I got back into table top role playing games last year (that'd be 2025), and I've been running campaigns in the weekends.
I mean, they are not really table top because they are played online. We do them over chat. Can't even say they are pen and paper because we write stuff up in text documents and a wiki.
But the point! One question players have asked me several times is "did we derail the campaign?"
And I have to answer: You can't, I don't do rails.
I used to. When I was a very little egg, running World of Darkness with the serial numbers filed off for a bunch of kids, I did think "hey, this scene would be cool to see" and make it into part of a session. It worked more than it didn't because I was just a little egg running a silly campaign for a bunch of kids.
But if my current self were dropped in that kind of game I would have made the storyteller cry. Or maybe not. They were a bunch of kids, so I might have just let them have their fun. I would have died of cringe inside, though.
These days I run campaigns in a much different way. I don't have rails. I have events and I have characters.
There are things that are written in stone in any campaign. These include the lore, that has happened before and so is a fact that you have to build around, but also those events that are a result of outside forces the players don't have control over.
If you are playing a street-level mafia game which has been mostly happening in a specific city block, and your region of the country gets a new politician elected who based their entire campaign into being hard on crime…
If you are playing an medieval fantasy adventure and your players are the orcs skirmishing on the borders of the human kingdom trying to make a living, and the church decides to start a crusade against your race…
If you are playing a sci-fi campaign where the characters have been smuggling forbidden tech between colonies, and a star goes nova, burning one of them and leaving them stranded in the middle of nowhere…
Well, these are the things that will change how the world operates, and they are way beyond the reach of those players.
Big events change how the world is operating. They change the stakes. They change the plans of the people involved in everything.
Big events by themselves won't be truly hated or loved by the players. What the players will enjoy or not is the consequences of those events. And that's where characters enter.
Because now every street gang is getting into a lot of trouble that they weren't getting before. Some people get mad, some people get desperate, and some people see opportunity.
Because now every orc tribe in the kingdom border is existentially threatened and they need to find a way to face the oncoming storm. Some will run, some will fight, but the only way to win is together.
Because the star lanes are now full of refugees, the government-in-exile of that colony is desperately trying to keep together their people, and the empire that grew fat from their taxes and industry is twisting the screws on everyone else.
Don't target events at your players. Make them affect everyone. Everyone reacts to them. Everyone can be hurt by them and everyone can take advantage of them.
I have recently ran Inside a Klein Hourglass, arc 1: Unreachable; it's the second time that I have ran this particular campaign, and it has been very different from the first time. The Events are the same, the Characters are the same, but the Players were different (and not just because the current party is extremely queer), and that changed first the vibe of things and then the very story progression.
By the end of arc 1, the old party failed to control the Ominous Object of Doom, which was taken by Brazilian natives, that they pursued to the jungle and fought at their home, only to be caught in a supernatural storm and punted into divergent timelines.
The new party managed to close the box keeping the Object under control in time and then was forced to negotiate with the local elites to build a gate they could use to reach divergent timelines to search for a way to getting rid of the Object of Doom. They were still racist to the natives, but at least did not wholesale slaughter them.
As far as the story progression goes, I don't really mind either way; I know what the Object of Doom is, how it operates, and what kind of problems it attracts. In the context of that, the party can choose to do anything.
They are in a boat at sea; there are many islands around them, there's a continent to each side, and cities on both ends. There are sea currents, and wind currents, and a storm season encroaching, but they can go wherever they want.
And they seem to enjoy it.