I’m wondering what steps different people take to craft their campaigns. How much detail do you go into? How involved do you get? Do you plan your story around the PC’s? How much influence do the PC’s have on the game world?
When I’m creating a campaign, my first step is to come up with a very broad, overarching story, based primarily around the villains or the campaign world. Who are the villains? What are they trying to accomplish? What sort of world is it-- a classic fantasy setting, a low-magic world, or a slightly more modern environment? What’s the general geography?
Once I have an idea of the world and the villains, I dive right in to adventure planning, fleshing out the world as I go. I plan the sequence of events and assemble a few encounters and NPC’s that the PC’s are likely to face. But I don’t go into too much detail-- it’s impossible to know exactly what the players will do at the game table, so I leave plenty of room for improvisation.
I find that the most important tool in planning a campaign is to assume that the PC’s will overcome anything you throw at them. If you plan for the PC’s to succeed, you’ll almost never have to worry about things like a critical hit killing your main villain in his first encounter with the players. I use this to lead the players along a set path without letting them realize that they’re being led along a predetermined chain of events.
The other important tool I use is improvisation. I have some players who are wildly unpredictable, and there’s nothing like having a “foolproof” adventure derailed by something you didn’t plan for.
So how about you other DM’s? How do you run your games?
I work similar to you, though maybe even looser. I pretty much come up with the base adventure,base world and throw in the main antagonists, and away I go. I like to improvise when Dm’ing. I find this leaves things a little more fluid and it is easier for me to work within what the players do. This certainly would not do well for everyone who DM’s. A lot of how people DM has to do with their own preferences,and what level of preparedness they are comfortable with.
I found that when I first started DM’ing, about 25 years ago, I would prepare evrything out. As I became more comfortable with the game and with RPG’ing in general I found out I enjoyed improvising at the table a lot. I of course would have a general idea of what the night would bring, such as traps,monsters,and npc’s etc.Beyond that I realized I liked the freedom to be flexible. You never know what the players would do, and I felt it important to let them have the freedom to explore. You hear the term “sandbox” campaign, that would describe my style.I am always interested to hear how others put their campigns together. I have seen the range from me(work it out as I go) to every little detail is worked out and figured in to the story line.
I also am not opposed to allowing players help develop the story line and the world to a certain degree. Odviously the chracters backgrounds can help steer the direction to a degree, but hey if a player came up with a good hook we would go with it. Dm’ing is not about control but about direction. They are 2 very different things and quite often confused. I have played with DM’s whom are always saying “You can not do that!”, I would be saying “Why not I am playing a Thief and he can pick locks!” The DM then says"Well thats because I do not know what is behind the door!” I would answer “Well I guess that is your own fault!” My point in this is simple. As a Dm you can not be prepared for evry detail and angle so to me it is important to be fliexible and able to tthink on your feet.
I think the important fact is to know what works for your style as a DM, and what works with the players, and their style of gaming they bring to the table.
As a final note I am also interested to hear how others put their campigns together. I have seen the range from me(work it out as I go) to every little detail is worked out and figured in to the story line. It always is interesting to hear from others.
More often than not in the past I did exactly what you describe. However, my most recent project is something I have only done once, maybe twice before in 30+ years of gaming. I am designing a world from the ground up.
I started with a very vague idea of a region I have called The Twelve Kingdoms. I knew it would be a region with a western Kingdom (now broken into twelve city-states) and an eastern Empire divided by a north/south mountain range. I then went into Fractal Terrains Pro and started generating worlds, always on the lookout for a region like what I described above. Eventually I found one and imported the region into Campaign Cartographer.
Now instead of fleshing out the region map, I set it aside and began typing. I envisioned the creation story (which though different from the standard 4e cosmology still has familiar elements), and history of the region. I named the twelve cities. I wrote brief descriptions of the races. I created naming convention documents, as the language of the twelve kingdoms is a sort of bastardized Welsh, and the language of the empire is Middle English.
What happened next is what I actually expected to happen. Campaign arcs and story lines began to suggest themselves based on what I’d already written. Now as I said I’d done something similar at least once before, and the results were the same. The coolest part about all of this is that when it comes to detailing specific locales, NPC or even writing individual adventures, they tend to write themselves. I don’t end up spending hours pouring through monster manuals looking for the perfect monster. It just seems readily apparent when writing what is needed.
I still have tons of work to do. Although I have two campaign arcs in mind, I won’t be able to start writing adventures for months yet. I started detailing one of the cities for the Homebase contest someone posted in the forums here, but real life has interfered as it tends to do, and I haven’t gotten as much done with that as I would have liked (after an initial flurry of activity). If I can get that completed you will have a more concrete idea of the detail I put into things before I even write the first adventure.
