Retrospective: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game

Between early exposure to televised coverage of NASA launches and constant reruns of Star Trek, it was almost inevitable that I would become a science fiction fan. It helped, too, that my father’s only sister, who was barely twenty years my senior, shared that passion and actively encouraged my fascination with all things related to space travel, robots, and laser guns. So, when George Lucas’s space opera Star Wars premiered in the late spring of 1977, my aunt and I wasted no time in seeing it. Like countless other children of my generation, the experience marked a turning point in the development of my imagination.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Star Wars dominated the mental landscape of my childhood from 1977 to 1979, a reign challenged only by my discovery of Dungeons & Dragons and, through it, the wider world of roleplaying games. Even so, my enthusiasm for Star Wars didn’t vanish. I vividly remember the thrill I felt at the first rumors of "Star Wars II" (the film’s actual title wouldn’t be revealed until late 1979, as I recall). While D&D redirected some of my imaginative energy, it never fully replaced my love for Lucas’s galaxy. That said, there’s no denying that the fervor of my early affection dimmed somewhat in the face of newer, competing obsessions.

By the mid-1980s, that dimming had become a common experience. Star Wars itself seemed to be fading into the past. In 1987, the franchise appeared adrift. Four years had passed since Return of the Jedi had concluded the original trilogy and no new movies were on the horizon. For many fans, the galaxy far, far away was becoming a relic of childhood. The Kenner toy line was winding down, Marvel’s comic book series had ended, and while fan interest endured, it was increasingly nostalgic in character. There were occasional whispers of more to come, but nothing concrete. To be a Star Wars fan in the late ’80s was to dwell in the long shadow of what had been, clinging to worn VHS tapes, dog-eared storybooks, and well-loved action figures.

Meanwhile, the tabletop roleplaying game hobby was entering a new phase. TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons still loomed large, but the landscape was shifting. A host of new games had appeared, offering players fresh ways to explore favorite genres. Yet the RPG industry had not yet figured out how to handle licensed properties particularly well. With a few notable exceptions, like Star Trek or Marvel Super Heroes, most licensed RPGs of the era felt to me like clumsy grafts, existing more as marketing tie-ins than true adaptations. Then, in 1987, West End Games released Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan.

What West End delivered was more than just a faithful adaptation of a beloved movie trilogy: it was a revelatory act of worldbuilding. The game employed a streamlined D6 system, originally developed for Ghostbusters, that emphasized speed, flexibility, and cinematic flair over rules complexity. It was a system that matched the tone and pacing of Star Wars perfectly. Characters weren’t defined by a tangle of subsystems but by evocative archetypes: the Brash Pilot, the Young Senatorial, the Quixotic Jedi. Combat was fast and improvisational, encouraging swashbuckling heroics rather than tactical micromanagement. It felt, in a word, right.

But the real genius of the Star Wars RPG wasn’t its rules; it was its tone and presentation. The game didn’t merely borrow the setting of Star Wars; it inhabited it. The rulebook and its indispensable companion, The Star Wars Sourcebook, were filled with film stills, in-universe schematics, detailed planetary entries, and short snippets of fiction. These books didn’t feel like products about the galaxy far, far away; they felt like artifacts from within it. For fans starved for new material, the RPG was a lifeline, offering a way not just to revisit Star Wars, but almost to live in it.

It’s hard to overstate the influence these books would go on to have. Much of what we now take for granted about the Star Wars universe, like species names, background details about the Empire and the Rebellion, classifications of ships and vehicles, and descriptions of distant planets, originated not in the films, but in the pages of these RPG books. Lucasfilm itself came to rely on West End’s material. When Timothy Zahn was hired to write Heir to the Empire in 1991, he was handed a stack of WEG books to use as reference. In many ways, West End Games defined the Star Wars expanded universe before it officially existed.

