A few observations on naming campaigns and scenarios, from both sides of the screen:
• Neither individual adventures nor entire campaigns need names, but it sure is cool when they have them.
• Campaign names are a useful shorthand, and one that helps evoke the tone of the game. “Sara’s campaign,” “Our GURPS game” and “You know, that campaign with the elves” are a lot less useful than “The Demonhaunt campaign,” “The Outsiders game” and “Elfland.”
• Naming your campaigns also prevents what I think of as the “Little Kitty Problem.” Back when we were kids, my best friend’s family got a new kitten, and they called her Little Kitty as a placeholder until they could think of a suitable name. Guess what Little Kitty’s name wound up being? (And naturally, she was huge.)
• Adventure names are not only fun, they can be useful: assuming you announce them, and refer to them later, they can help your players remember what’s happened so far in your game. They’re also enjoyable as teasers, as in my group’s just-completed Stargate game, where Don would give us the episode names at the start of each “season.”
• Giving each scenario you create a name will change the way you think about the structure of your campaign — and make it seem more official. Instead of just gaming, your playing “Vengeance from Below,” in the Ark of the Ages campaign.
Do you name your adventures, campaigns or both? Does your group enjoy your naming practices?
I have taken to consciously naming all my campaigns in the last few years. It helps me understand what I want a campaign to be about if I can boil it all down to a short title.
I’m not nearly as consistent in naming individual adventures, but it sounds like a good plan to do so.
I’ve never really named individual adventures. Mostly that is because of the style that I tend to run games in. It is rarely an adventure or an episode, but connected series of events. Naming the individual adventures sounds like a good idea. Kind of goes with a pulp serial feel to things, or an episodic grouping.
The big question that this spawns in my mind is do you name it before or after the adventure happens? You might name it “Getting to the Paladins stronghold” beforehand, but based on what happens during the adventure it might become “In which the party wrecked the train and many innocent lives . . . “
I actually did this with my most recent campaign. “Curse of the Wayfarer’s Wind.” It seemed to get a good response. Hopefully the name will stick after the campaign ends.
the first campaigns with my current group were named ‘alpha’, ‘beta’, ‘gamma’, and ‘delta’. after that came the ‘y zero’, ‘dragons’, ‘debris’, and ‘eberron’ campaigns. i started giving names to adventures for my own use sometime around ‘dragons’, and named them again afterwards for the recap posted online. (afterwards, to avoid the ‘paladins stronghold’ problem.)
I haven’t named campaigns yet, but that sounds like a good idea. I’d call it “good metagaming” – when the campaign is called “Godswar”, you might want to pay attention to the religious stuff… 😉
OTOH, I always name the adventures as I write them. I usually give that name out when the players will understand why I chose it, but I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just give it out at the beginning, as a tension-builder…
Adventure names usually have a hidden meaning or pop-culture reference:
Highway Robbery: In which Our Heroes face bandits of both the “stand and deliver” and “Boss Hogg” kind.
Getting the Shaft: How difficult can it be to clear out a mine that lay fallow for the last four years?
Death, Interrupted: Necromancer + Vampire. ‘Nuff said!
I also name the previous session on the XP sheet I hand out next session, although sometimes it’s nothing more than “Into the Temple, pt. 3”
I don’t name the campaigns until after they were done. Names of the various campaigns were The Brothers Return, Old History, The Return of the Dragon, Bead Magic, Legacy and there were others. Each of them had real life time spans of 3-5 years in various editions and areas of my settings.
Now recently since I’ve been using Obisidanportal for documenting my campaign, each nights adventure has a name and I can use cut scenes and forshadowing with titles to give the players a little more info and such.
I have for sometime taken to naming my campaigns as well as my adventures. The Campaign names I share with my players, but the session names I rarely tell them.
The session names are often just shorthand for me to find the right adventure notes, when I am looking for some information or a stat block.
For the longest time, our campaigns were simply “The AD&D game” or “Walt’s Shadowrun game.”
I really only started using episode titles when I regularly used my computer to type adventures (just like DNAphil said).
