What To Do If Your Old School Campaign Ends Now!

 Campaigns sometimes end for all kinds of reasons;tonight it ended because of reasons which I understand & respect. A friend is going in another direction in their life & I wish them all of the best. But what happens when you suddenly find yourself without players. First of all don't panic and go into a melt down, there are other players out there & they will come your way.

First of all I said don't panic there are vast numbers of reasons why campaigns end abruptly, player family emergencies, dungeon master work commitments, meteors crashing from the sky, all kinds of things that can & will happen. They've happened to me on a number of occasions; table top role playing games attract very strong personality types & sometimes the stars are not right for that special snowflake of a campaign setting to sit at your table. Don't take it personally & move on with life after a bit of time to breath. 

Whatever you do don't fall into the terrible 'D's and start planning right from the get go.
First thing to do is to actually start thinking about getting new players & not getting depressed about the situation & the second thing is not to fall into the trap of despair, disgust or the dumps. These things happen all of the time as I said for a wide variety of reasons.  Start by looking around the local gaming scene if there is one. This means taking a look for the major hobby shops, war gaming clubs, historical societies, & testing the waters to see what's being played and whose playing them. Whatever you do don't go barging in & get accused of taking other people's players. Start with the basics like posting a listing on Meet Up.com or getting some flyers printed up for community bulletin boards (yes the real world ones folks). Or it might be as simple as wearing that D&D tee shirt to the local Walmart or Tesco, Marks &Marks and Spencers , etc.

The thing I hear all of the time is, 'There's no local gaming scene in my area of the world' Well that might be because you are going to have to do the work Mr dungeon master. That might mean starting that war gaming or old school role playing club from the ground up. This isn't a bad option at all. Don't take that campaign that you've spent months on & let it collect dust on your shelf. Sometimes the best formula is to keep designing & writing to keep things moving. Just when the opportunity presents its don't do what I see a number of OSR designers & writers do; they write, design, & never actually play table top rpgs except at conventions.
There's nothing like the face to face of table top rpg play to get folks into the campaign world setting. Scheduling is & can be problematic at the best of times & I completely understand where that could be an issue in today's busy world.

CSW Expo 2009 staffHere I Stand session in progress. Players struggle for religious and political influence over 16th century Europe in this 2006 board game by GMT
For many people social media such as Facebook or G+ provides the answers with on line gaming. There are lots of options today for this sort of thing. For me it doesn't take away the face to face of actual table top rpg gaming. Its a large part of the hobby's appeal for me and one that seems to be disappearing from the social fabric as the years roll on. Which means investigating the local scene for yourself & seeing what's being played.
This is something that I'm going to have to do in the wilds locally so wish me luck.

Role players at the Convention Burg-Con in Berlin 2009 photo by Sargoth

A great video that I ran across in my travels on Youtube last night was this video that has some really nice and useful tips for getting a D&D or gaming group together.

So wish me luck and keep those dice rolling folks!