Typically I run year-long campaigns—which is somewhat unusual for PbtA games, I hear—but fits my life well (the games are often every other week). A friend, who is a college professor too busy during the school year, asked me if I could run a campaign just for the length of the summer. That worked well for me, as our youngest was home from college. I roped another friend in and the four of us played a Planet of the Week campaign.
We met every week for 11 weeks and did each type of mission:
- First contact → Nizhóní 2 (three weeks)
- Emergency response → Ulluriaq 0
- Space anomalies → Bebeku-ma 9
- Science mission → Hintutubí 1
- Diplomatic mission → Miskiphuru 5 (three weeks)
- Exploration → Wingerra 3.
The PCs did four of the planets in one session each, and two of the planets took three sessions each. It annoyed them when a planet took more than one week; they felt it wasn’t living up to the name! (Since one of our touchstones was Star Trek: Enterprise, for me it was just like season 4, which had lots of three-parters.)
Interestingly, about halfway through the campaign they started to have many questions about the wider setting. The players were looking to me to answer those questions, but I suggested instead we use a Microscope session to collectively build a shared understanding of our setting. We hadn’t started with any worldbuilding, given the shorten length of the campaign, but we played Microscope at week #7, and it was a lot of fun, as always.
We met and played IRL, which was a nice change of pace. Since COVID lockdowns, I’d played just online campaigns, except for two sessions of MASHED a few years ago. Unlike before lockdowns, I used an iPad with all my notes for running the sessions. Because everyone printed out references (one player printed out the entire Player’s Guide and put it a three-ring binder with dividers), I didn’t refine and update the rules as much as I did for my online campaigns (the one exception: tweaking one of the bonus dice).
Designed as an episodic campaign, there wasn’t much of a campaign arc, but when they did the diplomatic mission on Miskiphuru 5, they re-encountered alien species they’d met before. That adventure, which took three sessions, would have been the right place narratively to end the campaign, as it showed their influence on this sector of space and had callbacks to three different earlier adventures.
The final adventure on Wingerra 3 was just an exploratory mission and felt a bit tacked on, but “play to find out,” and we are playing, not writing a narrative.
One character really grew: a diplomat (the green nonbinary plant person in the cover illustration) pressed into service reluctantly as a pilot, who became an expert pilot at the end, racking up four kills in the one session that went that way and mastering even the hardest of hard landings.
The other two characters grew in abilities, diagetically and mechanically, with the telepath (shown wearing a telepathic headset that kills many that try it) really mastering her mental skills in a way that reminded us of Seven. The third character—plucky comic relief, an expert engineer, and liberated mascot of a steakhouse—was a joy but didn’t change as much over the sessions.
All in all it was a wonderful campaign, a highlight of my role-playing experience.
If you want to GM a similar campaign, the Planet of the Week GM’s Guide has everything you need.
Illustration credit: © 2025 Kyle Delaney. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
