See what’s become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
—from A Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon & Garfunkel
D&D and time has always had a bit of an odd relationship. There is the old joke about thirty seconds of combat taking three hours to play through while a three hour hike is covered in thirty seconds of game play. Fifteen minute work days followed by 23.75 hours of rest. Spell durations. Days for crafting items or training or what have you. Lots of things about how long it takes to do things or how long things last…mostly in terms of the players characters. None of that is the subject of this post. Instead, below the break, let’s talk about time in terms of the flow of time in a game, the possibilities it engenders, and what may become of a campaign because of it.
As time marches inevitably on, things happen. Crops grow and are harvested. Commerce and trade occur. Animals do animal things. Bees and butterflies do their thing. Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. And on and on and on. All of these things happen with no intervention from me or even my having knowledge of them. Most things that happen happen exactly in that fashion…with no involvement or knowledge. The same can be true in D&D and about the player characters.
Although the player characters are the central protagonists in a D&D campaign, they are not necessarily the only actors within the campaign. As time passes, other things may be happening in the campaign. Bad guys are going to be doing there thing and, without the intervention of heroes like the player characters, they must just succeed at what they’re doing.
A lot of published adventures for D&D are written as though the player characters are intervening at exactly the perfect time. The heroes arrive just before the evil ritual is completed and save the day by disrupting it. The dragon just happens to attack right when the heroes reach town. The wards imprisoning the demon hold just long enough for the heroes to get there to face the demon as it emerges. This perfect timing is pretty common to adventures, right? And it makes total sense. If the player characters are not arriving at the right time, the encounter might not happen and then where does that leave the game?
However, not everything in the campaign needs to be modeled on this “just in time” approach. Various things, like bad guys doing bad things, can operate on their own timeline…unless someone intervenes. In our Nentir Vale campaign, there have been a number of story lines that have crisscrossed over the thirty odd sessions and the two and half months in game time. Some of the things that have gone on in the campaign have certainly had this “just in time” approach. Others, however, have had a life of their own with time passing as it will until some sort of intervention takes place.
Here’s a couple of examples of the latter from the campaign. My players may not be too thrilled to read about this…which might be the whole point of this post. đŸ˜€
One story line was related to the Winter Fey gaining a foothold in their attempt to conquer the Nentir Vale. The player characters arrived in Nenlast not too long after the fey had gained their foothold. After some diplomacy and negotiation, the heroes had a “quest” that would get the fey to leave the Vale in exchange for a particular item. However, the fey made it clear that they would continue to spread across the Vale until the players delivered the requested item.
The arrival of the PCs in Nenlast certainly had an element of “just in time.” However, each day that the PCs were off on this new quest, winter spread farther from its center in Nenlast. I have a hex overlay on the map we are using for the Nentir Vale. Each day, winter advanced by one hex. By the time that the PCs had traveled from Nenlast to Winterhaven (partly via the Feywild) and back to Fallcrest on their way to Nenlast, winter had spread across nearly a third of the Vale. Panic was setting in and many of the residents of Fallcrest were preparing to flee.
If the PCs had reached Fallcrest a few days later, they would have found it in a very different situation. Winter would have come to the town or perhaps would have been just another day away. Many residents would have fled. As it was, the arrival of the heroes and the pronouncement of the Lord Warden that the heroes would be stopping the advance of winter, gave many hope and totally changed the mood of the town. Plus, Woody got to rear up his horse and heroically ride out of town into danger!
The same heroic and hope vibe could have been handled via a “just in time” approach. I could have set up this “adventure” such that whenever the PCs got back to Fallcrest, winter was a few days away. It all could have played out exactly the same. However, that shuts down the possibility that a delay in their arrival (or a hastening of their arrival) would have led to a very different experience for the players…all based on the passage of time.
I have a calendar for the campaign. It has information about what is happening (or has happened) on that particular day. For each day, I had tracked how far winter had advanced from Nenlast, including many days into the future. If the PCs (or others) had not interceded, I knew exactly how far winter would expand across the Vale each day and when the full force of the Winter Fey would likely have conquered the Vale. If the PCs had been too late, there would have been no “just in time” moment for whenever the PCs could get around to saving things.
Another story line is that of the Cult of Orcus attempting to open a sealed rift to the Shadowfell. The players know this and they know that the residents of Winterhaven are being abducted for sacrifices to accomplish this goal. This is the part that I think my players are going to hate to read: I know exactly how many sacrifices are necessary to remove the seal AND I am tracking the Cult’s progress day by day on my little calendar. I know exactly when the Cult will have completed their ritual and rift opens again.
The heroes had already intervened, preventing at least one family of farmers from being abducted, slaying a number of hobgoblins in the employ of the Cult and doing some of the abducting, and a number of other things that delayed the activities of the Cult. As a result, I adjusted my calendar appropriately based on this. Needless to say, the Cult has only redoubled their efforts after these setbacks, advancing the “ritual” along their timeline (and my calendar) after the heroes had left the area to pursue other pressing matters (the Winter Fey above).
The players are back in Winterhaven now and dealing with the Cult and the hobgoblins again. To be quite blunt, if they don’t stop the Cult in time, the seal will be removed and the rift opened. If that happens, it will take the campaign in a direction that I haven’t contemplated at all but a direction that I haven’t really been planning on. The Cult is going to continue to do their thing and the tally of sacrifices will continue until the rift is opened or the Cult is stopped. Here’s hoping that it is the latter.
Both of these story lines have proceeded over the course of time, impacted, delayed, and/or stopped by the interventions of our player character protagonists. Without those interventions, the BBEGs have continued to (or will continue to in the future) pursue their goals. Things would be very different in the campaign, potentially even ending the current campaign. As the passage of time marches on, I have to figure out the various possibilities to see what becomes of me and our campaign (to come back around to the song lyrics above). Mixing things up with these time sensitive story lines with the more typical “just in time” elements can add some interesting twists to a campaign and, hopefully for both the players and the DM, give it a sense of realism or at least verisimilitude and concreteness that may otherwise be missing.
Hmmm…thinking about this a bit more, I wonder what Bejik has been up to as well as Rage the Tiefling and other members of the Illustrious Order of the Onyx Pearl (and their apparent search for abyssal gates). Do I have the course of their machinations over the days mapped out? Am I going to share anything about this? No, I don’t think I will.
