Posts tagged PBtA

7 of My Most Successful Campaigns (part two)

RPG Campaigns RPG Life
7 of My Most Successful Campaigns

And here’s the rest of the list of the seven most successful campaigns I have run…you can find part one here.

The Final Revelation (Trail of Cthulhu) – 2020

  • The pitch: In 1930s London, a group of strangers are drawn together by shared, ominous experiences. They form a group to try to understand a pattern that soon reveals itself to by a threat to the nature of humanity. This frame leads to a series of interlinked scenarios. Spoilers: the world ends when the story does.
  • Context: Another pandemic favorite. The otherworldly cosmic horror made for a fine, distanced counterpoint to the realities of 2020—probably drawn from equal parts escapism and catharsis.
  • The verdict: As investigative games go, Trail of Cthulhu is hard to beat, and the vision of both Graham Walmsley and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan gave me a really compelling and disturbing game world to share with my players. Given the horror anthology setup, each player juggled 5 total PCs! What a weird, awesome experience.

Masks – 2022-2024

  • The pitch: PCs are teenaged heroes in historically super-powered Halcyon City. They struggle against evil, their own emotions, and the expectations of an older generation of super-heroes. Meanwhile, their various foes plot and scheme for world domination. Will they be able to rise above it all and save the world?
  • Context: I ran this game longer than any other. (Maybe longer than games in the past as well—it’s hard to remember.) Admittedly, there were two lengthy breaks, but all 5 players stayed in the game until the very end.
  • The verdict: This game was really one for the ages. It was mostly improvised, and as the story spun out, we wound up with a very large cast, and an epically drawn world. We wielded comic book tropes left and right—sometimes in a satirical way, but more often in a straightforwardly earnest way. It was a very emotional game with epic battles, as well as intense teenaged angst and romance.
Campaigns

CyBorg – 2023-2024

  • The pitch: Cy is a nightmarish corporate hellscape, whose citizens are all jacked in and constantly bombarded by advertisements and/or propaganda. The PCs travel into realities both virtual and concrete, taking on jobs for however many creds are offered. Everyone has debts to pay and bullets to spare as their desperation drives them ever deeper into danger and dystopian conspiracies.
  • Context: Potato Falls for the post-pandemic era—another very successful pickup game for our public group. As you might expect, it was a little grittier, but, as before, the game brought in new players and gave existing players something to look forward to.
  • The Verdict: This game was enormously fun. The many battles were explosively comedic. The weird locales and set pieces stood out against a sea of neon sludge. The pathologies of the various PCs were as difficult to fathom as they are to forget. And once again, the world ended when the story did. (Or did it? End simulation.)

The Detroit Campaign (Kult) – 2025

  • The pitch: In Detroit, in 1977, 5 strangers are drawn together by a shared nightmare. Gradually they discover a dark secret: that the American automobile industry was actually a decades long ritual that has allowed Hell to manifest in southeastern Michigan.
  • Context: I am from Flint, Michigan, and this was sort of a perverse tribute to my childhood home. It was also a chance to try a Powered by the Apocalypse horror game in a non-Cthulhu setting.
  • The verdict: We went really deep with this one, embracing the occult, transgressive sexuality at the heart of Kult. We also made room for Detroit style rock n’ roll, cameo appearances by the evil Henry Ford, and one of the most memorable PCs I’ve encountered—a Flint, Michigan empty-nester housewife, who sort of grew her own sub-mythos.

The Port of the West Wind (Hearts of Wulin) – 2025

  • The pitch: In a fantastic version of ancient China, the Port of the West Wind is a small and prosperous city, surrounded by magic and spirits. When a strange curse spreads across the land, the dead rise as puppets for demonic forces. The PCs are formidable warriors who go in search of the cause of these dark events.
  • Context: I ran this game in tandem with Kult, and, despite the demons, and the groundings of both rulesets in Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics, the moods involved were very different. It was very fun shifting my perspective as I moved back and forth between these games.
  • The verdict: Hearts of Wulin is just an amazing game. There are other systems if you want to bring wuxia storytelling to your table, but this one really sings, especially if you want to know about the inner lives of the characters. The group of players was awesome and really good about absorbing the somewhat eccentric—but effective—rules for combat, and each one of them brought a strong character to the table, all ready to undergo physical and emotional strife.