As far as some of your other questions go, I tend to think campaign arcs transcend party composition, so I come up with those without a thought about the PCs. Though I also write the adventures long before PCs are even created, I tend to think tweaking after the party is assembled is a good idea.
I also allow the action of the characters to have a huge impact on my game world. Especially in 4e this is almost a given. I try to keep this balanced though. Not only do the actions of the characters have an effect, but their inaction can have profound effects as well. My BBEGs are there for a reason. Their plans are dangerous and have a great chance of success. Else why have heroes oppose them? So if the PCs decide to ignore my campaign arc in favor of their own agendas, I will go along with it, but the BBEG will eventually complete his plans and the world could go to hell. Any further campaigns will reflect this state of affairs. For instance PCs in a subsequent campaign might be written up as slaves of the new god-emperor, and adventure in a world where the PC races are all but extinct.
Depending on how much you are willing to devote time to it, I suggest just making up the basics and get started. Then you can expand on things as the focus of the characters attention moves towards them.
I have seen many campaigns that were started and took months of work, only to see the project come to a halt. I suspect that if you actually start playing sooner than later, you will have more motivation and ideas for the game.
Make up at least one nation on a basic level and a town/city or two that are close to where the characters start. Plan for the first plot/adventure and then just start playing.
I know some people are more ambitious than that, and some have lots of prep time compared to the actual play time. This is just how I normally like to work.
I think Rothe has the right idea as far as actual play is concerned.
What HotHead describes as his early attempts, is what I did, once, but abandoned half-way through. Unless you’re seeking to get the world published, it’s more work than is necessary to go through all of that.
I guess I gave the impression that I was asking for help. I wasn’t, I just wanted to see the different ways people go about creating their campaign worlds.
But you guys have some great ideas, which I’ll probably use in the future :D
I think Rothe has the right idea as far as actual play is concerned.
What HotHead describes as his early attempts, is what I did, once, but abandoned half-way through. Unless you’re seeking to get the world published, it’s more work than is necessary to go through all of that.
I am actually thinking of publishing which is “partly” why I am going through so much trouble. It is also a creative outlet which is important to me, and the stuff may never get played since my group self-destructed not long ago.
When I just sketch things out I always feel under pressure to get the next session work completed, and I almost never am truly prepared. When I have done this type of thing in the past I find DMing effortless and I am so prepared at all times, that anything I have to ad lib is so indistinguishable from prepared material that no one notices. The characters, places and events I have created grow new material organically because I am intimate with the history, motivations and locales.
I guess I gave the impression that I was asking for help. I wasn’t, I just wanted to see the different ways people go about creating their campaign worlds.
But you guys have some great ideas, which I’ll probably use in the future :D
Actually my “I hope this helps” was a bit of a mistake. You can disregard.
I guess I gave the impression that I was asking for help. I wasn’t, I just wanted to see the different ways people go about creating their campaign worlds.
But you guys have some great ideas, which I’ll probably use in the future :D
Actually my “I hope this helps” was a bit of a mistake. You can disregard.
Regards,
Kalex the Omen
And by “I’ll probably use your ideas”, I meant in terms of creating a setting, not stealing your setting.
I guess I gave the impression that I was asking for help. I wasn’t, I just wanted to see the different ways people go about creating their campaign worlds.
But you guys have some great ideas, which I’ll probably use in the future :D
Sorry I was more rambling than anything else! I was describing how I progressed from one end of the campiagn design spectrum to another! LOL
This is long, so beware.
I am going to take your base question as a catalyst for looking back at all the campaigns I’ve created. Just off the top of my head I can think of several different methods I’ve used over the years, and I think the transitions will be fun (at least for me) to look at.
My first campaign was a huge work. I had always loved the world and detail of Greyhawk and sought to emulate the amount of detail. I basically did the world top-down. I created the world’s history first, starting with the creation mythos. From there I had no definite plans other than creating a generic D&D world. I drew a country, loosely based on England in culture and shape. Then I divided the country into regions or counties. Then I brought the map detail down to 10 mile hexes. Right around then I actually started to run the party through some adventures. Concurrent with running the adventures I continued world building, mapping out 10 mile hexes until the country was eventually done. My first focus would be on the region the players were in, but often I would work on other sections as well. On the way I created trade routes, multiple alphabets, heraldry for the world. I was creating for the sake of creating, not for any other specific purpose.
It wasn’t until the fourth adventure that the campaign gained a focus beyond simply “a group of adventures out looking for adventure”. The players were the catalyst for the campaign when they released a necromancer from his prison. For the next 9 years of meeting once a week, the campaign became one of countering the necromancer’s undead armies as he invaded the country.
My adventure writing turned into a mix of self written and published adventures. The world also continued to grow as I added 4 more detailed continents. The campaign reached an end, years after its start, with the defeat of the necromancer.
