When we think about a roleplay campaign story, many of us picture an epic quest which spans a great distance and amount of time. Often we imagine interacting with many people and enemies, perhaps entire armies. Whole cities, races, and cultures are thrown in. Of course, something horrible is threatening all of this. There is some enemy army led by an emperor or a mage or a lich or a warlord or a god. The epic quest is so engrained in our collective unconscious that we draw on it again and again. Today we’re looking at what that means for our games.
Where does it come from?
The epic quest goes back to the origin of human stories. One of our oldest, Gilgamesh, is an epic quest story. The Odyssey is another example of the epic quest. We have too many examples of epic quest stories in movies to even begin naming them, but start with the works of Mel Gibson and go from there. In fact, the concept of a hero marked by fate to go on a great quest spans across cultures, and is the basis for the book Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, which details this very idea. In Campbell’s writings, this is known as the Hero’s Journey.
There are so many reasons that we love the Hero’s Journey. It’s a grand, sweeping epic that feels exciting. It shows us bits of life and character brought out in dramatic situations, and teaches us about nobility. It makes us feel like there is an order to the world, and that people are born to greatness and shepherded by the gods. It gives us an entertaining means for encoding morals and values by showcasing them in the most obvious examples, and passing these morals and values on to our descendents.
Benefits of the Hero’s Journey
In games, we love being the hero. The world revolves around us, we are born destined for greatness, the gods watch over us, the world trembles at our step, and we can reshape reality with our very will. It is the ultimate empowerment, which is why so many of our video games and campaigns revolve around this very idea.
The reason we run the Hero’s Journey over and over is because it’s so universal. Everyone can relate to it, and imagine themselves in the role of Hero. It provides instant buy-in, because the adversary is clearly identified and the reason for the quest is simple to grasp. We have to kill the monster because he keeps eating the villagers. We have to go on this journey so we can get home eventually. We need to stop the evil mage because he wants to destroy our way of life or harm our families.
However, the standard Hero’s Journey can get a little tiresome for some GMs. Eventually, we want to run something different. We begin wearing a beret and refer to ourselves as story artists and decide that we want to do away with tropes and invent our own story model. What other options do we have? We can modify the Journey, that’s what.
A few alternatives
Rather than run a sweeping journey with a huge quest, we can run short-term campaigns focused around solving a problem. The characters are threatened by an immediate issue and set out to solve it. This can take several sessions, but tends to run best as a short campaign. The group may band together to defend one town, or to achieve one mission as a special ops team. The goal is “Achieve the objective.”
The party can be stationed in one town, and have to set up a lifestyle for themselves. Or they’re establishing a colony, or rebuilding and defending a town. This is more of a sandbox approach, but with a directed story. Or, there could be no overall story. The group never actually goes anywhere and may not have a great villain, but rather face multiple villains. The goal is “Build a life.”
The group can be dropped into a terrible situation and have to survive. This could be a zombie game, a horror game, a hunted prisoner game, or a campaign about running from the law. This is probably run best as a short game, because the point is to not let them put down roots. If they do put down roots, it evolves into the previous sandbox approach, and may in fact develop fully into the Hero’s Journey over time. The goal is “Escape and survive.”
The group could represent facets of one individual, and have to establish some sort of harmony in order to continue functioning. Players act out the roles of one emotion or part of a person’s psyche, and have to face issues which arise and work through them together. Or, the party plays characters who represent split personalities within one individual and must reunite in order to regain sanity. This could end up similar to the Hero’s Journey, but the concept is so outlandish that it would take someone a while to figure it out.
There are a host of direct modifications on the Hero’s Journey. One of the most popular that I’ve run into is that, instead of being gods-chosen, the characters are random people who die frequently and are replaced by a host of characters who pick up the torch. This can also be achieved by having the party switch characters periodically without deaths, playing the children, grandchildren, or students of the previous characters. The focus of the story is not the characters, but the quest itself. The goal is “Fulfill the quest.”
Do I need to try to avoid the Hero’s Journey?
Not at all. Don’t mess with something that isn’t broken. The Hero’s Journey is a fixed trope for a host of perfectly good reasons. No one should shy away from using it, because it is so universally appealing and understandable. Any players who complain about being run through the Hero’s Journey are volunteering to run the campaign and let you sit back and enjoy yourself, and odds are good that they will end up running a variation on the Hero’s Journey. It is, simply put, the easiest story to tell.
In fact, most campaigns end up as the Hero’s Journey, even when we’re trying to do something else. Any time we have a character with a goal who needs to achieve an objective, that plays right back into the Hero’s Journey. And the very nature of roleplaying means that we are going to be doing this, time and again. The above example of players acting out parts of a psyche trying to reconnect would most likely be a horrible game for anyone who isn’t a Psychology major, and even then it would only be a novel idea and would probably wear out fast. The Hero’s Journey, though, can run almost indefinitely. And chaining Journeys together still could be classified as one Journey, because it’s still the Hero’s life.
In the end, we need to run the stories we’re comfortable with. And, realistically, everything turns into the Hero’s Journey. So, don’t beat yourself up, return the beret, and get back to writing what feels good.
Let me know in the comments below some of the interesting takes on the Journey that you’ve come across.