Within the RPG hobby, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was also a harbinger of things to come. Unlike many earlier games, it emphasized genre emulation and collaborative adventure over simulationist detail. Its influence can be seen in the rise of narrative-focused design philosophies that would emerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It welcomed new players with familiar characters and easy-to-grasp mechanics, helping to expand the hobby beyond its traditional fantasy roots and making it more accessible to newcomers.

As I mentioned earlier, there were other successful licensed RPGs during this period, each with its own merits. But, in my opinion, none matched the totality of West End’s vision. The Star Wars RPG wasn’t just a game; it was a doorway into a living, breathing world, one that players could explore, shape, and make their own. Today, with Star Wars a global media brand, it’s worth remembering the quiet, crucial role this game played. It expanded the setting beyond what we saw on screen. It kept the flame alive during a fallow period. And it reminded us all that, with a few friends, a handful of dice, and the right kind of scenario, we too could journey to that galaxy far, far away.

"Babylon is falling ... and it's falling fast."

An excerpt from a sermon preached by Elijah Traynor at the Displaced Civilians Assistance Zone (DCAZ) outside Fort Lee, Virginia on December 6, 2000:

They call it "order," what them boys in the base are building. Steel walls, crisp uniforms, rifles at the ready, but it ain’t order they’re offering. It’s fear dressed up like law – a scarecrow stitched from scraps of the old world, strung up on bayonets, and fed with lies.

I’ve seen their kind before. Men who think a badge and a mandate makes them righteous. Men who'd sooner shoot than stoop. Tell me, what Gospel do they preach at Fort Lee? The Book of Logistics? The Gospel of Supply Chain Management? You can’t heal the soul with MREs and marching orders.

They burned Richmond to save it. That’s what they said, right? Rooted out the rot. But I ask you: who sowed the seed of that rot? It wasn’t just the ones who put on the New America flag. No, it was the whole rotten orchard – the lobbyists, the generals, the technocrats, and every last priest of Progress who bowed to Mammon and called it "freedom."

I ain’t blind. I know what New America is. A wolf dressed like a shepherd – all fire and thunder, no grace. Only folks who’ve never cracked open a Bible could mistake that kind of bloodlust for righteousness.

Babylon is falling, brothers and sisters, and it's falling fast.

Some of these folks here, they’ve put their hope in the men behind those walls. Others, well, they whisper different names. But me? I don’t put my hope in men. I’ve read the Book. I know what comes next.

Don’t trust too easily, brothers and sisters. The Beast don’t always wear horns.

"Trespassers! This is my home."

For all my current misgivings about the 1983 AD&D module, Ravenloft, I don't actually dislike it and indeed have many fond memories associated with it. I was reminded of this when I saw this ad from issue #78 of Dragon (October 1983). Whatever you think about Ravenloft and its influence over the subsequent history of D&D, there's no denying that this is an effective advertisement. It piqued my interest when I first saw it and, even now, decades later, it grabs my attention. 

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "And now, the Psionicist"

Psionics in AD&D is a strangely contentious topic and not just because the rules presented for it in the Players Handbook leave a lot to be desired. For many gamers, psionics belong to the realm of science fiction and are thus inappropriate to a fantasy game like Dungeons & Dragons. I can understand that point of view, but it's not one I share, since D&D is a "fantasy" game in the broadest sense, which is why it can readily incorporate "science fiction" elements without difficulty. That said, I never used psionics much back in my AD&D days nor have I attempted to add it to my Dwimmermount campaign. The reason for this has nothing to do with maintaining the "purity" of my fantasy worlds so much as the fact that, as written, the rules for psionics are a mess.

This unsuitability of the psionics rules was widely acknowledged by nearly every gamer I knew back in the day. Consequently, many of us greeted issue #78 of Dragon (October 1983) with some pleasure, as it was largely devoted to psionics and its problems. Of the articles in that issue my hands-down favorite was "And now, the psionicist" by Arthur Collins. Collins was one of those authors, like Roger E. Moore and Ed Greenwood, whose stuff was always good. He wasn't as prolific as Moore or Greenwood, but he never failed to impress me. Indeed, if I were to be completely honest, I think Arthur Collins was my favorite old school Dragon writer and "And now, the psionicist" reveals part of why I think so.

