I must admit, I’m a fan of long campaigns. I don’t know if it is because of Lord of the Rings or other epic fantasies I have read, but it certainly is there. I recently found this Youtube video from Matt Colville asking the question about how long an adventure should be?

How Long Should An Adventure Be? (youtube.com)

It got me thinking to the old days when we found our way into our hobby shops and flipped through the monochromatic modules with their light blue maps. Somewhere along the way, main stream publishers have moved away from small modules to large hardcover, flashy campaigns. We followed along as these campaigns were better produced, had artistic high-quality maps, and were marketed much better.

I’m sure these campaigns were more profitable for the publisher and we gladly forked over the coin for the higher quality hardcover books, but were they any better? The answer is for the most part, no.

I’m sure I’m not alone in my experience of disappointment at the end of the long campaigns where the adventure starts out great, but then gets railroady and ends with a forced illogical ending rather than a climatic exciting resolution. It really shouldn’t be a surprise, writing long epics and campaigns are difficult. I can’t remember ever being disappointed in the small modules I bought either physically in that hobby shop or recently in digital form from the Fantasy Grounds store.

Matt Colville makes a great point that campaigns shouldn’t be about the story or BBEG, but rather the adventurers. Adventurers playing through a series of modules is still a campaign – but one that embraces variety of settings, challenges, and themes. (And allows the adventurers to overcome a series of villians!)

Sadly, we have been convinced that homebrews also should be long, sweeping epics. Very rarely do we see DMs that create small homebrew adventures to play. Besides being difficult to write, large campaigns require much more work to prepare for and remember all the plot hooks. In short, DMs aren’t doing ourselves any favours by defaulting to the long campaign style. Perhaps it is because we secretly would like to be that next great author that creates a grandiose sweeping world. This again should remind us that the story should be written by the adventurers, not the DM. Campaigns make it easier for DMs to forget that – modules allow for more player decisions and direction.

I’m going to revisit the module approach as this is what made us fall in love with the game initially. The challenge is that it isn’t see easy to find these smaller, high-quality modules as it was in the past.

Thankfully, Matt Colville has again helped us. Matt shared the following Adventure Lookup site link:

Adventure Lookup

You can use this site to browse large and small adventures and rediscover the joy of that hobby shop and flipping through the modules to play!

Happy adventuring!