M.E.S.H – Modular Episodic Session Holarchy
While still a work in progress, the MESH System is designed to address a common challenge in tabletop role-playing: how to keep rich, interconnected stories thriving even when players and game masters (GMs) lead unpredictable lives. It offers a flexible yet coherent structure for running sessions, developing shared worlds, and maintaining continuity without rigid scheduling or fixed group compositions. At its heart lies a modular, layered hierarchy (called Holons) that organizes narration and gameplay scope.
Partly inspired by West Marches, MESH attempts to address a lot of the major issues in the hobby. By restructuring a traditional campaign into a modular, hierarchical structure you are able to eliminate or reduce many of the common issues such as:
- Forever DM Fatigue
- Character Fatigue
- System Fatigue
- Player availability change
- Long term commitments
The Hierarchy
Setting
The Setting is the broadest narrative and thematic container. It defines the universe in which all stories unfold—its geography, cultures, metaphysics, conflicts, and timeline. It serves as the mythic root from which all other Holons emerge.
A Setting is not bound to a single ruleset, game master, or player group. One region may be explored through D&D 5E, while another through the Cypher System or Pathfinder. This modular approach allows GMs and players to choose the most fitting mechanical lens for each narrative arc.
Players can drift in and out of campaigns without disrupting the world’s integrity. The Setting acts as a persistent backdrop, ensuring that even episodic or one-shot stories have a place in the larger mythos.
Epic
A Campaign, or Epic, is a major narrative arc or open-world sandbox experience within the broader Setting. It presents a sustained story or exploration-based structure that typically spans multiple sessions, characters, and possibly rule systems.
Each Setting can host multiple Campaigns, each with its own focus, tone, and temporal placement. These Campaigns may intersect or remain independent, depending on the preferences of GMs and players.
Campaigns are designed to allow different GMs to run sessions with various groups of players and even different characters. Long-term narrative consistency is preserved at the structural level, not dependent on any fixed combination of participants.
Saga
A Saga is a major story arc within a Campaign, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It may end on a note of resolution, a cliffhanger, or a launching point for future Sagas.
Sagas focus on a major conflict or thematic journey and help segment long-running campaigns into manageable, emotionally resonant segments.
Multiple Sagas can occur within a single Campaign, either one after the other or concurrently in different regions or among different groups.
As with Campaigns, Sagas do not require consistent player or character rosters across sessions. GMs may adjust the cast based on availability, allowing for dynamic storytelling with persistent narrative weight
Arc
This is the smallest narrative unit in the MESH hierarchy. An Arc is a short series of sessions (typically 1–10) focusing on a localized conflict or mini-quest.
Arcs are the only Holons that require narrative continuity in terms of GMs, players, and characters. Within these short, focused spans, consistent participation is important to maintain story cohesion. Outside these bounds, the MESH structure emphasizes flexibility. Arcs function as modular components that feed into the evolving saga, campaign, and setting.
These short formats are well-suited for trying out new systems, tones, or GMs with minimal disruption to overarching narratives.
Mechanics
Character Stables
Players may maintain a stable of multiple characters. This flexibility supports creative variety and allows participation across diverse campaigns and tones.
Players should typically bring only one character into any single Arc. This helps preserve narrative clarity and group balance.
For each character, players are encouraged to maintain two versions: a “standard” version representing the character at level/tier one, and a “current” version reflecting accumulated experience, items, and narrative changes. This dual approach allows characters to re-enter play at different stages while preserving continuity.
The standard version ensures that a character concept can be reintroduced or adapted to new stories or Holons without disrupting progression logic. It also serves as a foundation for adapting the character to other game systems, allowing cross-system continuity while preserving thematic identity.
Downtime
Because the MESH System emphasizes flexible, real-life-aware scheduling, in-game downtime becomes a crucial part of narrative and mechanical progression. Activities such as shopping, crafting, socializing, or research are ideally handled during these periods.
Downtime is most effectively managed between sessions or Arcs using asynchronous communication methods like play-by-post (PbP). This enables all players to make meaningful progress without consuming live session time.
Characters are assigned Downtime Units when narrative circumstances allow for rest or off-screen time. Players spend DTUs based on available options such as crafting items, gathering rumors, pursuing personal quests, or training new skills.
By relocating logistical and personal development activities to downtime, the system ensures that live play sessions focus on dynamic storytelling and group engagement, maximizing the value of shared time.
Faction and Parallax Play
One of the greatest strengths of the MESH System is its support for Faction Play and Parallax Play. These approaches allow multiple stories to unfold simultaneously or asynchronously across different locations, time periods, or player groups.
Players can align with various factions within the Setting, each with distinct goals, cultures, and influence. Sessions can focus on different factions at different times, building a rich, multi-faceted narrative tapestry.
Parallax Play enables stories to span non-linear timelines, with sessions revealing different angles of the same event or exploring consequences across time. This method encourages creative worldbuilding and provides fresh perspectives on established events.
Through Faction and Parallax Play, different groups of players or characters can affect the world in unique ways, setting off ripples that influence other sessions. This deepens immersion and makes the shared world feel alive and responsive.
Challenges
The MESH System may struggle with campaigns that rely on strict continuity, such as ticking-clock narratives, hardcore survival scenarios, or deep megadungeon crawls. These styles can be less accommodating to the modular and episodic structure.
To support these formats, GMs can employ narrative devices such as safe havens, time dilation effects, or “town portal” mechanics. These provide narrative pauses that make it easier to segment the story while preserving urgency.