The article takes the then-bold step of introducing a new character class -- the psionicist of the title -- as a way to make the psionics rules both workable and enjoyable. More than that, though, Collins also does something even more remarkable: he makes the AD&D psionics rules intelligible. He does this through his explanation of the psionicist's class abilities, such as its acquisition of attack and defense modes and psionic disciplines. It's a small thing, really, but it had a profound effect on me as a younger person. For the first time, I began to feel as if I understood how psionics was supposed to work. Likewise, the notion of making psionics the purview of a unique class rather than an add-on to existing classes was a revelation to me. It made so much sense that I couldn't believe no one had thought of it before. (Someone had, of course -- Steve Marsh -- but their version of psionics never made it into OD&D as written).

"And now, the psionicist" is fairly typical of Collins's work. Rather than wholly rewrite AD&D, he instead clarifies and expands upon the rules as written, in the process making the original rules both understandable and stronger. It's a talent all the best Dragon writers had in those days, but Collins, in my opinion, made it into a high art. Moreso than any other writer, he showed me that, strangely organized and presented as it was, AD&D's rules weren't wholly arbitrary; indeed, they often made sense if you actually took the time to look at them objectively and think about the logic behind them. The proper attitude when encountering a rule that seems "broken" is to step back and consider it carefully before deciding to excise it from the game. That's an attitude that has stuck with me after all these years and one I continue to recommend to others.

Traveller Distinctives: The Patron

One of the fascinating aspects of early RPGs is how they slowly formalized the logic of play. Dungeons & Dragons may have established the basic parameters of what a roleplaying game was, but it often left many questions unanswered. Why do the characters delve into dungeons? Who sends them? The answers were left to the referee. The occasional NPC might offer a mission or contract, but these were incidental, tools of the moment rather than a foundation of play.

Traveller, meanwhile, took a different approach. While it certainly didn’t invent the concept of the patron – an NPC who hires the characters to perform a job – it brought that arrangement front and center. Patrons weren’t just another option; they were core to how the game was expected to be played. The “Patrons” section of Book 3: Worlds and Adventures includes a table of potential patrons designed precisely to facilitate adventure hooks through employment. The Traveller Book is even more explicit in its discussion of patrons:

The key to adventures in Traveller is the patron. When a band of adventurers meets an appropriate patron, they have a person who can give them direction in their activities, and who can reward them for success. The patron is the single most important non-player character possible.

I don't think the game could be clearer. Patrons aren't just a suggestion; their appearance in a campaign is a procedural expectation. Traveller assumes that characters, once generated and set loose in the universe, will look for patrons in starports, bars, or back alleys, seeking work. The encounter charts in the rules were tools to support this play style, providing both inspiration and structure.

The 1980 supplement 76 Patrons reinforces the centrality of the patron. Rather than present long-form adventures as Traveller had done elsewhere, it offers 76 short patron encounters for the referee to slot into his own campaign. Each comes with 2–6 possibilities, ranging from the mundane to the sinister.

The group is contacted by a newly married couple, who decline to give their names, but have reason to believe that their respective parents are not pleased with their union. They will pay Cr3000 to each member of a group who will escort them safely to a planet beyond their parents' sphere of influence.

Are the newlyweds telling the truth? Why do their parents disapprove? What happens when the characters decide to help them? The beauty of the format 76 Patrons introduces is its open-endedness. A patron encounter is not a fully fleshed-out scenario but rather a situation, a prompt that acts as a springboard for play, driven by player choice and referee improvisation. It’s a wonderful model that encourages episodic, player-directed campaigns, compatible with a wide range of activities: bodyguard duty, espionage, smuggling, salvage, courier missions, outright crime – you name it.

