Resurrecting My Dead Campaign ...

Resurrecting my dead campaign, a ritual with a steep cost in gemstones!

Sometimes, ya gotta do a little necromancy.

I began this humble newsletter in January 2022, on the same day I launched a play-through of Pathfinder’s Quest for the Frozen Flame adventure path. Congregating with four friends in the digital tavern known as Discord, we played the game by posting our in-character actions and dialogue in a shared chat thread (as the GM, I handled all non-player characters as well as the world-building), and by rolling digital dice when the action got hot.

And hoo boy did we come out blazing: immersing ourselves in the primordial winterland setting known as the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, we cranked through the entire first chapter of the ten-chapter adventure in something like 12 days.

I think my Apple Screen Time report for that two-week period of iPhone usage was just the :grimacing: emoji.

On the topic of cringe, please earn yourself a Hero Point by nudging that heart button up top. I have no idea what it accomplishes, but I’m desperate for it.

The campaign continued to hum along at a brisk daily posting pace for a solid 16 months, during which we developed our own rich story. Propelled by deep and interesting PCs, we burned through the next five chapters.

Then, deep into Book 2 — at a point where I was projecting we might be able to conclude our adventure by Thanksgiving — things slowed to a crawl.

I began this newsletter as a rumination on Pathfinder, but in the past year my engagement with the hobby has changed. And so has the writing I do in this space. In some ways, the past year of Ambush Tactics has become a personal, vaguely-Pathfinder-tinged meditation on burnout, failure, and motivation.

They say that three of the most challenging life events any person can face in the modern world are: changing jobs, moving house, and having a baby. I’m currently at some stage or another of all three transitions. Thus, the time and energy I’m able to devote to Pathfinder has logically waned.

It didn’t help that I got really into chess around the time my Pathfinder mojo waned. But that’s another story for another day.

So the slowdown in my primary Discord campaign was entirely on me, the GM. I started taking long breaks between updating the story. I was trying to disentangle myself from screen usage, so I spent less time paying attention to notifications in Discord.

And at first the players were patient with me, letting me know that they understood the pauses and were waiting and ready to go whenever I got back in the groove. But as the months of trickle-trickle-game-play passed, they naturally and fairly began to tune out as well.

In the final hours of 2023, I updated the table: I didn’t feel I had it in me to take us all the way to the end of the AP. But I wanted to complete the current chapter, and then devise an “outside-the-grind way to bring our pbp story to a satisfying conclusion.”

They were all with me. And naturally, once January hit, my New Year’s resolution to hit the Pathfinder weights at my local gym proceeded to slowly run out of steam.

At the start of this month, I decided to make a final effort to honor my players and the story they’d crafted over that first 16-month surge of creativity: “Let's give this one more shot for old time's sake.”

Face it, gamers: sometimes campaigns die, just like the characters we create and inhabit and roll dice for. It can either happen through neglect or a string of poor luck or a single bad decision.

But here’s a cool thing about tabletop roleplaying games: mechanics exist by which to revive dead characters!

Inspired by the Resurrect ritual, my party — which, ironically, spent the past year paused in a climactic siege against a village of evil necromancers — is giving this thing one last shot. One final attempt to zap our dead campaign back to life.

We did a little dimension-door-by-montage and skipped ahead to the final boss fight of Book 2 — a clash with the thieves of the PCs’ ancestral relic — which had been within sight for the better part of a year.

And yes: the combat is happening. The players’ dice have been surprisingly hot. I’ve really enjoyed digging back into the minutiae of the rules by which this wonderful game is governed. All seems right with the world again.

It’s nothing like the magic of that furious burst with which our Quest for the Frozen Flame campaign set forth — and I could say the same for this newsletter, which launched on the exact same day.

But we’re keeping that frozen flame burning. Sometimes, that’s the best you can do.

• THE MINI AND THE DICE

Speaking of campaigns that ran out of steam, that handsome half-orc monk with the chipping paint is nearly a decade old (I unearthed him from the bottom of my old GM bag): Gulabash was my friend Toufeeq’s character when we played the PF1 adventure Shattered Star.

Run by Das, who took over the mastering duties from our OG GM Jason after the latter’s first kid arrived, this was our group’s first experience with an unfinished campaign — from the period where Das moved across the bridge to Oakland and babies started to overturn our lives. Still, it was a memorable romp, and when it began to fizzle during the middle of Book 3 as our party ventured into the caverns beneath Kaer Maga, I eventually took over the GM seat for our next campaign. The rest, as they say, is history.

As for those grey-on-mottled-grey dice: they’re some kind of Chessex set harvested from my dice bag, and I’d argue that these are the least readable dice in my entire collection. Especially in dim light, but how often could we nerds possibly gather to engage in our odd hobby after the sun has set for the day? Please don’t answer that question.

• SCREENSHOT PRESENTED WITHOUT CONTEXT

That’s it for this month’s edition, my undead minions. And so, as I say at the end of every Pathfinder module I run: this has been Ambush Tactics. I’ve been your Game Master. I hope you had a fun time. 

Adventure!