Size limitation to campaigns?

[chipmafia]

Is there a limit to the size of one's campaign? Most generally this would be speaking of the actually file size, but more specifically: Are there limits to the amounts of Story lines, personalities, maps, etc?

The reason I ask is because I am currently using the Fallcrest city info as a springboard/primer to other adventures. I am new to FG GMing and have been out of DMing since 3.0. I have a family now, so finding this in my new DM guide was like finding a sunken treasure. (since I don't want to take the time to create like I could when I was a college student)

I basically want to use the Fallcrest campaign as an offshoot to various adventures. Is this a good idea? Will I run into size issues? Should I simply start new campaigns?

Thanks for your input. I thoroughly enjoy the insight and experience I have gleaned from this community.

[Xorn]

You'll see a lot of styles among the DMs here, but I guess they would fall into two major categories of campaign prep:

1. Run most of your stuff from the books, and just keep primarily maps/images and personalities in your campaign. Since that's really all you need to play (maps, dice, and monsters) this has the least prep time. Plus as your monster and map libraries grow, you'll need less and less prep. Griogre has some great ways to even sort stuff, by prefixing the maps for a certain adventure with that module number. (Like H1 for anything from KotS.) Then you can filter your map list to only show "H1", etc. There's a little more to it than that, but that's the basic idea.

2. Keep only the core information in the main campaign, and make adventure modules that you can load as needed. There's more prepwork here; it's handy if you're using existing modules, like creating modules (that's me), or want to add/remove adventures on the fly. My main campaign only has the characters, a story entry called "Adventure Log", a map called "Marching Order" as well as a map of Fallcrest and the Nentir Vale, a few personalities that the characters interact with outside of any single adventure (several Fallcrest NPCs, currently), and an item called "The Sword of Ultimate Sorcery" (I was bored). The token box has the character tokens and a small ball of fire (for Flaming Sphere) and that's about it. All my adventures are loaded in with modules, plus I have some random encounter maps in a module, too.

Neither way is wrong, you'll find the way you prefer pretty quickly, I imagine. :D

[Griogre]

There are not any size limits, per se. You will find there are organization limits where it becomes too hard to find things. After you run a bit you will want to seperate out various adventures and locations because your main campaign will get very crowded with old adventures you are done using or rarely used locations.

This is where adventure modules come in (the name is a little misleading you can used them for cities and other geographic locations also). You can load these modules when you need something - like a city and then unload them when the characters leave the city. They allow you to modulaize you campaign so you only need to keep the PC's in your main campaign and then load the rest as modules you need it and then unload them when you don't.

Thus your example you might have Fallcrest in a module. And Keep on the Shadowfell in another, ect. You may find it useful to split out things from a module and this is easy to do - IE split out the town of Winterhaven from Keep on the Shadowfell.

[chipmafia]

The concept of loading/unloading modules is a foreign one. I'm sure it won't be with a good old fashioned forum search.

Thanks for the info. I like the idea of packing things up when I finish. I was going to put all the Nentir Vale info in that module as well, but I'm going to try your ideas.

[Xorn]

My adventure module tutorial demonstrates what it looks like pretty clearly. Armory Forum.