Why You Should Run Published Campaigns
Header Art: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2008) by Wizards of the Coast / Jason Engle
Now that I have the clickbaity headline out of the way, let me share the real headline for this post: “Why Running Pre-Written Campaigns Can Help You GM A Game Better, Especially When You Are Really Busy”. Doesn’t quite have the same zing to it, but I think it has some merit. Also, if you don’t know what a pre-written or published campaign is, I’m talking about any adventure you pick up that has been written and designed by someone else for you to take and run at your table.
Utilizing published campaigns come with a lot of built-in bonuses that you just aren’t going to get in something you write yourself. You get an adventure that has been playtested, you get an adventure that has been edited into a clear and concise format, and you get to delve into the ideas of someone else. Also, a huge bonus is that published campaigns are already done for you, saving you a load of time to come up with a unique idea, unique monsters, NPCs, maps, magic items, and more. It (should) all be in that campaign, just waiting for you to crack open the book and bring your players to a land of make-believe.
But this isn’t me being a shill for BigAdventure. While I’ve run my own homebrew campaigns, I’ve also run several pre-written campaigns. In fact, I’ve written a campaign in my setting for others to run! I’ve run the gamut when it comes to running campaigns, so now I want to share that experience with you.
What Is The Best Thing About It?
The simplest reason why I like published adventures so much is that they are already written. You don’t have to worry about playing catch-up with your players who may suddenly jump the story forward past what you have planned or leave you stumped. You know what comes next because the adventure, and its consequences, are already laid out.
Now obviously a published campaign can’t think of every outcome. But that’s also why I think they are so cool. You can run multiple tables through an adventure, and it will be a unique experience each time. While the main plot points will stay largely the same, it’s the individual parts that are going to be unique to each run-through. It gives GMs and players a common ground (like how gross the BBEG in Tomb of Annihilation is), but also gives everyone something unique they can share from the adventure (like how a character drank a potion of poison by mistake in the washing machine trap in that one dungeon in Tomb of Annihilation, which caused them to die, fail all their death saving throws, and become a new obstacle in the trap that almost killed two others trapped in there with the corpse!).
That common ground of the major plot points is invaluable when talking to other people about it, and you can really dive into the differences in your experiences while still being excited about what other people have done at their tables.
Time
And that’s not all - sometimes you are just short on time. For a time I was in four games a week, and running three of them. I was creating two unique campaigns and running a published adventure, and to be honest… it was tiring. I still had work, I still had responsibilities, and so those homebrew campaigns suffered because I didn’t have the time to properly give them my attention. While it made me quite good at improv in encounter design and plot points, there are things I think back and I’m frustrated I didn’t make other choices.
Resources
If you are running a popular published adventure, you are also going to have so many extra resources and reimaginings of the adventure to peruse. No one knows how many variant Strahd stat blocks exist on the internet, but there are a ton! As a GM that’s great news because now you can see stronger Strahds, weaker Strahds, unique Strahds, and Strahds meant to face off against a level 20 party who are covered in legendary and artifact magic items.
If you are facing a problem, there are GMs who probably faced something similar and you can draw on the collective knowledge of the internet to help you plan out your published campaign and ensure that it remains a unique experience from your table.
The Cons of Published Campaigns
I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that published campaigns are perfect and that nothing is wrong with them. They have their problems, but they are problems that you can overcome - especially if you have made homebrew campaigns in the past.
Flexibility
Published campaigns are always going to be limited in their scope due to page count. You can’t create an adventure that takes everything into account, and even if you could build a 5,000-page adventure, a GM who lacks the time to craft a unique campaign isn’t going to have time to read and digest a 5,000-page adventure. Nobody has that much free time.
But that problem is secretly just a benefit of published campaigns! What your party does is what makes the adventure unique for them. If you, as the GM, can be flexible, then this is the time when you get to flex your homebrew and improv muscles. This is the perfect time to homebrew a few encounters or a minor plot point, and then get your players back into the published campaign.
You get the practice of creating homebrew, but you don’t have to worry about crafting an entire level 1 to 10+ adventure, you just get to make a small adventure, try a few fun ideas, and then go back to the main plot. The published campaign, in this regard, acts as a safety net that you or table can leave whenever you want, and then return just as soon as you are done with the homebrew content.
Bad Story
Sometimes you don’t see the plot holes in media until you are already half-way through the book, movie, adventure, or tv show. By this point, you have already sunk hours and hours into the media, so you want to finish. The same can happen with published campaigns.
Publishing a campaign doesn’t make an adventure perfect. There may be weird plot holes that you didn’t notice when prepping for the book, or the encounters might not make sense, or the story is just kind of bad with no real motivations present. The only thing I can say about this is that this is a time when you as the GM have to step in and massage things, which might not be as fun of a task as it is when you are homebrewing things for a party of chaos wizards or putting your spin on the content. Luckily, if the adventure has any type of presence on the internet, then someone has probably published or shared how they fixed those problems, so there is hope that you don’t have to get too dirty if coming up with a whole new story isn’t something you are excited about.
Someone Else’s Idea
An adventure written by someone else is just not going to have the things that might specifically get you or your players excited. You are going to know your table and players far better than someone writing a published campaign to be used by thousands of other GMs and tables. A writer can’t write for one playstyle or table, and so they are going to be forced to be a bit generic when it comes to motivations, magic items, encounters, story, and more.
While this is a good time to include things that you or your table enjoys, like lots of underwater combat because apparently your table is weird, it does mean that there will be extra work on you that you might not want to do or find frustrating to include. Hopefully, the fact that you are making the adventure unique to your tastes more than makes up for the fact that the adventure might be a bit bland or generic when you first begin your prep.
Running Published Campaigns
All-in-all, I find published campaigns a great backbone to rest the type of story I want to tell. I might gut 70% of a published campaign, just keeping NPCs and encounters to use, while completely rewriting the story, or I’ll only change 5% of the adventure and leave everything else the same. It all depends on the table, the adventure, what I want out of the adventure, and more.
You should treat published campaigns the same way I do. They aren’t some holy grail that you can’t touch or manipulate, but rather an excellent skeleton to hang your ideas on. Feel free to leave the adventure whenever you want, bring in the elements that excite you and your players, and rest easy knowing that the published adventure will always be there for when you want a break from creating, but still want your campaign to continue.
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