Suikoden as an Open Table Campaign

April 8, 2026

Suikoden is one of my favorite video games of all time. This quaint, rustic JRPG is based on the oldest Chinese fiction novel, Water Margin, and tells the story of the young son of an imperial general who goes on to lead a revolution against an Emperor who was once a beloved folk hero, but was corrupted by rule and by the influence of nefarious advisors.

If you haven't played it, I urge you, nay beg you, to consider doing so. There's a new Remastered Version of both the first and second games. They are both masterpieces of storytelling, character building, art, music, and genuinely fun gameplay. The second game is even better than the first (as unbelievable as that may be), and may end up getting its own analytical treatment in a future article.

What struck me recently was how looking at the world of Suikoden through the lens of TTRPG campaign structures might make for compelling examples that we can learn from to improve our tabletop games. Apart from simple story structure and the various modes of gameplay, there's the intriguing process of gathering your allies, the "108 Stars of Destiny". Each character is colorful and lively, with their own artwork and personality, their own charming interactions with other characters, and in some cases, their own keystone story arc. What better way to imagine an open world, open table campaign?

The Story and Its Parts

If you don't want spoilers for the game Suikoden, turn back now. But it's 31 years old. Get with the times.

Suikoden Plot	Campaign Concept
The Hero, Tir McDohl, is introduced as the son of a general and is tasked with running imperial errands for an overbearing, obnoxious toady. Collecting taxes from a nearby town becomes dealing with bandits who stole them, but it's revealed the imperial toady is the one committing the fraud. Retrieving an important message from the Astrologer, a mysterious but powerful magician who sees a complicated future for the Hero.	This is the typical "start local" prologue, but within the trappings of an empire instead of a rustic village. Truths are revealed through subtle differences between expectation and reality, and we are not-so-subtly aligned to be opposed to the Empire through the actions of those within it.
The Hero's best friend is betrayed and attacked by the powerful Court Magician, but Ted gets away and comes back to the Hero to bestow upon him the Soul Eater Rune before he dies. Great mysteries are revealed - about Ted, his history, and his unbelievable age. The hero and his friends are labeled as enemies of the empire, and are forced to flee the capitol city.	Ah, the Macguffin! The Soul Eater rune is our first revelation into the bigger and more mysterious world, and we are tightly tied to it. It must be safeguarded from the Court Magician, and the Hero flees. Up until now, everything has been prologue - establishing the world and its players and introducing the new world that the players will inhabit.
The hero relies on the wits and connections of his party to find a place to hide, and comes into contact with the leader of the rebellion against the empire. this sets off a series of events that results in the hero becoming the leader of the Rebellion Army, as he collects more and more allies and resources and finds himself standing in opposition to the Empire's generals.	The open table comes into play here - you're collecting new players and characters all the time, winding them into your story. Can you imagine a GM introducing a new session and a new player by having you run a quest that involves that character specifically? Less "a new player shows up and accompanies you on your journey" and more "You need to go talk to this character and help solve their problem and then they will join you." What an interesting way to introduce new characters and players to the game!
A series of escalating conflicts with the empire. Infiltration, sabotage, politicking, and magic. One by one, the generals are defeated by the surging Rebellion. As they are defeated, powerful rune magic is revealed - they have been under the evil influence of Windy, the Court Magician! Can the hero forgive them, or is justice a sharp blade? The generals may even be swayed to join the rebellion once they understand their plight. The emperor is beyond redemption, but the empire's citizens can be spared further suffering.	Modes of play shine here. The hero may be delving in strange dungeons, scouring the world for rare ingredients to an inoculating potion, climbing the floors of a vampire's castle to prevent an unholy matrimony, or traveling into the past to see sad truths. We've got dungeon crawls, overland travel, heists. We also have domain level play here! Recruiting allies, forging alliances, even engaging in large scale battles. There are a ton of different kinds of stories here that an open world campaign could showcase. It's also worth pointing out that the imperial generals here are the next Macguffin of the story. The hero needs to defeat them all/collect them all in order to have enough strength to overcome the Emperor's armies.
Things come to an emotional head as the hero confronts his father, a loyal general of the empire. He loses friends and allies, suffers defeats and celebrates victory in equal measure, and hard choices are in store. All of it leads to the final epic battles between the Empire and Rebellion, and the storming of the imperial capitol city, where the hero confronts the Emperor himself, an impressive monument of a man who we can empathize with as someone who lost their way. And then they turn into a frickin three headed golden dragon, cause it's the final battle!	A frickin three headed golden dragon, did I stutter?

