Writing Every Day 27: Sequels

I've mentioned in the past how I like to run a campaign to its dramatic conclusion and then put the PCs and situation on the shelf for a while. Tonight I want to talk about when I choose to pull them back down. This isn't about cinematic sequels, though I may reference them from time to time.

When I decide to return to a group of characters, there are some personal rules I like to follow. First is that the characters' situation must change. For example, I've run a few games set in the post-apocalyptic wastelands town of Covenant. In the first campaign, the characters were some of Covenant's founders. The game was about the danger and difficulty of establishing a home in the frontier. When I decided to return to Covenant, I knew that I had to change something, so I made Covenant grow.

It made sense to me. A successful town pushes back the edge of the wilderness. The next frontier lies beyond it, and as a waystation to reach it, people travel through, buy supplies, or decide to stop traveling and put down roots. I advanced the timeline by two years, I think, and the tiny town of Covenant had grown to support a population of nearly a thousand. Small by our standards, but booming by the standards of an irradiated wasteland.

Growing the town allowed me to "start fresh," so to speak. The PCs knew old Covenant and were forced to adapt to its changing face. Instead of keeping marauders at bay, now they needed to worry about organized crime settling into the town. Or they needed to worry about other businesses muscling them out. Or needed to worry about losing their political clout in Covenant as new circles of power rose in prominence. You get the idea. They couldn't follow the assumptions they may have had based on the previous games, because the situation had evolved.

When I set out to change the campaign world like this, it helps to remember some of the screenwriting advice in Robert McKee's book Story. In it, McKee talks about the emotional charge of scenes. I've never tried applying the theory to individual scenes in an adventure, but I suspect it could be made to work. Each scene has an emotional charge, positive or negative, when it begins. McKee suggests ending the scene on the opposite charge. So, if the PCs begin a scene on an "up" beat, by the end they should experience a "down" beat, and vice versa.

That flow of emotional charge is how I treat campaigns and their sequels. Or at least how I try to. I start by altering the status quo in some way, like the expansion of Covenant in our example. Then I examine how the last campaign ended. Was it an "up" ending? Then the feel of the next story is probably going to take a downturn. Sometimes there's a bit of work that is required to transition between the two emotional states, but I try to get the feeling of the new game out as quickly as I can.

Since Star Wars is such a shared cultural phenomenon, I'll use it as my example. A New Hope ends on an iconic up beat (for everyone but poor Chewie). Then we roll right into Empire, where the Rebels are on the run. You'll notice that things aren't presented as hopeless at the start of Empire... heck, the rebels commend themselves pretty well in the Battle of Hoth, but by the end they are grim as hell. In Return of the Jedi, we begin with echoes of Empire's grim ending, but eventually it pushes through to a happy Ewok party ending.

If you do decide to sequelize a campaign, I suggest taking the time to examine the previous one. Find out how you can modify the situation and reverse the emotional charge. Try to have a solid idea in mind before you tell the players to bust out their old character sheets. Try to make the experience just as new and exciting the second, third, or n+1 time as it was the first.