Starting a New D&D Campaign - Part One

I currently have 12 "campaign drafts" sitting and collecting digital dust in my Google Drive RPG draft folder.

(Source: pinterest.com)

New campaign ideas keep popping into my head, so I jot them down in my draft folder, and every weekend or so I pick one draft and flesh it out further. I usually delete those drafts who didn't get any attention for some time (a month or two, usually), so the folder now contains around 12 half-baked campaigns, almost ready-to-play.

When starting to work on a new campaign, I usually don't have any information about the players who will be playing it, so I can only develop it up to a certain point.

I usually jot down the following:

1. The campaign setting (I default to the Forgotten Realms these days, but some campaign ideas work better in other settings)
2. The general plot, from a bird's eye view.
3. How the player characters meet, why are they adventuring together, and why do they care about the plot.
4. Any good idea I had about a special location, encounter, or NPC.

Campaign Setting

I don't really have the time to develop my own campaign settings. I have some drafts (again) or worlds I created, but running a campaign in a home-brew world requires a lot of ongoing work between sessions, and I don't have the time to invest in world building anymore. 

Published settings suites me better, especially those who get some new content published on a regular basis. I don't mind using settings that aren't officially maintained (Greyhawk comes to mind, and Eberron), but settings like the Forgotten Realms, who seem to get endless love from Wizards of the Coast works best for me, as I can loot stuff from adventures, modules, articles and books published with FR in mind. I also own the old FR grey box...so nostalgia definitely play its role here.

Most of my campaign ideas revolve around a main theme that can be described by a single sentence - such as "Gods meddle in human affairs" or "A demon found a way to get himself free from his eternal prison", or even "An evil alien race is about to invade the planet - with a similarly evil warlord planning to stop it". Some campaign settings are more suited for some themes, but I think any D&D setting can host any theme, with some modifications. So, if my idea can work in the Forgotten Realms, I just assume the campaign will be played in the Forgotten Realms.

The General Plot

I usually start with a single sentence, something that can help me focus when the campaign is already underway. I found that most of my campaigns rarely unfold as designed, mainly due to the fact that I try to avoid railroading as much as possible. In addition, sometimes players have ideas that can take the campaign to a better direction than I envisioned - and I do my best to cooperate. So a single sentence that describe the overall story is often vague enough to allow some flexibility in the story, while providing a 'lighthouse' for me to keep the ship in the right direction.

Most of my campaigns are epic in nature, with a world changing event looming or already underway. Such campaigns can be run for many sessions, with the story slowly unfolding. Characters can go from first level to the 6th or even 8th before the main story really kicks in. It allows for character development, and some "getting sense" of the players' interests. If needs be, I modify the story in a way that stays loyal to the original plot line, but entertain the players as much as possible.

The 5th edition D&D Dungeon Master Guide has some great advice on creating campaigns - while reading the first chapter I had a sudden realization that 90% of my campaign ideas are about big events that literally shake the world. I'm sensing my next campaign will tone-down the action level and focus on smaller regions and tighter plot lines - but that's remains to be seen.

How the Characters Meet

I learned in the hard way that in order for the campaign to start on the right foot, the party must already be 'a party'. Namely, while the players might be playing for the first time, the characters must already be familiar with each other, and have a clear goal and, preferably, a patron to send them off to their first mission.

Why? Well, you want some glue to make sure the party stays together and heads in the right direction at the first session. I had groups splitting on the first session, simply because characters had different interests, or because players failed to realize that D&D is a cooperative game. I don't mind in-play debates or splits in session 18, deep inside the story, with the characters expressing different opinions in a heated argument. But I don't enjoy several strangers sitting around my table heading each in his own direction without thinking about the guys sitting next to them. I found that declaring the group as such in the beginning, and making sure they have a patron that can 'show them the right way' to adventure works best. The campaign can break later on, with the players at the reins, but the first session should be run as smoothly as possible.

Examples can be:

• The characters are working as 'special crimes' investigators, reporting to the local temple and handling cases with suspected demonic involvement.
• The characters are handling barely-legal deals for a shady merchant with a love for ancient arcane devices.
• The characters are responsible for transporting dangerous prisoners from and to the local asylum, with a dwarven lord (running the prison) as their patron.