Modes of Play and Domain Play

In this game, you do all the same types of things you do in an RPG campaign.

1. Dungeon and location crawling, dealing with traps and monsters and magic items.
2. Politics and intrigue
3. Saving the people of the empire, as well as the natural world and its inhabitants, from the predations of its government
4. Confronting the Agents of the Big Bad (Generals of the Emperor)

You also do quite a bit of things that are typical domain play goals.

1. Gathering allies and resources
2. Fighting pitched battles with other armies
3. Consolidating other resistances under your banner
4. Expanding and improving your home base
5. Making bigger, long term strategies against the foe

These modes of play are seamlessly interwoven in Suikoden 1, with such mastery of pacing that you don't even realize how many levels of abstraction you've jumped through in achieving your goals.

And it doesn't hurt that it's accompanied by gorgeous art and music, satisfying battle animations, and lovely writing.

Open Tables, Rotating Casts, the Stars of Destiny

The 108 Stars of Destiny are all lovely, interesting, artful characters with their own behaviors and mannerisms and quirks. They come in and out of the campaign, showing up when they are needed, building relationships with newly recruited characters. They are the soul of the game. Even their portrait art is wonderful and delightful.

Sounds a lot like the players at the table. In an open table, they come and go, showing up for this adventure and that adventure. Unlike Suikoden, there is no Tir to be the main character, though.

The core idea that excited me to write this blog post is the idea of keystone character quests. Not every character in Suikoen has their own quest, but many of the important ones do. Ted, Tir, and the Soul Eater Rune. Flik and Odessa and the Rebellion. Viktor and Neclord. Pahn and his loyalty to Teo Mcdohl. Mathiu Silverberg and his haunted past. Tai Ho, Yam Koo, and the ice boats. Futch, the Dragon Knights, and the cure for the sleeping poison.

The list goes on and on, with so many characters getting to share the spotlight and become truly part of the world.

I want this in my open table RPG campaigns. If they are interested (and I assume many would not be!) I would introduce them in the course of an adventure that is quite a bit about them. Maybe the adventure starts with the party trying to recruit them, but to do so they need to accompany them on their own dangerous quest. Maybe the character has some resource that the party needs to achieve some other objective, and can show them where to get it and what to do with it. Whatever the context may be, the new player and their character should be introduced as part of the story, rather than just as another person who happens to be in the same place and with similar motivations.

And if you enjoy stable play, where your players can have multiple characters, you could ask one of your players to play a new character who has an important story to tell in the world or perspective to contribute. Ask your players, "Anyone want to play a really important character for this next adventure?" and tell me you're not going to get volunteers...

You might even start imagining the sessions of your campaign as steps in character based story arcs and how they interact with the world. Less sandbox where the characters are just proxies for the players, and more narrative sandbox where the players are eager to discover new characters and their stories through play, accompanied by an overarching narrative structure that gives the entire thing stakes. When Viktor confronts Neclord and prevails... what a climactic, cathartic, and powerful moment of the story. If Viktor were my PC, I'd tell the story of that campaign for the rest of my life.

(It should go without saying that you don't need 108 Stars of Destiny to make for a diverse cast of characters. But there's room, I think, for a lot more than five or six.)

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You've gotta play this game. Play this game and keep your RPG mind open while you do. I'm positive there is more to learn about adventure design and campaign threads and general storytelling, because the game is a masterpiece and that just tends to happen with masterpieces. And if you have any anecdotes about RPG campaigns that reached for some of these ideas, I'd love to hear them below.