You ever have one of those games?

Your plans go out the window.

You tip your hat too soon.

Your carefully constructed campaign is revealed and it was no where as cool as you thought it would be.

These are the things that happened to me last night.

After an exhausting 2 hour combat (which was quite the kick butt fight btw) I found myself going against my instinct and revealing too much and making it go too fast.

Now as this is issue 12 - Part Two, it could be said that after five months of playing I was just a bit burned out.  Or it could be that the night was tiring, we were all exhausted after the fight, and that lead to me making some really dumb moves.

Both of these are valid reasons, but in the end I have only myself to blame.

Let me explain.

I have been running a fairly tight campaign thus far, and I have all sorts of ideas of things I want to do with the characters and the story being told.  I have plots, conspiracies and even awesome fights planned.  I have put a lot of work into this and thinking it through, the Zenith Universe is not random.

The thing is that I wanted this to be a Bronze Age campaign and, as one player put it, the big reveal and craziness of last night made it into a Modern Age as written by Mark Millar.  Now I don't mind Mark Millar comics as a general rule, it isn't very Bronze Age.  In fact it is too much and too crazy and, for lack of a better word, wrong.

The campaign certainly was doing just fine, but as I went along my reach started to exceed my grasp and I got caught up in all the crazy fun and conspiracy metaplot and less on the heroes fighting crime and doing their thing.

As another player said, referring to an old campaign, it went to the moon.

That's like saying it jumped the shark.

This has always been a problem I have as a storyteller.  I put a lot of work into my campaigns and that is good and bad.  It is good because there is always something happening and it bad because there is always something happening.

The first rule of campaigning, that I seemed to forget, is that this is about the players and their interactions with the world, not the world and its interaction with the players.  The latter is just a bad idea from the word go as it will make the players feel like passengers and not drivers.

Fortunately I have a group of players who are very understanding and tolerant.  They accept my foibles and my missteps, trusting that I can either make it better or fix it.  That's a lot of trust and something I hope to live up to with this current campaign.

So yeah, just needed to get that off my chest.

Thanks for reading.