It's best to keep it simple, and make sure the patron (and the party's current "job") actually fits into the story, so the relation stays intact at least for a couple of sessions.

Sometimes, no patron / specific goal comes to mind. In this case, I just plan for the characters to be at a specific time in a specific place, with some event bonding them together, at least until the campaign hook sinks in. This method works best with groups you are already familiar with, and with players who are willing to "play along" at the first session. I still prefer the former approach.

Good Ideas

Sometimes ideas flow that don't really match your current campaign draft, or you sometimes have this really cool encounter idea, or an NPC that clicks with the story. I jot down a paragraph or two every time I have one of these ideas. You never know when those things will come handy.

Ideas run out, and inspiration might go away for a while. DM 'burn out' is a real thing, and so jotting some notes when inspiration strikes ensures your campaign will survive a 'dry season'.

I also made it a habit to invest time in reading published adventures (old or new), easily read fantasy books (anything under 300 pages) and material found in Wikipedia in subjects that can be related to D&D campaigns (such as the history of the Roman Empire, naval piracy, ancient Egyptian legends etc). Such "pools of inspiration" can really save the day. I remember running a session with NPCs build from sigmund freud's definitions of Id, Ego and Super-Ego. Inspiration can come from a lot of sources, so I invest time in exposing myself to some, and jotting down ideas so I can revisit them when in need.

(Source: tumblr)

Following the above steps - my draft campaign folder grew to 12 campaigns that just need several hours of work to make them playable.

So how to continue from here? What do you do after you have your draft campaign ready, and you even have players who are willing to participate?

More on that in Part Two of "Starting a New D&D Campaign"....

4th Edition Retrospect (with Kids!)

My 4th edition campaign ended over a year ago, and we quickly moved to D&D Next and 5th edition once it came out.

Surprisingly, my home campaign (with my kids) is still run using 4th edition rules. I thought it would be a good exercise to convert my son's current character - an Eladrin Paladin - to 5th edition, but he got bored just after generating stats, and refused to continue.

I thought long and hard about it, and tried to understand what did I do wrong. After all, he loves reading his 4th edition player's handbook over and over, so why didn't he enjoy creating a 5th edition PC?

I realized that 5th edition took away the single element he liked best in the game - "Powers".

In 4th edition, many skills, attacks, spells and special abilities are formulated into At-will, Encounter or Daily "Powers" the player can activate.

For a kid used to playing games on computers, tablets and consoles, 4th makes a lot of sense. You have a character, it has powers you can activate, go have fun adventuring in the Forgotten Realms.

Generating a character is fast, revolves around selecting those powers, and at the end of the process you have a rather powerful character - lots of hit-points, self-healing abilities and at-will powers means you can have fun with even that single character adventuring.

In 5th edition, the situation is a little different. Yes, there are a lot of choices to be made, but the 'interesting stuff' only happens around level 3, and level 1 PCs are weak in comparison to 4th edition characters. The layout of the 5th edition book makes it hard to understand at first glance what the PC can do - and that was very important to my young players.

So we kept using 4th edition at home.

Things got more interesting when I allowed my son to run a game for us (with my daughter and myself as players). Here, 4th edition really shined. All he had to do is come up with a simple story (he's 9yo, so the stories were largely influenced by the recent TV show he'd watched, or the recent movie - which was cool). Once he had the story, 'designing' encounters was easy - pick XP budget, select monsters, go!. Hard to make a mistake here.

In a sense, 4th edition technicalities makes it a very easy and fun system to run, as long as the scenarios are kept simple. Too many players fighting too many monsters with too many abilities makes the game hard to track - but with a DM and two players running 1st level characters, we had the famous RPG "sweet spot" right there and then.

But what about role-playing and out-of-combat scenarios? Well, here 4th edition skill system shined. The simplified skill system made it easy to complement dice roles with "acting out" and pretending to be the characters speaking to the King or the Evil Wizard.

The main take-away is that 4th edition is very structured, and its presentation makes that structure obvious and easy to grasp, which is a bless when playing with kids who are mature enough to bite into a role-playing system, but still small enough to need easy to understand rules and easy to press "buttons" to play the game.

