5 reasons why you should run a 10-session campaign

I want to show you a secret. One that will help you create the most satisfying campaign you’ve ever run. It’s found in the rule book for fantasy role-playing game 13th Age, on page 190. Here is the description for a 10-session campaign:

In this quick campaign, the players start at 1st level and gain one level each session. The campaign concludes on the 10th session in a climactic confrontation with the PCs’ personal enemies.

The entry has further guidelines on how to handle combat, treasure, travel and the plot which I’ll touch on further down but the main idea is that you’ll craft a focused campaign with intense combat and high stakes. I used this method for my recent campaign and while I didn’t hit it out the park quite like I wanted, I liked it so much I’ll likely use it for my future ones. Here are five reasons why.

(Note: These rules use terminology from 13th Age such as “heal-ups,” but the idea is just as applicable to Dungeons and Dragons if that’s your jam.)

Your story will stay focused — and you’ll actually finish it.

Groups face many challenges in playing a campaign to completion. Kids, work, vacation and illness can cause groups to miss sessions, which means that instead of meeting weekly or every second week like you planned, you might average only a few sessions over several months. This in turn means that, in real time, it feels like the campaign is taking forever to progress. That’s not even factoring in the possibility of GMs burning out part way through.

A 10-session campaign mitigates those hurdles. Everyone knows when the campaign will end, one way or another. If you miss a few sessions, the campaign isn’t going to drag over months. And GMs know they’ll be able to take a creative breather soon enough.

GMs also have the freedom to focus on what they truly think is important to the story. You don’t need an extensive history of your world, or a Shakespearean cast of NPCs. You need a cool and powerful villain whose plans the players have to stop. Everything revolves around that. (A tip from experience: One or two underlings or powerful minions the players have to work to defeat over multiple sessions early on will help smooth out your pacing. By about session 7 or 8 I was really having to stretch to explain why the players wouldn’t already be squaring off against Leviathan.)

As 13th Age puts it:

With just ten sessions, you need to stick pretty tightly to the core story line. The campaign world should be changing around the PCs as they gain levels. Eventually, they should face a climactic battle at 10th level. Their deeds in this battle and in the previous nine adventures may make a big difference in how the whole campaign world fares, or at least how the icons they’re related to end up.

You can abstract out the boring bits.

Some GMs get excited about details like the precise amount of gold pieces the characters will find, how many experience points each slain gelatinous cube is worth, how much their meals cost or the number of days to travel from Hobbiton to Bree. I don’t and neither does a 10-session campaign:

The characters get a level’s worth of treasure spread out among one session’s encounters. They get a full heal-up and a level-up at the end of each session.

The action can bounce around the map from session to session. You’ve only got ten sessions for them to see the world, so don’t have them stay in one place. You can make a checklist of locations on the map you want the campaign to go. At the start of each session, summarize what has happened in the days, weeks, or even months since the last session. Fast forward through the administrative stuff, like travel, and race to the action—important NPCs, exotic places to explore, and high-powered battles.

My campaign took place entirely on one small island with one central town, Pirate’s Cove, so I didn’t have to worry too much about how far away all the adventure locations were. Still, I appreciated the freedom to not have to play through multiple slogs through the jungle each time the party went somewhere. You need to save the druids from the hydra. Pitter patter.

The players will get to play with their high-level powers.

In 13th Age, characters only go from levels 1-10, as opposed to the 1-20 in Dungeons and Dragons. That means each level is a significant power boost and it isn’t long before wizards are slinging fireballs, and monks are swinging thunder punches.

A 1st level character in 13th Age already has some cool tricks up their sleeve and is roughly on par with a 3rd level Dungeons and Dragons one. The damage characters do is also based on their level, which means that by level 10 just a basic attack from a rogue is doing something like 10d8+15 damage.

And you know what? It’s so friggin’ cool and fun. Typical campaigns usually end long before character reach the upper tiers of play — but in a 10-session campaign, a player creating a wind lord (a class from the 13th Age Glorantha book) can look at their 9th level Scarf of Mist attack, which does damage equal to half the target’s hit points and blinds them and blocks off their most powerful abilities, and know that if they survive, they’ll get to use it.

You’ll get to play with high level monsters.

In a 10-session campaign, each session includes two battles. These are double-strength battles because there are only two of them.

This rule, more than the rest, really helped me plan for our sessions, which are usually 2.5 to three hours — on the short side for role-playing games. I only needed two battles, and since they were meant to be harder, I could bust out the higher level monsters earlier, like the hydra and the big boss of the campaign, Leviathan (based on the Forest That Walks monster) which was far too great a challenge for a regularly balanced battle against a three-person party, even at 10th level.

I do also have to mention that the monster design in 13th Age is top notch. They have powerful and thematic abilities that are simple to run.

It’ll make you a better GM.

Board game critic Quintin Smith recently made a great point about getting better at something with the example of pottery: it’s better to make one pot in an hour, smash it, and repeat 100 times than to spend 100 hours making one pot. It’s the same with GMing. Having run this campaign, I like how I was able to throw different curveballs at the characters, and how their choices were still able to shape what was a linear campaign. (Poor, poor Nasemsbick. Hoot hoot, my friend.)

I can also see how I miscalculated some encounters, so that they were too easy; I can see how I had more time than I thought to develop secondary villains; and how I could have done more with the NPCs and factions I had created.

Next time, I’ll be able to fine-tune the roller coaster just a little better.

So there you have it. Five reasons you should run a 10-session campaign. If you feel like in a rut, or you don’t have a lot of time, or your campaigns wither on the vine, I recommend giving it a shot.