making and don’t waste time on transitions. Instead, as soon as they say they want to do something, push hard and cut straight to them in media res doing it.

Then, on the back end of the scene, don’t be shy about sharp, definitive endings. Be quick to say, “This scene is done. What next?” in whatever forms works best.

Tip: There’s a converse of this at the one-hour mark, where — if they’ve already reached the third chunk of the scenario — I’ll relax the pace and maybe bring in a proactive element or reincorporate an NPC or other feature from earlier in the scenario. But, in my experience, this is rarely a problem.

The final hour.

If we hit the point where there’s only one hour left in the session and we’re still running behind, that’s where I pull the emergency lever. (You want to do this here because there’s still time to do it gracefully. If you wait until they’re only fifteen minutes left, it’s too late to adjust.)

Start by looking at where the PCs are and where they’re headed next. (Or, alternatively, where they could be headed next.) Following that line, what’s the vector that gets them to the conclusion of the scenario?

Aggressively prune everything else away. For example, do they head off to investigate a node that isn’t going to yield a lead pointing them to the end? Resolve it rapidly with one or two skill checks and then move on.

Basically, at this point, everything that isn’t essential should be treated as a dead end (even if it technically isn’t and you’d normally play it out in full). Check out Dead Ends in RPGs for more details on how to handle this.

Note: This is one of the reasons why it’s so useful to prep scenarios rather than plots. Actively playing a scenario means there are LOTS of potentially satisfying conclusions that can emerge from play, making it far more likely that the PCs will be near a potential conclusion when the time comes.

If, at the one-hour mark, the PCs are so far from a conclusion that it’s clear they’re never going to make it there no matter how aggressively you pace and prune, then you need to start taking more dire actions. (This includes all sorts of retcons and other stuff that I would never do in a full campaign.)

Option #1: Edit the vectors.

For example, whatever the next node that PCs go to is now miraculously stocked with clues that all point to the concluding node! Yay! Alternatively, a proactive node — similarly festooned with Clues Pointing Straight to the Finale — shows up.

In a dungeon? They search a room and find a secret staircase leading down to Level 5! Or the next hallway they go do down suddenly leads to the Fane of Nyarlathotep. Or the intervening rooms are still there, but it turns out all the monsters in those rooms were actually called away to another part of the dungeon. Maybe they’re responding to reports that the PCs were attacking the West Gate? Wow. It’s ironic that in trying to find the PCs they actually left the route to the Fane unprotected!

Option #2: Move the conclusion.

Instead of opening a path for the PCs to reach the ending, you can instead move the ending to wherever the PCs currently are. This often takes the form of either:

• The Big Bad finds the PCs and attacks them. (For example, if the scenario is hunting a werewolf, the werewolf pops up and attacks the PCs.)
• Someone tells the PCs where to go. (The werewolf attacks the chalet and an NPC calls the PCs to beg them for help before it’s too late!)
• It turns out the Big Bad is at whatever location the PC go to next. (Maybe the scenario was designed for the PCs to confront the Evil CEO in his office atop the Moebius Tower, but I guess it turns out the Evil CEO is conducting a surprise inspection at the warehouse where all the illegal drugs are being kept!)

When looking at your options here, it’s generally more effective to have the ending triggered by something that the PCs do. (In other words, if they choose to go to the warehouse and then the Evil CEO is there, then it feels like they found the Evil CEO! Good work! If the Evil CEO just walks through the door where they’re having lunch, it can very easily feel like nothing they did actually mattered.)

There are exceptions to this, but they tend to still be based in the PCs’ agency. (If you really need the bad guy to just teleport to their location and trigger the final fight, it helps a lot if they shout stuff like, “You’ve interfered with me for the last time!” and “You meddling fools! You thought you could blow up my chalet and kill my pet werewolf and there wouldn’t be any consequences?!”)

Keep in mind that you can also mix-and-match your options here. A good combo is triggering a proactive count that you can lard with a bunch of leads pointing to a location (or multiple locations!) where you can plausibly relocate the bad guy.

Tip: You may have noticed that having a proactive node designed into your scenario is incredibly useful for problem solving here. It’s always a good idea to include one. If you forgot to include one, Raymond Chandler’s “a guy with a gun kicks down the door” is always a good fallback.

LIMITED SESSIONS

Now let’s expand our horizons a bit and look at how we can handle a campaign with a limited number of sessions — either because we launched the campaign that way or because real life has imposed itself in some way. It turns out that a lot of the same techniques apply, just twisted slightly to account for the larger scale.

First, though, it can be useful to see if there’s an alternative solution to cutting the campaign short. For example, if you have a player who’s moving away, you might be able to arrange a satisfying send-off for that player and their character while the rest of the group keeps playing. (Check out Saying Goodbyte to a Player for a deeper dive into how to handle this.)

Alternatively, is there a way to increase the number of sessions you can play before the end? When I first ran Eternal Lies, one of the players needed to move to Atlanta to pursue her career as a stuntwoman, but we didn’t want her to miss out on the end of the campaign, so we ran ten sessions in fifteen days to wrap things up.

