Running Epic Stories In Long-term D&D Campaigns

Long-term campaigns and epic stories

There is a common mismatch in Dungeons & Dragons between the time spent playing a campaign, and the narrative time of the story we are telling. Long-term campaigns can run for years with weekly sessions, with players committing to a character for weeks and months. But from the perspective of the characters, often the time spent on their adventures is only a couple of weeks. The time scope of the campaign feels monumental from the players perspective. After all, they have potentially spent years building their party’s story. But the narrative scope of the fiction can feel much smaller than that. If the characters have only been together for a few weeks, the gravity of their adventures can seem lackluster in comparison with the epic scale of the campaign.

Luckily, there are a few tips and tricks we can use to run epic stories that match the scale of our long-term campaigns.

The adventuring day dilemma

One reason for the mismatch of time between the campaign in the real world, and the fiction of the game world, is the adventuring day. If characters go through 4-5 encounters per adventuring day, those encounters might take multiple game sessions to play out. That is, regardless of whether they are social interaction, exploration or combat encounters.

We want to increase the drama and tension of a game by letting characters expend their resources over the course of an adventuring day. We want to zoom in on their struggles throughout this time. But that takes a lot of time at the table.

But, instead of throwing out the adventuring day, or running only very short adventuring days, what can we do to make a campaign feel grand, momentous, and epic in its narrative time scale?

Possibilities to broaden the narrative scale of a campaign

More downtime

To stretch the time frame of the story we are telling as a group, we can introduce more downtime. By using downtime, we can stick to an action-packed adventuring day but give characters time to develop “off-screen” during downtime. We might spend two game sessions exploring forgotten temples. But then, we give the party a month off afterwards to come to terms with the secrets they have uncovered, to spend their well-earned treasure, and to pursue personal character goals.

Think of Frodo’s adventures in the The Lord of the Rings: There are 17 years (!) between Frodo getting the One Ring from Bilbo, and him finally leaving the Shire. That is 17 years of downtime between two adventures.

Gritty Realism rest variant

Instead of, or in addition to using more downtime, we can also stretch the adventuring day itself to create epic stories for long-term campaigns. In chapter 9 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide we find a variant for the rules around short and long rests. Under these variant rules, instead of one hour, a short rest takes 8 hours. A long rest takes a week instead of one night.

If we use these variant rules, characters spend resources, and experience rising tension and drama over the course of a week instead of a single adventuring day. We turn the adventuring day into an adventuring fortnight.

Give characters larger quests

Especially at higher character levels, we can give the party tasks that are more complex require more narrative time (but not more real-world time) to complete. Here are some examples of quests that can stretch the narrative of our campaign:

Gather and train allies for a coming war.
Construct a mine that digs into the heart of a mountain.
Conduct a ritual which takes 365 days and nights to complete.
Gather rare components to open an interplanar gateway.
Travel hundreds of miles through a post-apocalyptic desert.

All of these larger quests can be broken up into smaller chunks and be interspersed with downtime. We zoom in to certain scenes, like speaking with a local lord to recruit their troops, defeating a nest of Umberhulks that is halting the mining process, or performing a ritual challenge as part of the year-long ritual.

The narrative scale, however, remains suitably epic. We can tell a story of months and years over the course of just a few sessions.

Build a large time horizon into the campaign premise

If we want to run a campaign with a story of epic scale, we can lay the groundwork before we start playing. We can set up apocalyptic events that take years to unfold, plan villainous schemes that play out over a long time, and tell the players to build characters that have room to grow over years of story time.

These types of campaign hooks are going to require significant downtime. So it is important to create characters which have personal ambitions that they can pursue in between adventures. Frodo spent more than a decade building a life in the Shire after getting the ring from Bilbo, before being set on his quest by Gandalf.

Running long-term campaigns that have an epic time scale

When we are trying to run a long-term campaign, in which the story unfolds over years, decades or centuries, we need to plan for it. The main device by which we accomplish an epic story time scale, without the game itself taking decades to complete, is downtime. Using downtime liberally, using the Gritty Realism rest variant, sending characters on large-scale quests, and letting players know about these things before we begin the campaign, can help us tell epic stories in our D&D campaign.