What’s more, this system makes sense within the larger science fictional context depicted in Traveller. The player characters are often former military personnel, merchants, or scouts, recently discharged from service with a pension, a few skills, and perhaps a ship with a mortgage. They’re not heroes out to save the world, but freelancers trying to keep the lights on. This framework gives Traveller a tone distinct from that of D&D. It's less about fighting adversaries in dangerous locales and more about negotiating contracts, weighing risks, and navigating a morally gray universe. The use of patrons supports a looser, sandbox-style approach to campaign structure, encouraging referees to present opportunities for players to involve their characters in a wide variety of interstellar hijinks.

Today, it's easy to recognize the importance of patrons in Traveller, because the idea of an NPC giving out jobs seems commonplace. But in 1977, just three years after the release of OD&D, few games emphasized this as a default mode of play. Traveller systematized the role of the patron and, in doing so, offered another way to structure an adventure, one rooted in negotiation, opportunity, and choice rather than exploration alone. That quiet shift in procedure helped lay the groundwork for decades of mission-based, open-ended roleplaying. I don't think it's any coincidence that, having played Traveller for so long, my default campaign frame includes lots of patrons to present opportunities to the player characters. The House of Worms campaign, for example, makes heavy use of patrons to this day. In my experience, it's a robust and flexible foundation that fosters engagement, supports improvisation, and sustains long-term play across almost any genre.

The Long Game (Part III)

In Parts I and II of this series, I laid out some of the principles and practices that have helped me successfully referee several long-running RPG campaigns. In my experience, flexibility, treating the game world as a living place, and investing in player choices all pay huge dividends. I also touched on my weekly routine: very light prep, frequent reuse of old material, tracking what matters, and finding ways to maintain player engagement between sessions. All of this is system-agnostic and, to some extent, it can be applied to any roleplaying game with the right mindset. However, I’ve found that certain games make this style of play easier. They either assume it from the start or provide rules and mechanics that reinforce the kind of open-ended, collaborative worldbuilding that long campaigns thrive on.

So, to conclude this part of the series – there are a few more related posts coming next week – I want to recommend a handful of RPGs I’ve played that I think are particularly well-suited to supporting enduring, player-driven campaigns.

Dungeons & Dragons

The TSR editions of Dungeons & Dragons, especially AD&D, are built on assumptions that naturally support long-term campaign play. They treat the referee as the final authority, assume player freedom of action, and offer no built-in plot or “story.” Advancement after the first few levels is slow, exploration is richly rewarded, and the game world exists beyond the player characters. These games provide excellent frameworks for the kind of emergent, faction-rich, consequence-driven campaigns that I’ve found work well over the long haul. Though I haven’t played AD&D in years, I still think it has just the right mix of elements to encourage sustained, imaginative play, especially if the referee is comfortable using his own judgment.

D&D Derivatives

While it probably goes without saying, I nevertheless want to be explicit: most RPGs that share a lot of rules or mechanical DNA with early Dungeons & Dragons are likely well-suited to long campaigns. I’m talking about games like Gamma World or Empire of the Petal Throne (obviously), as well as the many retro-clones of D&D. Particularly worth mentioning are Kevin Crawford’s Stars Without Number and related games. These not only preserve the simplicity of older systems but also explicitly support long-form sandbox play with tools for faction management, procedural content, and worldbuilding. In fact, I’d say many of the principles and practices I discussed in the earlier parts of this series really crystallized for me after I first read Stars Without Number all those years ago.

Traveller

The default playstyle of Traveller revolves around sandbox exploration, commerce, patronage, and factional intrigue, all of which are ideal ingredients for long-term campaigns. The original 1977 rules support the growth and development of an enduring campaign through a robust set of procedural tools: world and sector generation, reaction rolls, random encounters, and more. Traveller encourages players to make their own way in the universe, taking risks, building reputations, and developing relationships with factions and NPCs. Since I’ve been playing and thinking about Traveller for decades, I don’t think there’s any doubt it’s had an outsized influence on how I referee RPGs in general. Its assumptions and tools are deeply compatible with the kind of campaign play I find most rewarding.