It's interesting to note that my own introduction to D&D was with the Basic Set (the red box), which was a very simple system combined with a presentation that was meant to inspire. When reading the player's booklet as a kid back then in the 80', I felt so excited to see game that presented a system that 'sorted out' all that buzzing imaginative energy I had as a kid and laid it out neatly so me and my friends could share wonderful moments of role-playing in a fantasy-world. I didn't look for 'what my character can do'. I knew it could do anything I wanted, the system was there to make some sense of a fantasy character wondering around in a fantasy setting.

Now it seems a 10 years old kid is already so familiar with gamification terms such as 'level', 'power', and with the slew of fantasy movies (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Hobbit and their likes) that a role-playing system trying to focus on imagination fails to hit the mark, but a system focused on 'levels' and 'powers' and that 'trick Legolas does when shooting 4 arrows in one pull of the bow' connects easily.

In a sense, 5th edition is the closest to the spirit of my old Red Box D&D, while having the technical aspects of a modern RPG system. It will be interesting to see if the young generation of role-players will find 5th edition digestible - they'll probably need help from old D&D veterans like me to show them the way. At least the setting stays the same - my kids were always adventuring in and around Neverwinter. But more on that in a later post....

And Now for Something Completely Different

Recently I was re-introduced to a great game called Magic the Gathering.

Magic the Gathering (or MTG for short) is a collectible card game in which you assemble a deck of cards and battle against an opponent and his deck. Each card represents a magical spell or a creature which you cast to knock your opponent from 20 life to zero.

(Image: http://gatherer.wizards.com)

I dabbled with Magic when I was younger, but very few of my friends played the game, and since it required buying rather expensive cards on a regular basis I ditched it and focused on the pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons instead.

I recently learned that several co-workers were into the game, and so we dusted off our old decks and started playing on a semi-regular basis.

So what makes Magic such a fun game to play?

1. First and foremost, it's heavily fantasy-flavored. Vampires, wizards, dragons, goblins and other 'D&D-like' creatures and spells are all over the place (and the art on some of these cards is simply stunning)
2. It's a war-game with simple rules, but some of the cards can break the rules in certain ways, allowing for a wide variety of tactics and strategies to be employed. In a sense it's like playing Chess. The basic rules are simple, but winning the game requires more than just moving the pieces according to the rules...
3. Deck building is a big part of the game. Each player needs to construct a 60-card deck, but there are virtually thousands of cards out there, and new cards are released throughout the year (every year since 1993!). There is no 'best deck', as each deck has ups and downs, and the luck of the draw still plays a part in deciding a game.

So how is the game played? Well, simply put (and omitting a lot for the sake of simplicity), you got two types of cards in your deck. Lands, and Spells.

Lands come in colors: Black, White, Red, Green and Blue. Here is an example of a Blue Land card:

(Image: http://gatherer.wizards.com)

Spells also come in colors. Here is a red spell card for example:

(Image: http://gatherer.wizards.com)

In a nutshell, players 'cast spells' (play spell cards) by using 'mana' (land cards), with the goal of reducing the opponent from 20 life to 0 and win the game.

Here is an example of a Magic game 'battlefield' layout in the midst of a game.  

(Image: http://archive.wizards.com/mtg)

I won't go into the details of the rules any further - I urge you to browse the official 'how to' section at Wizards site if you want to get the hang of the game, and if you want to enjoy my future posts about Magic the Gathering!

While I still plan to write D&D related posts (got an interesting retrospect on 4th edition coming up), I will also delve into MTG gameplay every once in a while. Nothing to worry about - D&D is still in my heart, but if I want a fantasy-flavoured casual play to fill up half an hour - MTG is definitely the way to go!

Here's a (rather nerdy) introduction to MTG (by Wizards of the Coast).

Enjoy!

The Pattern

I really like the Eberron Campaign Setting.

(Image: wikipedia)

Quoting Wizards of the Coast: 

[Eberron] combines pulp adventure and intrigue in a world where magic-driven technology has produced airships, trains, and similar advancements comparable to early 20th-century Europe.