Another effective strategy is using temporal lensing, pausing one thread while exploring another, allowing the group to step back from continuous timelines without breaking immersion.
At the end of the day, there’s nothing preventing a long-form, traditional campaign from thriving within the MESH System. It simply requires careful planning and narrative devices to balance flexibility with the intensity of those formats.
Individual Backstories and Personal Character Arcs
A modular drop in drop out ecosystem can make it difficult to consistently explore individual character arcs. Traditional campaigns often build momentum around the same cast appearing session after session, allowing the GM to weave personal histories, secrets, and motives into the main narrative. M E S H complicates this because the cast is fluid, and not all characters appear in every Arc, Saga, or Campaign.
However, in practice, most GMs still have a core group of regulars who gravitate toward particular characters, players who show up reliably and settle into long term roles. These players represent natural anchors for character driven storytelling, giving the GM stability to explore deeper emotional arcs, revelations, and payoff moments. Their backstories can unfold over several Arcs or even across Sagas, mirroring the character centric depth of long form play.
For less consistent players, one shot guests, or experimental characters, this flexibility becomes a benefit rather than a burden. The GM no longer needs to bend the campaign structure to accommodate a dozen half developed personal backstories. Instead, ephemeral characters can participate without pressure, allowing the GM to reserve heavier narrative investment for those who remain engaged across multiple Holons.
This establishes a natural triage system: deep arcs for committed characters, lightweight hooks for transient ones, and a shared world that accommodates both without strain.
Strongholds, Bastions, Businesses, and Bases
Player owned structures such as fortresses, inns, safehouses, shops, temples, and research labs pose another logistical challenge. In a modular framework, the characters who own or maintain these places might not be present every week. A stronghold works seamlessly when the same characters are always around, but becomes awkward if the owners simply vanish between Arcs due to scheduling.
There are two main strategies to resolve this.
1. Tie ownership to the same reliable players who serve as the narrative anchors.
Just as with personal story arcs, the players who show up consistently can become the natural custodians of bases, businesses, or territories. Their presence across multiple Arcs ensures continuity in how these locations evolve, and allows the GM to build storylines around upgrades, threats, expansions, or consequences without worrying that the owners will not be present for long stretches of time.
2. Shift the ownership model from individuals to institutions.
Rather than giving full ownership to player characters, strongholds can be operated by:
guilds
local orders
factions
mercenary companies
temple hierarchies
corporations
magical consortiums
town councils
Players might hold partial ownership, majority shares, rotating stewardship, or high ranking positions, but the location itself belongs to a larger entity. This prevents continuity issues when the players are absent. The organization maintains the bastion, staff operate the business, and the players influence remains even when their characters are not present. When players return, they re enter a living maintained space that has grown or changed organically during their absence.
This approach preserves the fantasy of investment and impact without requiring fixed attendance.
In Practice
You have a great idea for a game and you have gathered a group of interested players. Likely, these players have jobs, families, and other responsibilities but they’d like to play.
You have decided on a traditional fantasy setting, perhaps one with a coast named after a bladed melee weapon. It’s familiar and most players have an idea what to expect; magic, monsters, and villains.
Your campaign idea involves stopping the awakening of a great evil, a timeless classic. You create the events that lead up to it, the ways it can be stopped, and what happens if the evil is unleashed.
Rarely does a great evil just simply go from trapped to released in a straight line. So, you have divided this into “The Three Great Works” that must be completed by the antagonists in order to unleash the great evil. These are your three sagas. These can be sequential, in parallel, or involve some sort of time travel shenanigans.
Each “Great Work” requires resources, preparation, and follow-through. You have broken the first “Great Work”, Sacrifice, into three episodes. This is where the antagonists need to force the townsfolk into the center of town in order to sacrifice them all at once
Your first group of players create their characters and follow the clues to a group of raiders targeting specific goods or specific resources.
Your second group of players, some returning, some new, either create new characters or continue their previous characters. Here, disguised alchemists infiltrate the town and begin spreading a sickness, the cure requiring the resources that were targeted in the previous story arc.
Your third group of players repeat the process, but here they must defend against the final assault by the soldiers or cultists to make the great sacrifice.
Each of your Sagas will have their own unique spin and unique outcome. In this case, let’s say that one of those “Great Works” actually come to pass. Something bad has happened. While it’s not the end of the world, yet, to your total campaign, but to the people involved, things aren’t so great.
Lo and Behold, one of your players has an idea. They want to run an arc or a mini-saga to resolve the completed “Great Work”. The ritual that was completed, shattered reality in this region. Your player wants to run an Eldritch Horror theme, using a popular Lovecraftian system, in this setting. The GM now gets to be a player, and a new group starts up at its own cadence.
Then comes the final “Great Work”. However, even the good guys are divided. One faction whose goals align with the preservation of the natural order aim to reclaim the artifact and use it to end the corruption of their land. Another faction believes artifacts such as these are too powerful for anyone to wield and wishes to hide it so no one can use it.
You have created only two story arcs, one for each faction. But, they are happening simultaneously and in opposition to each other. You now have two groups of players, each have chosen their side. You play each separate until the final sessions where you bring them all together and let them both play against each other while also trying to prevent the final “Great Work” and potentially unleashing the Great Evil into the world.
Conclusion
Because this is based entirely on the premise of flexibility, use what you want, throw the rest out. It’s about having as much fun as possible with the people you have available.
If you have any questions, thoughts, or ideas please leave a comment here.
Otherwise, I hope you found this helpful or interesting and thanks for reading.
Mason Beck Fiction 