Thereafter I ran several more campaigns, but all with little to no world building, as I used published worlds/adventures. I would tailor then for the players and party, but did little actual creation. Birthright, Shadowrun, Torg, White Wolf were campaigns that lasted about a year or two each. Despite the fact I was running published modules I did find I had enough time to individualize content for each player. I was working a lot more with their backgrounds and desires. Each game night I would try to throw something of a personal note in for each player.
My next non-published campaign began with a concept for the adventure itself. The players would all start out as young human children in a fantasy setting (Rolemaster was the system). They were the offspring of a demon invasion and the campaign would consist of them dealing with their demonic heritage. Every adventure would feed off that single concept. While I didn’t know the exact nature of each adventure I did know some specific things that would happen. They would discover their true nature (since the village had kept it a secret from them), the village would be destroyed by a demonic army, the players would be forced to flee from mankind in general, they would discover who their fathers were, they would stop the newest demonic invasion. I had 3 very specific possible ways for the campaign to end: 1-They all die; 2-They kill the leader of the demon army; 3-One of the party turns against the rest of the party.
The world itself consisted of vague generalities. I mapped out a general outline of the country, put some names to the surrounding areas and knew I wanted a Germanic feel, but left most information untouched. I did, however, make a detailed map around the starting area of about 50 miles, including detailing their home village down to individual NPC names, ages and connections.
This time I only detailed the immediate information that was required.
Side Note: The campaign ended about 10 years ago. However I restarted the campaign from scratch last year with a new set of players (4E this time). I am doing the same world building as before, only creating as much as I need as I go. I do have to put everything down on paper, as one of my players has started running the same campaign for a different group a week after I run mine.
After that campaign ended (Option 3) I decided to hand write a new world from the ground up. My intent was to build everything. It was going to be a mix between heavy duty world building and a central plot driven adventure line. I started with the creation myth again and tied it into the overarching theme. This theme was one wherein the gods had fought in the past and found their powers diminished. (Side Note: This theme tied into a universal theme that runs through all my world designs now.) Now the gods were awakening and a new war was about to start. In walk the players into the middle.
I detailed 10 mile hexes again and had a specific design goal for each 50mile area. In each area I directed my self to include: 1 unique monster of epic proportions, 1 thing that dealt with the theme, 1 “mysterious thing” that not even I knew the answer to. Instead of hand drawing everything I used Campaign Cartographer. I made sure to detail the area around the players (in case they moved in an odd direction) then focused my efforts into areas that I knew the plot might eventually lead them. The campaign ended about 2 years later with the country half detailed.
My next campaign was to be my opus. I spent two years detailing a space galaxy. I used the campaign setting of Dragonstar, but created the worlds myself. In all I created over 300 worlds, defining planetary details, trade routes, how it fit into the campaign and even included pictures of each planet. I set up databases with key people, organizations and the planets listed so that the players could look them up quickly. In all I have 3 computer programs (travel time calculator, interactive map, the database) the players could tap into, as well as 3 large books of planetary information. Not until the world design was done did I find players.
Similar to the past, I had an overall theme in mind (Blake’s 7) wherein the players would be renegades fighting the evil space empire. It was to be an epic sandbox.
I found a group of players to play, but the game ended shortly when a player turned on the party and created a TPK.
These days I tend to think in ways of campaign themes. I have an idea and then work at finding the best game system to fit it. Thereafter I build as much as I need. For the demon campaign I only needed a small area at the start as that was where all the action would be. For the space galaxy campaign I needed an entire galaxy mapped out due to the nature of exploration.
Currently I am working on a few new campaign ideas.
One is the Land of the Lost (as per the 70s TV show). I will only have to design a small area, but due to the fact exploration is part of the theme, I will have to detail it all ahead of time.
One thing I do these is days is adapt and reuse. If I can find a module, magazine article, setting that has something I can use, I will adapt it to the game I am running fitting it into my current theme or players/characters. I will also reuse things I’ve created in the past but that my current group has never seen before. For my current campaign I use a city I created over 20 years ago. Back then I detailed each building and street. Now I don’t have to do it again.
Oh, good thread here with lots of awesome insights.
My own campaign worlds are always custom, but large parts stolen from whereever I feel like.
I first choose a pantheon, which for the past 3 campaigns have been the Greek Pantheon. Nothing better than the petty squables of imperfect gods. \o/
Then what I flesh out at the start are the nations, their disposition to each other, their political structure and natural resources and strategic points of interest.
After this, I flesh out about 4 or 5 major organizations that are not nationbound. Usually trade companies but could also be roaming Knights Templar like cabals. These organizations have opposing goals or not, with varying degrees of evil intent or not. There is always one organization that is ruthless in means, but not inherently evil.
Next stop are the 2 or 3 major villainous Powers That Be. Yes, I never use just one.