7 of My Most Successful Campaigns (part one)

RPG Campaigns RPG Life 1 Comment
7 of My Most Successful Campaigns

Potato Falls (2019)
Hypertellurians (2020)
The Final Revelation (2020)
Masks (2022-2024)
CyBorg (2023-2024)
Kult (2025)
Hearts of Wulin (2025)

I don’t know if it’s old age or the state of the world, but, lately, I’ve been reflecting on various parts of my life in a deliberate way. Predictably and appropriately, a large part of this consideration has revolved around tabletop roleplaying games. I’ve been game-mastering since I was around 12, I think, though there was a lengthy break, from maybe 1995 to 2017, due to various trivial “real life” things, like work and health.

Before that hiatus, every game that I ran or played in was a campaign. Neither I nor the people I played with ever considered playing otherwise. That mindset seems really strange to me now (not in the least because so many of the old campaigns were discontinued after only a session or two). These days, I run a lot of one-shots and enjoy doing so. At the same time, like many other gamers, I have a certain passion or compulsive sentimentality—I’m really not sure which it is—for the idea of a campaign. I love the epic meta-plots, the sweeping character arcs, and the familiarity and camaraderie that go with a long form TTRPG—not to mention the slow builds, the setups and punchlines, the will-they-or-won’t-they moments of suspense. 

With that last point, I’m not (just) referring to romance. I’m pointing toward those remarkable moments wherein you find yourself wondering: will the GM go that low? will the player go that high and/or silly? and what unexpected developments will come out of someone/everyone going off the rails, the script, the planet, or the plane of existence? There are the big fights, the noble or ignoble deaths, and the times when a beloved character is lost to madness.

Currently, I find myself running three campaigns—all in different systems and settings: Vaesen, Trail of Cthulhu, and Brindlewood Bay. We are at least a couple of months into all 3 games, and they all seem to be going well. (Vaesen has been running since July.) I know that things can and will change before we hit the finish line with any of these games. (With Brindlewood, I suspect we’ll be done by mid-March.) I’m running hardly any one-shots, though I don’t expect that situation will outlast this winter. I love campaigns, but I do miss the huge range of experiences that a one-shot setup offers. Still, while in my campaign mindset, I wanted to say a few words about some of my most successful campaigns to date.

Potato Falls (Dark Places & Demogorgons) – 2019

  • The pitch: It is 1984. PCs are adolescents and teens growing up in the town of Potato Falls, OH. Peculiar things keep happening, from attacks by ghosts and monsters to disturbances in the space-time continuum. Somehow, none of the adults ever seem to pick up on how weird everything is.
  • Context: Potato Falls was a pickup game that we set up for our public RPG group. In the space of a year, I’m not sure how many people showed up, just out of the blue—definitely more than 20. Everyone rolled a character in 5 or 10 minutes, and was cast into hijinks right then and there. Many of them went on to join other games with me, public or private.
  • The verdict: I can’t begin to tell you how fun this game was. It was also really chaotic, and I responded to all the energy at the table with bigger ideas and crazier concepts for how we played. Almost everything worked, because the vibe was so positive and welcoming. I really miss the game and might be running it still, if it weren’t for COVID.

Hypertellurians – 2020

  • The pitch: You are part of a group of passengers and crew aboard the Ultracosmic pleasure-ship, The Aetheric Lordling. You visit strange places, always seeking after new adventures and experiences. This game is really about wonder and exploration, viewed through a 1970s lasers and sandals haze.
  • Context: A campaign that I threw together for 4 players in March of 2020. It was a bonding experience for all of us, I think, and led to some really memorable, psychedelic moments.
  • The verdict: Despite the game’s innate silliness, we loved its Wonder mechanic, and we all became really committed to the various PCs and NPCs, and at times, the whole thing had the capacity to be somehow moving. Go figure.

Part 2 coming soon…