A trend we see in the entertainment industry – from books to TV to movies — is what I’ll call narrative bloat. It’s especially bad with writer/director/producers in movies, but equally bad in books that become serials — the Patrick O’Brians, Robert Jordans and George R.R. Martins. In TV, we see this strongly in series that have been going for decades — the Law & Order serials are a perfect example of this. I know, you love the world-building and the characters and you don’t want the journey to end, but that’s kind of the point to a story. The ending.

This ties into another staggeringly lazy, dated bit of writing: the mystery box. From the start with The X-Files, running through various shows and movies — usually the JJ Abrams crowd of writers — TV and movies have given us fantastic first acts with this trick. Introduce a mystery: who is the smoking man? What is this secret organization? What is happening on the island? Who is Rey? What’s in the trunk of the car in Repo Men (to get old school). It’s a great hook that pulls the viewer or reader in…but eventually, the box needs opened. If you haven’t planned for that — who are the Final Five Cylons in Battlestar Galactica — you will eventually have to wedge the answer into whatever corner you’ve painted yourself in, because you didn’t bother to answer the question for yourself. In other words — there’s no point.

A good example of making the mystery box work (while still having to dance around issues of production) was Babylon 5. Who was Morden? We find out. Who are the Vorlons (and by extension the Shadows)? What do the Shadows (and by extension the Vorlons) want? What happened to President Santiago? Who is Sinclair and why did the Mimbari end their war against the humans? All get answered and with a few hiccups (the three that are one, for instance), they get answered satisfactorily because the answer was, at least in broad strokes, known.

So, how does this apply to running a game campaign? If you’re going to have a mystery box (and it’s an excellent way to get buy-in), you have to broadly know what the endpoint is. You should have a few waypoints that give hints and clues, and be ready for the characters to figure it out before the big reveal. There’s nothing wrong with them figuring it out early. This is where “red herrings” are useful — let them press forward to discovering the location of the treasure, or the identity of the person they’re chasing, or uncover the secret cult that’s been committing unspeakable horrors — then throw a plausible alternative to throw them off course for a session or two. But don’t suddenly change “what’s in the box”, because they got there before you wanted them to. If they get there early, let them find the treasure, perpetrator, secret early…when they’re probably not ready for the big bad guy. Hit them harder than you intended, but give them room to escape, succeed with some major consequence (the hostage dies, the bomb goes off, whatever…), or let them win. The cheap shot is always “yes, but who was pulling their strings” in the case of discovering the identity of the big bad.

There’s a great line in Clerks 2, where the ever-assholish Randall Graves says, “Those hobbit movies were boring. Three movies about walking to a fucking volcano…” Again, yes — colossal and rich worldbuilding, great characters and battle scenes — and while I enjoyed them…three movies about walking to a fucking volcano.

What you don’t want in your game is to lose sight of the point. Maybe you have several side quests and red herrings because it stretches out the fun and the player, inevitably wander off course because the simple barmaid character caught their eye and they are convinced there’s something more there than there is, or they get the plot wrong. But unless you want to scrap your big reveal, big bad, whateveter (and there’s nothing wrong with this), you may have to come up with another denouement for your players. Alternately, much like the writers of shows with a mystery box, you retcon the hell out of your original plans to fit with where the players decided to wander.