Intro
We can all picture the platonic ideal of a D&D campaign. One long, interconnected story. PCs who go all the way from level 1 to 20. A big bad that every quest points toward, faced at the very end.
Like any platonic ideal, that is often not how reality ends up looking. And — controversially — perhaps it is not how it should look most of the time either.
The gold-star campaign experience is absolutely worth pursuing at least once in your D&D career. I love long, complex, overarching stories as much as anyone. But there are as many ways to tell a story in D&D as there are players of D&D, and some of those structures might serve your table and your ideas better than the gold standard does.
Maybe your schedule is unreliable. Maybe you do not want to commit to one genre or one tone for two years. Maybe you have a pile of people you want to play with who cannot all be in the same room at the same time, or who are at wildly different skill levels. Maybe you just want to try something new.
So here are five non-traditional structures. Some I have run. Some I desperately want to run. All of them are worth having in your back pocket.
1. The Anthology Campaign
Want to run a campaign but only really have time for the occasional one-shot? Here you go.
An anthology is a series of one-shots connected by a theme or a bigger picture. And it is genuinely great for new and experienced players alike. For new players, it is a chance to pop in for a single night, get a feel for the table, and find out whether they like this whole D&D thing without signing away their Thursdays for the next two years.
It is also far more forgiving of busy lives — in two directions at once.
- Scheduling. You can hold the campaign together with much less frequent play. A month between sessions does not hurt an anthology the way it hurts a long campaign.
- Party composition. It is a new cast of characters every night, so you can bring in a new player or a friend visiting from out of town and let them try something for one session. And a regular who has to miss is easy to accommodate, because you are not plucking their character out of an ongoing story and hoping nobody notices the immersion break.
You can even rotate DMs. Agree on a broad sketch of what the anthology is about, have everyone build a session, and run them whenever you can.
The theme is the container
So what makes this a campaign structure and not just a pile of unrelated one-shots? The theme.
The theme is what gives everything cohesion and purpose. It lets players weave in and out and experience only a couple of sessions if that is all they can manage, while still rewarding the people who show up for all of them with Easter eggs and small interconnections.
For an anthology, you are not really thinking of a story. You are thinking of a container you can put stories in.
- An adventure through the Nine Hells. Nine episodes, a new group in each one.
- Mercenaries in a city. Every week, a new mercenary crew in a new district facing a new threat.
- My most recent anthology was centred on Old Ones. Every night, a brand-new eldritch horror and a brand-new group — new PCs and new players — going to face it down. Levels ranged anywhere from 3 to 13, depending on what that session needed.
Horror belongs here
Horror works exceptionally well in an anthology, and the reason is structural.
Part of the fun of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror is that plot armour is arbitrary. We genuinely do not know who is making it to the next episode, which means we do not know how this episode ends either.
That means you, as the DM of a horror anthology, can feel at liberty to take big swings — to drop your party into nearly impossible situations in a way you would never risk in a long-form campaign where those characters have to survive another eighteen months.
If you go this route, the cult is your best friend: a single sinister organisation is exactly the kind of connective tissue an anthology needs, and I would point you at how to build a cult your players will never forget for the mechanics of making one land in a single night.
And the level flexibility is not a footnote. Running a one-shot at level 13 is a rare licence to build encounters you would never get to build otherwise — which is its own skill, and one worth reading up on before you try it.
So: if your life is too busy for a two-year campaign, or you just want to clear out the cache of ideas you have never been able to use, the anthology might be for you.
2. The Episodic Journey
A campaign that is less focused on a big bad and an overarching plot, and more focused on the conflict of the week and what new trouble we can throw the party into tonight.
Before the old heads come for me: yes, I understand that the looser, more episodic campaign was basically the default structure for decades of D&D. But newer players — myself very much included — could use a reminder of what it is actually good at. This is not just “the way it was done before we thought of big bads like Strahd.” It is a legitimate structure that might serve your table and your story better than the alternative.
Unlike the anthology, you are probably staying with the same PCs in roughly the same setting from night to night. You are just not worrying much about interconnectivity. New adventures, no big bad, no agonising over how we get from one to the next — unless those things sound fun and come up organically.
Your PCs might be guild members who get new assignments. Or a travelling band of mercenaries who roll into a new town each session and help with whatever that town is dealing with.
Less Breaking Bad, more Columbo
That is the whole pitch, really. You start and end a conflict every session — or every few sessions, if you want a longer arc — and you get to test new subgenres, new settings, even new PCs, without breaking anything.
You also get to skip an enormous amount of tedium. Travel. Gold. Inventory. Food. Which NPC you need to sending to for the specific piece of information you picked up twenty-five sessions ago. All the accumulated bookkeeping that quietly strangles long campaigns just… does not accrue.