My current campaign as 3, namely a sect wishing to resurrect their heathen god, a country ruled by zealous xenophobic priests of Athene who are hellbent on purging the lands of all unnatural magicks (aka, all things arcane) and a group of Gith mercenaries who are after a certain Lodestone that can make a fullblown galley fly and planeshift with everyone on board. This Lodestone is of course in the hands of the party, but they haven’t fully discovered it’s uses yet.
I make a map with the capital cities, dot a few towns here and there, but leave the specifics till they party actually goes there.
Then I show the map and ask the party where they want to start. Dependent on where they start, will I give out starter story and initial quests to each and all. After that it’s pure sandbox time, and I just follow where-ever my party decides to go. Which can lead to some pretty bizarre routes in the world and story archs.
I am actually working on my very first campaign. And well the very first campaign that I have ever played, in a sense. In fact just a few days ago I hosted my very first session. So as you can tell, I’m extremely new to the DnD world. In fact I suppose you could call me a n00b.. :( But hey, we have all been n00bs at some point in our lives right?
A brief history as to why I am new at this is; My elder brother bought a PHB because a few of his friends were going to try and put together a game of DnD. Well that didn’t last very long, because no one knew what they were doing. I spotted the book, and having a slightly addictive personality, I suppose, took the book and read through half of it in one night. Of course it took forever for me to actually understand any of it, but my knowledge of other Rpgs, Oblivion and Final Fantasy for example, did help. So I’ve been trying to soak up as much as I can, and as fast as I can. I do a lot of writing, so its not to difficult for me to come up with story lines, or characters. So far my friends seam excited and cant wait for our next session, which is on Thursday. But it would be amazingly helpful if I got some tips and ideas.
Any way, back to what this board is about. Currently my campaign has one of the most used and classic story. There is a group of baddies terrorizing the innocent people, and the good guys have to stop them. Throw in a cult who worships Zehir. Two feuding Kingdoms, and way to many towns and villages. And you have my campaign. Along the line are a ton of side quests to choose from. Every thing from filling out the names of towns on the map I printed out for them, to finding pieces of a treasure map to find a treasure a powerful wizard wanted to keep from the world. I put a lot of detail into it, but at the same time I didn’t. I still only have a few towns finished, and maybe 20 or so quests actually ready to be used. But as time goes by and things progress, things will evolve and change. We’ve added our own personal touches not found in the game, or at least what I’ve found, such as a race track and an arena where they can fight each other. Who’s to say if those touches will be successful, but it’s worth a shot.
I suppose my steps could be this. 1. Create a place (i.e country, kingdom. etc.) 2. Populate it with towns and villages. 3. Work on a basic story line. 4 Create a few quests to get things started. 5. As time goes on, make the story lines deeper and actually meaningful.
Celes, I think you started out well. You did what you should, broadly covering the country with areas and quests that might interest the characters, but leaving out details. A DM cannot really detail everything at once. Instead, focus on what the characters are likely to do next and make some encounters that you can use in many locations (they can still be part of the plot). A complete “sandbox” design with everything ready at once is something that takes too much time and effort to then be ignored by the players.
Also, make some pre-generated generic NPC’s with stats and have some names ready to be assigned to them in mid-session. Then when the players go somewhere unexpected, you can improvise quickly and still have game statistics at hand.
If you want a “main plot” it is a good idea not to tie it into a specific location for the players to find, at least not at once. Instead, tie it into some interesting event or NPC that the characters can encounter in many places. This should get them interested.
I disagree with Rothe. When I was in High School would have been the perfect time to detail a whole world. Not to say what you have done is wrong. In the end whatever works for you and your group is best. My point is I had all kinds of time, and like you could spend hours pouring over rule books, plus I read more at that age than I have in all the years since, so I had hundreds of ideas floating around in my head. Even if you were to work on it as a side project, the next time you want to run a campaign you will already have an incredibly detailed world to set it in.
One of the huge advantages to creating your own detailed world is this. I don’t care how many times you read a Campaign Sourcebook written by someone else, you will never have the same grasp on the intricacies of the world as you would if you wrote the source material yourself. In my campaign world if a player asks, out of the blue, what the political relationship between the city-states of Caer Arail, and Caer Golorion is, I can tell them without pause with a fair amount of detail. If the same question arises about Cormyr and Sembia in a Forgotten Realms campaign, I have to stop the game and pull out the Campaign Sourcebook to find an answer.
The advantage you have all over me is that you have time to do the work now. That will change over the years until you find you have almost no time to do these things. I’ve been working on my campaign world (on and off) for nearly a year and have very little to show for it because real life concerns continue to interrupt my design work. I continue to do it because it is fun and relaxing, but I have very little faith it will ever get used in a campaign that I run. I’ve morphed the project over the last 9 months into a possible self-publishing project to keep my interest alive.