Pendragon

For something more structured but still open-ended, Pendragon absolutely deserves mention. It’s built around generational play, where sessions span years of in-game time and characters age, retire, or die –only to be replaced by their sons. It assumes from the outset that the campaign will unfold over decades, filled with consequences and a world in motion. Unlike D&D, Pendragon places strong emphasis on character development in moral and psychological terms, not just skills and abilities. Players must contend with passions, virtues, family legacy, and political entanglements. For referees willing to embrace its tone and rhythms, it’s uniquely rewarding, which is why I consider it one of the best roleplaying games ever written.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. The games above are simply those I’ve used successfully in multi-year campaigns, but I’m sure many others could work just as well, especially if the referee and players commit to a shared style of play. In the end, I’d probably argue the “best” system for a long campaign is the one your group enjoys returning to week after week. If your players care about the world and the game gives you the tools to keep that world alive and responsive, then you’ve already got the makings of something lasting.

The Shape of Things to Come

The Long Game (Part II)

In Part I, I outlined a few broad principles that have helped me successfully referee long-running campaigns. Now, I want to offer some more concrete examples of how I prepare and run these games, specifically what I actually do week to week to keep the campaign moving forward. As I said before, I’m not suggesting that my way is the only or even the best way. It’s simply what has worked for me across multiple campaigns that have lasted several years or more.

Start Loose

When launching a new campaign, I try not to overprepare. I begin with a broad concept or locale, often something quite minimal, like a regional map, a few factions, or even just a handful of evocative ideas. I don’t want to box myself in too early or create the illusion that the campaign has a “plot.” Instead, I focus on a starting situation with open-ended possibilities.

For example, when I began the House of Worms campaign, I gave the players a simple premise: they were junior clan members on an assignment from their elders in the bustling city of Sokátis. That was it. From there, we started to explore Tékumel together and nearly everything in the campaign developed organically from that starting point. Those early sessions were a kind of calibration, helping me learn where the players’ interests lay, what kinds of challenges engaged them, and in what directions they wanted to go.

So, early on in any campaign, I focus less on outcomes and more on possibilities: rumors, locations, hooks, and the movements of important NPCs. I try to offer meaningful choices from the beginning and avoid pushing the players in any particular direction. That’s why I usually use the word referee rather than game master. I see my role as that of a neutral adjudicator of player decisions, not the director of a pre-planned story.

Prep a World, Not a Plot

This is foundational to what distinguishes old school RPG play from many of its later descendants. I don’t write scripts. I don’t plan story arcs. What I do is keep track of the world and what’s going on within it. I try to treat it like a living place, where NPCs and factions pursue their goals regardless of what the player characters do. That means I maintain a brief set of notes on major players and what they’re up to behind the scenes. When the PCs intervene, those plans might change. When they don’t, the plans proceed. Over time, this creates the impression of a responsive, persistent world. It also generates future material automatically. When the characters return to a location months later, they’ll find that things have changed. I don’t need to know “what happens next.” I just need to know what’s already in motion.

Reuse and Recycle

I rarely throw anything away. Abandoned adventure seeds, unused NPCs, discarded locations all go back into the toolbox. Long campaigns are full of unexpected turns and something irrelevant in session 10 might acquire sudden significance in session 85. Players, I’ve found, are especially good at reviving old material. They remember a strange artifact or an NPC they met in passing and decide they want to follow up. When that happens, I run with it. I can pull out my notes, rework them a bit, and reintroduce the material with minimal effort. I also try to repurpose my prep across sessions. I might reuse the same map with slight modifications, though I’ll admit, it hasn’t always gone unnoticed. A defeated adversary might return with new motivations and goals. I treat the campaign like a compost heap: nothing is wasted, everything breaks down, and over time it becomes fertile soil for something new.

