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Unfortunately for some of us, life comes beforeDungeons & Dragons.It’s an all too common story. Your Fighter’s job starts asking more of them, the Monk is getting more into Pathfinder, and the Cleric has a new baby. Life happens, and the campaign has to pause.
A year down the line, everyone starts to get settled, and the itch comes back. The one that whispers dark thoughts like: “Surely a D&D campaign would be great in my life right now.” So, now you need to get that campaign back on track. Here are a couple of ideas to help.
Identify Why It Stopped
Sometimes it’s hard to pick right back up where you left off.Unless the party is adamant that you finish the dungeon or the shopping session, you’re probably safe to move on,especiallyif your heart wasn’t in it.
The death of imagination is fatigue.Full stop.
If you decide to start your campaign again,throw out what was unsustainable.Sometimes this might be a story element that people weren’t fully engaged with, but sometimes it’sruntimeorpreparation burnout.Whatever it is, find it and figure out ways to help minimize your pain.Do not put yourself through burnout for the sake of a tabletop game.
If you’re comfortable with it, this step can generally help you retcon and make edits to NPCs, storylines, and the like, as well as open up the idea to your players to do the same. Try not to change major things, but make sure everyone is on the same page as you start back up!
If the end of your campaign was more about scheduling,ask your players for an estimation of their schedules.These will always be in flux, so you’ll never know for sure, but chances are, if they want to play, they’ll likely be able to let you know ahead of time if they can’t make it.
Once you’ve identified the contributing factors to your campaign’s hiatus, you can start worrying about how to kick it back into gear.
Enact A Timeskip
You’ll see this a lot in shows. Between seasons, a certain amount of time passes to wipe the slate clean and make room for fresher stories.A timeskip can stabilize a shaky campaign by giving the characters a new purpose.This works well in tabletop, too, especially if you tell your players ahead of time.
One of the easier ways to handle this is totell your players your plansanddiscuss what they may want to have accomplishedin the few months, weeks, or years between your campaign ending and resuming. If it’s been a longer time,come up with why they may or may not have split from the party, and what draws them back into adventuring.
Consider devoting ten to twenty minutes of the first session to each player, group size dependent. Let them get acclimated to their character before merging their stories again.
The great thing about timeskipping is that you canbuild up stakesand then immediatelydisrupt the player character’s lives, prompting them to adventure. Plot elements you don’t like will die a fairly natural death, and you get to cling to the stuff that worked.
This method also gives your players a breather, sothey don’t have to worry about recalling everything from a campaign they haven’t played in a while.Their character’s memories can be their memories, alleviating some of the pressure on both the player and the Dungeon Master.
Share A Summary
Some Dungeon Masters, however, love the pressure. For a DM who loves writing,creating a small bit of recapcan never do any harm.This method is best for jumping directly back into the game, and has you create a small’lore document’to remind the players of everything their party has done of significance. After all,sometimes the story is too good to shift away from.
If you’re more comfortable workingsmaller, you may simplyrecap the most recent thing they did.It will help you to have your last few sessions in your mind anyway, if you’re picking up from where you started.
This will take a little bit of mental legwork on the DM’s part, especially for fetching the information from so long ago.Luckily, if you have notes and organizational methods, this becomes easier.If not, well,your party is a resource!Get together and discuss the last few things they remember happening.
Some Dungeon Masters can even treat the summary like a TV show recap and may read it at the table to their players before the game starts, so the story is fresh on everyone’s mind.
Introduce A New BBEG
If you left the campaign at a plateau, think aboutcreating a separate Big Bad Evil Guy.By introducing another villain (or perhaps introducing a villain at all), you can toss your players back into caring about something.
An unfortunate quality of the brain is that it changes memory over time, no matter how much your players loved the campaign.They won’t remember everythingand some of the enthusiasm for the story may be somewhat tempered. If this is the case at your table,a new villain might be a great way to reinvigorate everyone.
Not only is it exciting, but itunites the party against a common enemyand eases them back into the synergy they used to have.
Perhaps it’s a devil holding you in a pocket of the Nine Hells while he negotiates a dispute with another devil, or perhaps it’s an archfey looking to enact amusement for himself. Whatever you decide,it turns up the heat on your players and gets them moving.
Enforce Consequences
After leaving a campaign for so long, a Dungeon Master gets the chance to do a mid-campaign retrospective.There might be plot threads that got droppedor worse, completely mangled in the party’s attempt to help (or harm). There is no better time to startreintroducing those consequences than when the players return, good or bad.
This works especially well with parties who talk frequently about their campaign, and it sets up future session ideas nicely. This start to your campaign could even become more impactfulif your players don’t remember everything they did.
Don’t fool them, but don’t shut out the possibility of having a soul-crushing roleplay moment. (Think: “You took everything from me.” “I don’t even know who you are.") If you think your players will go for that, do it!If not,make sure you pair this idea with a recap.
Make New Characters
The truth is, as time goes on, sometimes playersdisconnect from old characters, and taking a hiatusonly widens that ever-growing gap.As their lives shift, they may connect to new themes and stories, and the former character becomes more of a weight than an escape.
Even if this isn’t the case, many players may find they want to continue the story, butthey feel their characters achieved a good stopping point in their narratives.Say a fond farewell to those characters, androll up some new ones.Nothing gets a story going again like a couple of new adventurers joining the fray, possibly for very different reasons.
A fun aspect to this is thatit completely shakes up the party dynamic.You may have been a bunch of do-gooder Harpers in the past, but well, with the new fiend pact Warlock as the face and the Oathbreaker Paladin as the tank? You may very well have a much more morally dubious party on your hands.
This is an introduction of the old plot into new devices. The story can start back up smoothly, especially if you tie them into the old story.
As the Dungeon Master, you’re able to even feed them old lore in a much more natural way. Their characters are potentially seeing this all for the first time, even as you connect back to the brilliant story you’ve all been telling together.