A lot of that bookkeeping drag is fixable within a long campaign too, if you would rather keep the epic and lose the friction — that is basically the whole of ten things to clean up in your D&D game.
The real advantage is the combination: the variety and simplicity of running one-shots, with the familiarity and emotional weight that comes from spending time with the same characters again and again.
And as stakes rise and levels climb, an episodic campaign can naturally evolve into a more linear one — the way Adventure Time did over its run. That is completely fine, as long as it happens organically and everyone is up for it. Often, spending a long time with characters in a casual setting makes the eventual turn toward a dramatic conclusion land harder, because you have seen these people in their lightest moments as well as their darkest.
That is the same machinery behind the five character evolution moments every campaign needs — the payoff is only heavy because you banked all the ordinary hours first.
On modules
If you want to work off published material, it is worth stating plainly: modules the size of Curse of Strahd or Out of the Abyss are not the only modules that exist.
There is a mountain of material from older editions, and a mountain more homebrew online, sitting in the 10-to-50-page range. Things you could comfortably run over a week or a month and slot straight into a structure like this without worrying about wrecking the broader flow.
The fact that both of these ways of playing have coexisted for so long is genuinely great. Even though one has pulled ahead in popularity over the last decade, the other is still right there, and still very good.
3. The Light Side / Dark Side Campaign
We have all wanted to play villains. And then — at least for me — after a session or two the shine comes off. Once you have scratched the itch of doing anything and everything you want, there is not much left to grab onto. Nothing to root for.
But what if you and your players had a stake in both sides of the story? You control the heroes and the villains, and whenever the two intersect you get the genuinely complicated, genuinely satisfying experience of rooting for everybody at once.
This structure is taken more or less directly from Sonic Adventure 2. Make of that what you will.
Two parties, overlapping. Acting at the same time, occasionally running into each other, chasing the same goals for different reasons. By the end of the campaign they converge on one climactic finale — either facing each other, or united against something worse.
As a kid I thought it was incredible to see the two sides overlap and feel sympathetic to all six characters, because when they finally came into conflict I wanted both of them to win and both of them to lose. I was essentially having The Last of Us Part II experience at six years old, playing Sonic. They did it first. What can I say.
This one is a lot of work
Unlike the first two structures, this is genuinely involved.
Chronology is the main challenge. Two timelines running in parallel, occasionally touching. Get a calendar. Get a world map. Use both.
The second challenge is how the crossover actually works. Are these two separate groups that you are DMing on separate nights? Or is each player running one character on each side, and then having to be both people in the room when the parties collide?
It is overwhelming, and it is a real challenge. But I think it is worth doing, because it creates the one situation where playing villains carries actual emotional weight. They are not free-roaming and doing whatever they want in a consequence-free sandbox. They are directly intersecting with what the heroes do, in a grounded story where their choices cost something.
How I would set it up
I would start with a central location and an object both sides want — a MacGuffin that reliably drags the two groups together and into conflict. Then I would open with the villains, and let the first step of their master plan be the thing that kicks the heroes into action.
Whatever you do, the thrill should come from three places:
- How do these plot lines start intersecting, and what does it look like when they do?
- How do the decisions we make as villains get in our own way as heroes?
- Are there climactic moments where people change sides, or where something devastating happens to both groups and the whole campaign pivots?
Worth noting what the stakes here are not: nobody is motivated by the fate of the cosmos. They are motivated by the other party. That is exactly the argument in why cosmic stakes are not enough, and this structure is about the purest expression of it I can think of.
If you have a lot of people to DM for, or you just want to run something cerebral and a little higher-difficulty than usual, this could be a blast. It is definitely something I would love to do. And if you do it right, you just might blow six-year-old Mark’s mind.
4. The One-Shot Interludes Campaign
This is a combination of the first two. You run a campaign with a real through line, but you split it into concise arcs with interludes in between — one-shots that serve as a prologue of things to come, or a different perspective on something the party is about to walk into.
This idea comes from something Joe did to me years ago, in one of his campaigns.
We were in a mega-dungeon that had been taken over by a lich, and we reached a part of it that let us peer into the past and learn about him and the people he had affected. Instead of monologuing at us, or handing us a document to read, Joe handed us character sheets and said: next week we are running a canonical one-shot. You are playing as these people, and you are going to relive their memory.
So that is what we did. The randomness of the dice and a few of our own decisions changed some details, and at the end of it we came back to our main PCs — and what had just happened was now canon. Part of the past. Part of the same story. And we went forward carrying that knowledge.
This is, I will dare to say it, cool as hell. It has stuck with me ever since.
What you can do with an interlude
- Plan them between arcs as deliberate palate cleansers.
- Keep one in your back pocket for when a player has to miss or scheduling falls apart, so the table keeps engaging with the story from a different angle instead of cancelling.