Track What Matters

If you were to look at the piles of paper on my desk and shelves, you’d see that my campaign notes are messy. (Yes, I still use paper; I’m old.) But they serve their purpose. I focus only on the most important details, such as what happened recently, what major NPCs are doing, and what potential developments are still active. I’m not writing a novel, so I don’t need exhaustive recaps. What I need are reminders: what changed last session, what threads the players are following, and what might happen next if nothing interferes. After each session, I spend a few minutes updating these notes. Just ten minutes of scribbling down events and adjusting NPC status can go a long way toward keeping the world coherent and responsive. I also maintain a running list of future developments. These aren’t predictions; they're more like a menu of possibilities. This keeps me flexible while still being (somewhat) prepared.

Encourage Player Investment

This is a big part of how I’ve kept campaigns going: I reward player initiative with more material. If a player takes an interest in an NPC, I flesh that character out. If they pursue a particular goal or locale, I give them opportunities to do so. In this way, the players shape a lot of the campaign’s direction and even parts of the setting. I see my job as referee as more about expanding and refining what they care about rather than inventing new material from scratch. This approach keeps players engaged and takes a lot of the creative burden off me. When a campaign hits its stride, it feels more like a collaboration than a performance. Everyone is invested. Everyone is contributing.

Keep the Flame Lit

Finally, I try to keep the fire burning between sessions, if only a little. For all of my current campaigns, I have a dedicated Discord server. I post information, rumors, and questions for the players to consider between sessions. I follow up on unresolved plans. I drop hints about future developments. These aren’t elaborate, just enough to keep the campaign present in the players’ minds. A long campaign is like a slow-burning fire. You don’t need to stoke it constantly, but it needs a steady trickle of oxygen to keep going. This between-session activity also helps me gauge interest. If players respond eagerly to something I post, I know I’ve struck a chord. If not, I pivot and try something else.

In the End

By now, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t do a lot of prep in the traditional sense. Instead, I’ve tried to adopt and maintain a few good habits: stay flexible; let the world breathe; notice what the players care about; don’t panic when things go off the rails. And above all, show up and keep the game moving. Even a short session is better than none. Over time, those small sessions build into something enduring and deeply rewarding. So, these are my “secrets” to refereeing a long-running RPG campaign. They’re not revolutionary: persistence, openness, and a willingness to let the campaign grow on its own terms. If you can manage that, you may find, as I have, that years later you’re still playing, still surprised, and still eager to see what happens next.

(There will be at least one part to this series, because, in the process of writing it, I had some additional thoughts people might find valuable.)

The Long Game (Part I)

Earlier this week, a reader asked me:

Can you do a post where you outline your process for prepping and running these long-running campaigns? You must be doing something right, as you've run several.

It’s a good question and one I’ve touched on before in several posts over the years. Rather than linking to them all, I thought it might be worthwhile to distill some of my thoughts and experiences into a few broad maxims. These aren’t exhaustive or definitive, but they reflect the principles that have helped me referee campaigns that last not just months, but years. In a follow-up post, I’ll go into more specific detail about my preparation habits and practices (if you can call them that).

Whenever I reflect on what made a campaign successful, I keep returning to the same handful of guiding principles. They’re not glamorous or novel, but they’ve proven their worth time and again. Of course, they’re just that, principles, not rules. I’ve “violated” all of them at one time or another, often during the course of my most successful campaigns. That’s inevitable. Each campaign is a unique thing with its own temperament and trajectory. There’s no foolproof formula for success, however one chooses to define that elusive term, but these are the things I’ve found most helpful over the years.

Play with Friends

This is the cornerstone. Roleplaying is, at its heart, a social activity. It thrives on camaraderie, trust, and a shared sense of commitment to the game. You don’t need to begin a campaign with a table full of close friends – some of my longest-lasting campaigns began with strangers – but what matters is that friendships develop over time. When the people at the table (real or virtual) genuinely enjoy one another’s company, everything else becomes easier. Disagreements, when they arise at all, are easier to resolve. Player engagement rises. The game becomes something people look forward to because they want to spend time together. Without that level of friendly intimacy, I suspect it’s much harder to keep a campaign going in the long term. Roleplaying depends on a degree of vulnerability, imagination, and trust that is best nurtured among people who like and respect one another.