When I ran 7th Sea, I decided to write a short piece of fiction to start each adventure (this was usually a “cut scene” that provided metagame focus for the players). The fiction titles became adventure titles.
This carried through to my first Witchcraft campaign (episode names, not the fiction). When things started to get stale, I decided to retool the campaign. I gave the retooled version a title to reinforce the focus and change in direction. Every campaign since then has had a title.
Obviously, titles have been very useful in my powerpoint opening sequences 🙂
Titles don’t have to be extravagant. My current two campaigns are “Witchcraft: Emerald Nights” (as it is a modern occult fantasy game set in Seattle) and “Freeport” (a D&D campaign centered on…you guessed it!). Sometimes, a title can be too limiting and lose its meaning. Calling your campaign “The Vampire Hunters” will seem a little weird if your players spend more time slaying werewolves and battling mages than actually hunting vampires.
Walt
I treat it like a TV series. The campaign name is the series title, and the adventures are the episodes. I don’t share these with the group, but I think I will from now on.
I’ve been doing this for the D&D game I run as well as for my previous Trinity game. I actually do it as a way to focus my own thoughts as I prepare. Strangely, I don’t share the names with the group. I don’t deliberately withhold them, but instead just neglect to provide them.
I did this for every adventure of my d20 Modern horror college game, which had a definite hook for each one and was more TV-style. I haven’t started doing it for my new D&D game. The players did ask on the first adventure what the campaign name was (because there’s a box for it on the character sheet) and I had to say it was coming, since the one I have in mind might give away too much about what’s to come.
I have done this a few times but it never caught on. Maybe I need to come up with catchier names.
I played with a GM that did this, but I’ve never felt drawn to do it for my own games. I try to make the games have a memorable feature significant enough that they are easy to remember later. Some of my previous games were: The Water Bubble game, the Mirrors game, The Alex the Stupendous game (that was actually named after a PC) etc. My current game is The Psionics Game.
I think ideally I want my players to remember their games by the characters they played instead of what happened: this is usually how I remember games, although that unbelievably goofy mess we made out of the Banewarrens will always be nearly as memorable as the character I was playing at the time.
I’ve been running a campaign for over 4 years now, and it just struck me that it doesn’t have a name. For the whole time, I’ve just been calling it “Kensing” after the island where it takes place.
However, if I had focused on story instead of setting it might have gone somewhere by now. Instead, it’s been sort of all-over-the-place without much central continuity.
I should probably try to think of a good name, just as an exercise in focusing in on a core storyline. Hmmm…what to call it?
My current campaign has a name, but I haven’t shared it with the players as I was afraid it would give away too much, or perhaps lead them by the nose?
Our individual sessions get names, too, shared as the title on the adventure logs I write up and e-mail out afterward. I don’t think of these in advance; I usually conceive of them as I’m writing the log.
I never used to name my campaigns until I started playing V:tM. It was always, “Let’s play Darksun,” or, “Run Cyberpunk for us!” After that, I started naming everything.
I’m in the same boat with adventure names, but started naming those using the same conventions that Telas uses after gaming with my friend Byrd (who used them to great effect). Adventures I’ve played or run in:
The Great Siberian Itch
Escort Service
Mom’s Shacked Up in the Whako Basket
40 Klicks to Tao Pang
Never Have Sex With Anything You Summon
One fun thing I’ve found is to have a couple of adventures (or adventure name) ready at the end of each adventure. Rattle off the names and let the players pick their poison. It gives them something to look forward to and keeps interest in the chronicle high.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I am more likely to name an online game because that helps the recruitment effort. My current fantasy forum game is entitled “The Queen of Air & Darkness.” I usually only give an adventure a title if one jumps out at me while I am preparing it.
Face to face campaigns may get a name if I am particularly deliberate in plotting them. I tend to get dropped into the role of GM without warning, though, so sometimes the games are a little too impromptu for titles.
Midgardsormr
We always have campaign names:
The Allthing
The Spider Guard (dark elf campaign)
Adventures in Cauldron (alternates w/ Shackled City)
For the Shackled City game (our first store-bought), I’ve been using the chapter titles to break the campaign up into acts: Life’s Bazaar, Drakthar’s Way, Flood Season, etc. Granted that was done for me by the excellent crew at Paizo, but I think it works really well, even if the chapter titles do give something away. I plan to use act or chapter names in all future home-grown campaigns.