- Shroud them in mystery and leave your players wondering what on earth this has to do with the arc they are walking into.
- Let them build very high-level characters and have a blast — and then reveal at the end that those characters are now villains, and their real PCs are going to have to fight them.
That last one is a gut-punch, and it works for a specific reason: the players built the thing that is now pointed at them. If you want it to land as a genuine twist rather than a gotcha, there are rules for subverting expectations without robbing your players, and this is exactly the situation they were written for.
It is also a break
This structure gives you room to breathe. Maybe you do not have the next chunk of the long-form campaign figured out. Maybe you do not even know how this one-shot is going to factor in yet. It still buys you a session to zoom out, try something else, throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks.
You can even hand the reins to a player and let them DM the interludes. Collaborate on what the story contains, but give them the power — a level of collaboration well beyond what normally happens in an already very collaborative game. And you get to play for a night, which, if you are a forever-DM, you already know is not nothing.
Have your cake and eat it too: a long-form campaign, plus interludes to test new ideas, mess with party comps and levels, and rotate who is behind the screen. If you want the platonic ideal but need something to break it up and make it less daunting, this is probably your structure.
5. Non-Chronological Flashbacks
This is the weirdest one. Have any of you seen Baccano!?
Okay, so: a bunch of people get on a train. There are something like thirty characters, from different gangs and different countries. There are also about three hundred years of lore from before the train, and seventy or eighty years of lore from after it. We are mostly on the train for the present timeline — but the present timeline is only half the show, because we are constantly cutting to flashbacks and sometimes flash-forwards that fill in how these people ended up on that train in the first place. There is a central plot about gangs fighting over power and territory, and there is also a plot about searching for the elixir of immortality.
It is one of my favourite things I have ever seen, and I want to make a campaign like it.
Yes, this sounds impossible
It sounds like a nightmare. Like a headache doomed to fail. But it is too fun, too lightning-in-a-bottle, too barely contained chaos for me not to want to try it.
Here is how I think you make it survivable.
Decide how players inhabit multiple characters. Either everyone builds several PCs from the offset and starts as one, ready to slot into the others — or everyone builds one, and you establish up front that this is a high-death campaign and it is very likely their PC dies and they slide into the perspective of an NPC who was already part of the ensemble.
Give the madness an anchor. A central location, like the train, that most characters end up in. A central object, like the elixir, that most of them are chasing for their own reasons.
Build a timeline of fixed events. Things the dice are simply not allowed to touch. That gives everyone something solid to hold onto no matter whose perspective they have hopped into or where on the timeline they have landed.
The version I actually want to run
Put a very powerful artifact at the bottom layer of an elaborate mega-tomb. Every character down there knows about it and is pursuing it for their own reasons — but they all have secondary objectives, secondary motives, and complicated relationships with each other, and those things collide more and more as the party descends.
Most sessions happen in the tomb. But we take interludes — maybe even full one-shot interludes, like the last structure — back to things that happened in the past: how these groups got to the tomb, and who they were before they arrived. And eventually we build to a flashback thousands of years back, to when the people currently entombed here were still alive, and we learn what they did — things none of the characters walking in ever knew, and now cannot unlearn.
If anyone ever ran this, I think it would be the hardest campaign they ever ran. You would need a dedicated note-taker. A master calendar. A wiki, genuinely. And a mad-scientist DM willing to stitch a dozen ideas together and see if the thing stands up.
I cannot tell you whether it would work. I really want to believe it could. And if you are tired of standard, by-the-book D&D, this is certainly something different.
Closing Thoughts
There you have it: five campaign structures I have either given a go or want to give a go someday. Things to shake up the normal, year-long, same-PCs, big-epic-adventure format.
A few things worth saying before you run off and restructure everything.
Pick the structure that fits your table, not the one that sounds most impressive. An anthology you actually finish beats a two-year epic that dies at session nine. Most campaigns that get started never get finished, and structure is one of the biggest levers you have on that.
Whatever you pick, pitch it in session zero. Players build very different characters for an anthology than for a linear campaign, and “we are doing conflict-of-the-week, no big bad” is exactly the kind of expectation that has to be set before anyone rolls stats. That conversation is the whole foundation — and if you are mid-campaign and want to change structures now, there is a version of it for that too.
And steal shamelessly. Three of the five structures here came directly out of a TV anthology, a Sonic game, and an anime about a train. That is not a coincidence — it is basically the whole method.
If you want more on building the long, complicated version well, Joe has a video on act structure and I made one last month on conflict quadrants. Either will help you lay out the big stuff.
Let me know if there are other weird structures you or your DM have tried — things that shook up the standard expectations and turned out to be surprisingly good for the story. I would love to read them in the comments.