Stay Consistent

Consistency builds momentum. Especially in the early weeks of a campaign, nothing matters more than regular, dependable play. Weekly sessions, even imperfect ones, create a rhythm that reinforces the campaign’s presence in everyone’s lives. It becomes a shared ritual, something to anticipate and plan around. Of course, real life has a habit of interfering. People get sick, travel, or have other commitments. That’s normal. But a campaign with strong momentum can absorb these disruptions without falling apart. That’s why I’ve always aimed for a weekly schedule. Anything less frequent makes it harder for a campaign to take root and find its footing. In my experience, campaigns that start with a fortnightly or monthly schedule rarely last.

Accept the Lulls

Not every session will be exciting. Some will be slow, distracted, or even dull. That’s part of the process. In a long-running campaign, those lulls are often just as important as the thrilling moments. They give contrast to the high points and contribute to the texture of the shared experience. They also cultivate a kind of patience and persistence, which are crucial to the long game. If you can accept that not every session will be a triumph, you’ll find that the campaign as a whole becomes something much greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, the dull sessions are often forgotten entirely as the months and years go by. What remains instead are the high-water marks, those moments of triumph, disaster, or revelation that become the stuff of legend.

Be Flexible

No campaign plan survives contact with the players. Over time, they will zig when you expected them to zag, and the campaign will evolve in directions you never imagined. I don't resist this, but embrace it. Some elements will fizzle. Others will flourish unexpectedly. That’s all to the good. A long campaign is less like a novel and more like a sprawling oral history – messy, inconsistent, filled with odd detours and loose threads. It doesn’t need to be dramatically coherent or tightly plotted. In fact, I'd argue that concerns for such things are the road to campaign perdition. What a campaign needs is forward motion and a willingness to follow the players’ lead when they seize on something unexpected. This also means being comfortable with unresolved threads. Not every mystery will be solved. Not every adventure seed will bear fruit. That’s fine. 

Don’t Cling

A good referee is, or should strive to be, an idea factory. Hooks, schemes, adversaries, rumors, location should flow constantly. But don’t get too attached to any of them. Players won’t bite on everything you throw at them and if you cling too tightly to a particular idea, you risk turning the game into a soliloquy rather than a conversation. Let ideas go. Toss them out like seeds. Some will take root; others won’t. So be it. There’s always more where they came from. I’ve left entire adventures, factions, and NPCs on the cutting room floor simply because the players weren’t interested. I didn’t try to force them. Instead, I focused on what did spark their interest and let that guide the course of play. And sometimes, those discarded ideas can be recycled later in a new form. Players might not bite the first time, but a variation on the same concept might work wonders down the line. The important thing is not to become precious about your ideas. In a long campaign, flexibility and responsiveness matter far more than cleverness.

As I said above, these aren’t really rules and they’re certainly not the only factors that contribute to a successful campaign, but they regularly work for me. I share them here in the hope that they might help others find the same joy in long-term play that I have.

There’s a unique kind of magic in watching a campaign world  and the characters who explore it – evolve over the course of years. It’s a slow magic, but all the more rewarding for it. When a campaign lives long enough to gather history and memory, to surprise even the referee with its twists and turns, it becomes something truly special: a shared story that belongs to everyone at the table and could never have existed without them.

That, I think, is the real reward of the long game.

Retrospective: Ars Magica

The period leading up to the release of the Second Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is an interesting one. Though TSR’s flagship remained the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla of the hobby – still popular and selling well – the larger landscape of roleplaying was beginning to shift. Starting in the mid-1980s and continuing into the early ’90s, a number of new and, dare I say, experimental RPGs began to appear. Many of these games deviated sharply in both design and intended playstyle from the template laid down by D&D in 1974.