Naming your campaigns and adventures is a great idea!
In the past I’ve done it occasionally but only my first campaign had a name(which was known to the players). Also recently I named several sub-adventures in the current campaign but never told them to the players.
Well I’m definitely gonna try that now.
My groups games started getting named bacause we put updates on a webpage and you had to put something down for link to the game page, and a link for the session pages.
Now the games usally get named first, and the gamemaster names the net session when putting in a prelude in advance.
Vanir is absolutely right, the only campaign I remember the DM naming was never referenced by its name.
That doesn’t mean that I as the player haven’t come up with campaign names to fill in that little box on the character sheet. It’s usually something generic, but it helps me personally keep track of that character’s campaign.
I do think that it can be difficult to think of a name when you might not have completed the story yet: sometimes your title should come last so it best fits the story.
We name our campaigns but not our adventures, though they rarely catch on. The last two I ran were “To Sway the Stones” and “In the face of Darkness” (both Mage campaigns). “Traitors to Empire” and “Smugglers and Criminals” were the names I tacked on two Star Wars campaigns we previously played in.
I’ve been naming my missions and campaigns as long (15+ years) as I could remember and encouraging either the players or myself to write them up over time, so that I’ve ended up with a catalogue of over 1,000 mission writeups from my campaigns.
Giving the missions names helps lock them in the memory of the players and stops it being “y’know if was when we um raided the bank, or was it when we stormed the secret facility?”
I recently decided divide my campaigns into seasons, which seems to be going down well too, as they know there will be some epic missions coming up 😀
I would say that it is much easier for me to name missions for Broken Shield my sci-fi/gritty game than for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as the WFRP sessions are much more generic.
Using a campaign shared space (like Google groups or a Wiki) can be enhanced by having the name of the campaign sitting as main title.
Also, naming adventure is a good DM tool for placeholders when you plan the main-quest line of adventures. All my work in progress are stored on my DM Wiki and accessible on the main page by their adventure name.
Since I returned to the DM’s chair about four years ago, I decided to name my campaigns and adventures. I do share the campaign titles with the players straight from the get-go, but the individual adventure titles are entered in the campaign log once they’ve been completed.
I do notice that the campaign titles has a bit of a metagame effect on the players. I think it, at the least, causes them to choose certain types of characters, but I’ve definitely seen differences in play styles based on the name.
I find having a title helps me to stay focused when writing adventures. In my current campaign, The Price of Loyalty, the concept of loyalty has come up several times and will have a significant impact as the campaign comes to a close.
I love threads like this — the ones that grow much larger than I expect, and wind up all over the map in terms of responses. It makes for great reading. 🙂
(Micah) I’ve been running a campaign for over 4 years now, and it just struck me that it doesn’t have a name. For the whole time, I’ve just been calling it “Kensing†after the island where it takes place.
Oddly enough, most of my campaigns get named this way, too. It works well enough, but in retrospect some of them could definitely have used sexier names.
Sarlax: I’d like to see all the names at some point, even if it’s once our campaign ends.
My “Age of Worm” game is going strong, although around the store where we play, it’s usually informally known by some key element of the campaign at that given time. For a while it was “Diamond Lake” game or the “Blackwall Keep” game, etc. Nothing formal, since I usually don’t give the name of the module we’re running.
Rather than have hard breaks between modules, the campaign sessions run smoothly from one to the other.
On the other hand, on the store website, it’s listed as the “Age of Worms” game on the schedule, so I guess it has more than one name at a given time.
BTW: The “Little Kitty” syndrome is rampant with my wife’s inlaws. I don’t know how many pets over the years have been called “Baby _____(fill in the blank)____”.
Since I run my campaigns like TV shows, they always have a name. Sometimes I start with it. In the case of my superhero game the name of the campaign was the name of the team, so the players effectively named it. It helps in all the ways you mention above. I highly support this. 🙂