A Moment in History

Campaigns take place during a moment in history. This makes it a little more difficult to believably implant several different wars and other major world conflicts into a single campaign. When you look back at Earth or your campaign world history, there are very few moments in time when one person’s life span (we’re talking normal human life spans here) encompasses multiple wars. OK, maybe they’re still alive, but not in their fighting prime. So should there only be one war in a campaign’s “life”? No, but the player characters might have to travel to the war zone. That’s pretty much true in our modern age as well, there’s always a war of some manner burning somewhere, you just have to go find it. Having too many invading armies all attack your character’s home city is, well, cheesy. It’s like a bad comic book or TV series where ALL of these horribly bad things all happen to this one place. That’s why Dr. Who works - He can go to any period, any planet. He goes looking for trouble; it doesn’t keep coming to him. I mean, I love Scooby Doo, but how many times was the Mystery Machine going to break down in front of some haunted house? All I’m suggesting is that GMs make the players work for it. Make them travel to some other places to face down the bad guys. It seems more reasonable, and you extend the campaign over the course of time. After all, those travel times make the campaign longer and the players a little bit older. Becoming super powerful over the course of ten years is perceived as more realistic than if they did it over the course of two.