If options like those don’t work, then you’ll need to figure out how to wrap things up in the time that you do have. Start, of course, by figuring out how many sessions you have left. I recommend immediately assuming that at least one or two of those sessions won’t happen: Either something will come up and actually cause those sessions to get canceled — in which case you’ve preemptively solved the problem! — or they’ll provide some breathing room in case anything goes wrong. It’s much better to wrap things up early (and maybe run an epilogue session or something) than to run out of time!

Now, remember our guideline about five or six meaty chunks of content per four-hour session? Just multiply that by your sessions and you’ll know what your “adventure budget” is.

If you’ve been prepping your campaign as you go along, you just need to identify where your potential conclusions are and then vector appropriately through the amount of adventure content you have to work with.

If, on the other hand, you have an existing structure of some sort — a published adventure, a set of linked node-based scenarios, etc. — that exceeds your adventure budget, then you’ll need to figure out how to cut things down!

It turns out, this largely works the same way it does for individual adventures, you just have more flexibility and the luxury of prep time to think about how you want to handle it. For example, in an individual adventure your might say, “I don’t have time to run this full dungeon, so let’s remove Levels 3 through 5. The stairs on Level 2 go straight to Level 6 now.”

You can apply the same technique to, say, node-based campaigns: You can redesign the clues from Adventure 2 to point to Adventure 6 instead of Adventures 2 through 5.

Alternatively, if you have a Big Bad, you can have them turn up in almost any scenario.

Also look for places where adventures can be dramatically trimmed down instead of cut entirely: Maybe the Tomb of Raknar-Thalla was originally supposed to be a large dungeon with dozens of rooms and multiple levels. You can have the same clues pointing to the tomb, but instead design it as a 5+5 dungeon that can be wrapped up in a single session instead of several.

OPEN TABLES & UNFINISHED SCENARIOS

Another place where a GM can often run into a time limit is an open table: Here you want to wrap up a scenario by the end of the session because there’ll likely be a completely different set of players at the next session and you can’t leave things dangling or stuck on a cliffhanger.

As discussed in the Open Table Manifesto, one option is to sidestep the issue entirely by immediately scheduling a bespoke sequel session with the same players: Now you likely can leave things unresolved and wrap everything up next time!

If that’s not an option (for whatever reason), then you can, of course, always use the same techniques you’d use for any other one-shot and get things wrapped up by the end of the current session.

When it comes to an open table, though, it can be useful to ask yourself another question: Do you NEED to finish this scenario?

Sometimes you do: Investigating half a murder mystery and never getting the solution isn’t satisfying. If the PCs are in the middle of trying to escape a haunted ghost ship, then it’s probably important to know whether or not they get out!

But in other cases you clearly don’t: If the PCs are investigating a megadungeon, for example, they can easily have a satisfying experience, accomplish many things, and then leave without “finishing” the dungeon. (That’s because scenarios like this are holographic — any part of the adventure contains the full experience of the adventure.)

Other scenarios will exist in a gray area between these extremes. In my experience, there are two keys to figuring out whether you can leave a scenario unfinished or not.

First, can you still give the current players a meaningful conclusion? For example, maybe they’ve been tracking the illegal drug trade on LX-510. They weren’t able to track the drugs back to the black market chemlab they’re being sourced from, but with an hour left in the session they are on track to take down the gang responsible for the local trade. Framed right, that’s a solid conclusion.

Second, what are the consequences for leaving the scenario unfinished? For example, with the gang taken out of commission, how does the rest of the criminal network respond? What new scenario hooks might be generated from that? What leads do the current characters have that they could follow up in future sessions (and will that follow-up result in a full adventure experience for them)?

WE DIDN’T MAKE IT!

Whether it’s an individual adventure or a full campaign, sometimes — despite your best efforts — you just won’t be able to succeed in wrapping things up. The best thing to do, when it becomes clear you won’t be able to reach a satisfying conclusion, is to let the players know what’s happening and then work with them to find some sort of closure.

For an individual session, this likely means that about ten minutes before the end, you say something like, “I don’t think we’re going to get to the end of this scenario today.” You can then switch to highly abstract time and wrap things up in broad strokes: “Okay, so when you got to the warehouse, you find paperwork implicating Rebecca Li in Helen’s murder.” You can — and should! — still ask the players what their characters are doing. It’s just those declarations and their resolutions will be handled in much broader strokes. You can even call for dice rolls from the players, but each one is likely to resolve entire scenes, not individual actions.

For a campaign, if you’re going into a final session where there’s no chance of bringing things to a conclusion, you need to accept that reality. Try to wrap up whatever the players were doing at the end of the last session in an hour or less, and then, similarly, transition to an interactive “summing up.” Some of the techniques discussed in Epilogues & Skipping Time may be useful here.

The other technique here is to look at each remaining adventure in your campaign structure — whether that’s levels of a megadungeon, nodes in your Night’s Black Agents Conspyramid, or semesters at your magical academy — and resolve each one with a single round robin of action checks around the table. (I have a technique for resolving side jobs in my Mothership open table that can be useful for this sort of thing. I’ll try to share it here in the near future. You might also think in terms of each adventure being a clock, skill challenge, or complex skill check.)

It’s not ideal. But it’s better than nothing, and sometimes that’s the best we can do.