Whew, done!

My first, completed, prewritten campaign is over! It was definitely rough. Though I believe the players had fun, I found myself stuck on the tracks. Talk about railroading! When the GM feels like they can only go one way, I know the players felt that too. There is so much more offered in the book that I was running that was missed, glossed over, ignored, etc. that I know the players would have enjoyed. However, because we had this major goal, they felt it necessary to accomplish that.

In this particular campaign, there are a few things I will do differently next time. Probably the biggest issue was it gave out way too much information right after the first real encounter. The players knew immediately what needed to be done, and even a bit of how to do it. At the end of that scenario, they were given a direction to find another NPC with even more information. So, how would I change this? Well, cut the information in half, if not more. Let the players explore the first city more before driving them onward.

The next issue I would address was the magic items. Many points within the campaign just gave quite powerful items to the players from NPCs. A couple they found on bad guys they had defeated, but that was only a few. A couple of the players ended up having so many items that they began to look for ways to sell them. Well, it didn’t make a lot of sense for them to sell these particular items as they were religious relics in a low magic world. Besides that, they didn’t have a whole lot they needed to buy.

So, that being said, I ran this in my usual style without caring about what they were carrying or how much was needed to pay for room and board. I just don’t like the nuances that come with keeping an inventory and, quite frankly, I forget about what the players actually have in their hands when encountering a guard or city official. However, I still felt as though that would not have mattered much in this campaign.

I want to run this again. Next time, I will treat it more like a campaign setting and less like a prewritten campaign. I want to allow my players to explore the world more, and interact with more of the NPCs. Instead of knowing ahead of time about the bad guys, they will “stumble” upon them, and not receive so much information until they are half way through, or maybe even later. Gotta keep ‘em guessing, right?

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