Of these, the one that immediately stands out in my memory is Ars Magica, released in 1987 by Lion Rampant, a small outfit co-founded by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein-Hagen, two designers who would later leave a lasting mark on the hobby. Even though the original edition was a modest affair, as one might expect from a fledgling company in the days before desktop publishing and professional layout, Ars Magica was an impressive work of imagination and clarity of purpose. What it lacked in visual polish, it made up for with a bold vision of what a roleplaying game could be: a tightly focused setting, a flexible and evocative magic system, and a novel approach to campaign structure that encouraged long-term play and shared refereeing responsibilities.

Despite all this, Ars Magica didn’t receive widespread recognition at the time, at least not in the gaming circles I moved in. I don’t recall it being especially celebrated, let alone commonly played. My first encounter with it came by chance, through a friend whose cousin lived in Minnesota, where Lion Rampant was based. What struck me most was how different it felt from any RPG I’d seen before. Even then, though, it remained something of a curiosity – admired more for its ideas than embraced at the table. It wasn’t until the third edition’s release in 1992, now under the White Wolf banner, that Ars Magica gained broader visibility. By then, Rein-Hagen had already launched Vampire: The Masquerade and that connection lent the game a cachet it had previously lacked. But the seeds had been planted back in 1987, in that humble, ambitious little book that imagined a different kind of fantasy roleplaying, rooted not in treasure and combat, but in magic and myth.

At its core, Ars Magica is a game about wizards: not the fireball-slinging adventurers of Dungeons & Dragons, but practitioners of a consistent magical tradition grounded in a pseudo-medieval European world. The magic system, based on a combination of techniques (Creo, Intellego, Muto, Perdo, Rego) and forms (Animal, Aquam, Auram, Corpus, Herbam, Ignem, Imaginem, Mentem, Terram, Vim), was unlike anything I’d encountered. It encouraged creativity and system mastery in equal measure, rewarding players who approached spellcasting not as a list of pre-defined effects but as a kind of magical engineering.

That alone would have made Ars Magica noteworthy, but its concept of troupe-style play made it all the more remarkable. Players were encouraged to share the duties of the referee (the “storyguide”) and to control not only a primary character (a magus) but also companion characters and "grogs," which were lower-powered retainers and guards respectively. This structure fostered a sense of shared "ownership" of the campaign that stood in stark contrast to the more referee-centric campaigns I was used to. I hadn’t seen anything like it before and I remember reading Ars Magica for the first time and being struck by how different it seemed to be.

The game’s setting, "Mythic Europe," was equally striking. Rather than creating a wholly fictional world, Tweet and Rein-Hagen placed their game in a version of historical Europe where the content of folklore and legends were real. Monasteries, faeries, noble courts, and demons all existed side by side, filtered through the lens of Hermetic magic. It was a world where the mundane and the magical existed in an uneasy equilibrium and the player characters stood firmly on the side of the uncanny.

As I mentioned earlier, the first edition rulebook really was a humble production: a softcover with a stark black-and-white cover depicting a wizard at his desk. The layout was clean, if plain, and the text dense with ideas. It lacked the polish of later editions or the visual flair that White Wolf would later bring to the game, but it had a seriousness of tone and clarity of vision that made me take notice. Looking back, I think Ars Magica represents one of the more intellectually ambitious RPGs of the pre-1990s era. Its design anticipated many later developments like freeform magic systems, troupe-style "storytelling," and campaigns centered on a fixed locale (the covenant). That the game’s fifth edition, released in 2004, remains in print is, I think, a testament to the enduring strength of its foundational ideas.

For all its virtues, the original edition nevertheless had its rough edges. The rules were sometimes vague or overly ambitious and the troupe model required a level of buy-in and trust that wasn’t always easy to find in groups accustomed to more traditional GM/player dynamics. But these were small complaints in a game that dared to be different and in doing so, helped shape the future of the hobby in subtle but lasting ways. Though I was never a regular player, I was an admirer – and still am. In fact, I’d count Ars Magica among the few roleplaying games to which I’d gladly devote some of my dwindling time. That’s about as high a compliment as I can offer any game.