Every once in a while our gaming group has what we’ve been calling a ‘Nexus’ campaign. In essence, an excuse to revisit old characters and inject some nostalgia and fun callbacks into our games. I like these games because they provide a good release valve for the desire to recall old characters and old events; we have a lot of callbacks in all of our games, and outside of our yearly Beach Weekends where reminiscing is an important part of the experience, I find callbacks and cameos in an otherwise unrelated game to be a bit annoying. With that in mind, it’s perhaps odd that it ended up being me who’s now running our most recent Nexus game: our current DIE campaign is taking place on a version of the setting made up of the settings of a number of our old campaigns.

Our gaming style is one of many relatively short campaigns; for a long time 6-9 month campaigns were the norm and over the past few years we’ve expanded that timeline a bit to 1-2 years. Still, when you consider that we’ve been playing together for over 20 years, that’s a large number of games and a lot of games where we end things and say goodbye to those characters. I personally enjoy being able to have endings; I don’t think many of our stories would stay compelling over years and years of play. At the same time, there’s something to be said about continuity. Figuring out how to continue providing more depth without being trapped in a single storyline is tricky, but as we’ve been playing together as long as we have, it’s something that I want to figure out.

A ‘Nexus’ game isn’t a solution to continuity. As much as I’ve had a lot of fun putting the world together and peppering it with throwbacks, this DIE campaign isn’t going to last any longer or create any more continuity than any other game we play. What it does do, though, is take advantage of our group’s continuity, the fact that we’ve had a pretty consistent cast of characters in the real world. This even shows through in the writing; I revealed last session that the real-world players may show up in the game in one form or another, and there’s been continued hints that characters can recognize when they have the same ‘player’ as another character. It’s my version of what I think DIE does fairly well in either long or short form: holding a mirror up to the players, and showing them more than they thought they let on.

I do plan on letting this end, though. These characters, like many others, will enter into the annals of our group’s history, likely to be the source of more stories shared at Beach Weekends and other spare moments between games. While more meta and opening up our existing history, it’s going to be the back end of a campaign that’s likely to last somewhere around a year and a half, maybe longer. When I sit in the GM’s chair again, what am I going to do to offer something more resembling continuity? What is the right balance between keeping everyone’s interest and leaving space to go deeper?

I’ve fantasized about big campaigns, about long campaigns. The problem I run into again and again is that, whether I’m a GM or a player, there’s only so long I want to go before I’m looking for something else. Now, if that’s happening in the first half-dozen sessions (especially if the game’s going well), that’s more wandering eyes and I kind of need to just deal with it. If it’s been a year or so, though, and my enthusiasm is waning, there’s something to be said about the campaign being ended around that point being the best outcome. And fact is, stories have a length, they can’t be stretched out forever and still have the same quality. So if I’m thinking honestly about how to keep more continuity in our gaming, it ends up being about the setting. But  more than setting, it ends up asking the same question that a ‘Nexus’ campaign arguably answers: How can we step back and see who our characters were, and what they did?

One thing that we’ve built up over twenty years of playing is a mythology, a set of stories about characters past that inform how we look at characters we play now. Every time we play a ‘Nexus’ campaign, we get to make that mythology into stories we play through. The idea of mythology may be one that I can make use of for introducing more continuity. There’s a few ingredients to this. First off is making a setting that’s diverse enough and interesting enough to keep coming back to. Second is doing just that, playing multiple games in the same setting and letting the setting evolve in play just as much as the characters do. To be honest, we have done that in the past, but it’s always run into a problem. We’ve played a lot in Cyberpunk and we even had a Cyberpunk-specific Nexus campaign back in 2012. Thematically, though, Cyberpunk is in a difficult spot for this. Characters are meant to get chewed up and spit out, and the corps are always bigger than people. We’ve also played numerous Star Wars campaigns, but there the room for making big, influential characters always seems bounded by the canon. Setting familiarity needs to be earned, it seems, because playing in someone else’s setting always seems to mean deference to the stories which already exist.

Thinking about it, my desire for continuity and a bigger, more involved setting is missing a middle step. We know how to make good settings for games and characters we enjoy. We also know how to look back on our former characters and mythologize them. The middle step is creating a setting which makes players want to return to it, even if doing so requires a different character and a different story. This is of course a bit harder. It means considering scale very carefully; small places are the ones that feel more real, more human, and that players think about. Big places, be that whole continents or planets or even solar systems, are where there’s more opportunity for more stories. But you need both…you need to provide a sense of place while at the same time presenting a world worth exploring beyond the horizon.

When we play ‘Nexus’ games, we’re celebrating the history we created that sits in between fact and fiction, the world that’s only internally consistent because it’s us, sitting down and playing games together. I think there is more room to get that feeling within a single setting, one where all the players feel they have ownership and agency. DIE works as a game to celebrate stories, to set them against each other and see how they all answered the same questions. What makes me care about these places? What makes me care about these people? I feel like seeing how those questions are answered is going to end up being the key to helping me write a setting that encourages the whole group to go deeper and to want to spend more time there. I have a lot of thinking to do as I go into my next spate of worldbuilding, but I do think that, even if I don’t know what to do quite yet, I’m asking the right questions.