It's a rather low-level D&D setting, with very few NPCs topping level 10. If the DM emphasizes the setting's grit and intrigue elements over the techno-magical ones, the campaign can express the mindset and tone of movies like Brotherhood of the Wolves, From Hell, The Name of the Rose, Pirates of the Caribbeans and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Taken into the techno-magical grey-zone, scenes from movies like Blade or even League of Extraordinary Gentlemen can be depicted.

This versatility - along with the relatively low power level - is what attracts me the most to this setting. I can cater to a lot of tastes, grabbing ideas from various books, movies and TV shows while stilling feeling I'm playing D&D.

Want a vampire slaying session, with the PCs armed by a shady governmental agency dedicated to undead-slaying supplying them with Batman-like gadgets? Check!

A James Bond scene in which the PCs try to hijack a gnomish submarine in order to bring it for inspection by the authorities? Check!

An out-of-the-blue Startrek session with the PCs serving onboard the Enterprism - a House Lyrindar Airship sent to explore strange, new lands?

(Image: 1d4chan.org)

And the list goes on and on…

One of the most interesting aspects of Eberron is the 'shades of grey' approach to everything related to Alignment. Unlike most D&D settings, Good and Evil in Eberron are in the eyes of the beholder. A nation that employs undead as troops in the Forgotten Realms setting (think Thay) is an evil force to be reckoned with. No good-aligned ruler will even consider such a horrendous idea. But in Eberron, the nation of Karrnath have used undead as troops for years now, but it is a proud human nation with a strong military tradition. Evil? some will say so, but most of its citizens shrug and continue with their daily lives, dismissing their undead guardians as a necessity in a harsh world.

DM'ing a session in Eberron is actually a lot of work, especially for me, as I really like an intrigue heavy plot with lots of NPCs and 'powers behind thrones'. It means I need to be prepared with various agendas, goals and secrets each NPC have, in order to easily improvise when the players interact with them.

Again Eberron's way of 'doing things' works the way I like it - as Eberron encourages plenty of slow-paced investigation scenes broken by a few fierce combat scenes. It's never a 'room after a room' with Goblins (or other monsters) guarding chests of treasure and a boss fight in the end. In Eberron, the dungeon is most likely deserted, with the only real danger being the double-agent guide the PCs hired..

Because Eberron's tone is different from the baseline 'Heroic Fantasy' assumed by the D&D rules, the simple 'kick-in-the-door' style of play (played with one-line background PCs) will never life up to the full potential of the setting. If you want a successful Eberron campaign, you should consider to add the following ingredients:

1. A patron to kick-start the first few 'quests'. It can be an agent of an shady organization, a noble with aspirations, or a merchant 'who knows too much'. Someone the PCs can trust (at least to a point) with the ability to point them in the right direction if they are lost.
2. PCs with goals, agendas and secrets, with some ties to the patron. Goals, agendas and secrets are a must if you want rounded PCs that will be able to pick the story up and drive it themselves. Ties to the patron are needed for the first few sessions, until the PCs find another anchor to build their story around.
3. Slowly expanding 'fog-of-war' circles. In an intrigue heavy campaign, the PCs spend most of their time in the dark. But that darkness needs to recede if you want them engaged. It also need to recede slowly enough to allow you some room to maneuver, since intrigue scenarios are really susceptible to unexpected PC actions. Your plot should be two or three steps ahead of the PCs 'sphere of influence'. Too close, and you risk them 'blowing your cover' and killing your campaign too soon. Too far, and you risk a very loose coupling between the story and the PCs actions.    

You'll also want to discuss the world with your players. Knowledge of the world's history is not a must, but some familiarity and 'openness' to the setting's quirks can a boon.

Here's a good finisher to exemplify the special tone of this setting:

(Image: http://i605.photobucket.com)

   

Care to guess which is which?



Enjoy!

Post Mortem

Writers write.

“Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend than inspiration.”
—Ralph Keyes

As an aspiring Dungeon Master, I made it a routine to sit down once every month or so and outline a campaign: writing a handout, a campaign bible, and a first adventure. I discovered that it's the best way for me to hone my writing skills, and keep the 'juices flowing'.

I also try to do some retrospect, think about the last adventure / campaign I ran, focusing on what went well and what fell apart.

So here's a snapshot from a recent campaign I ran: The heroes - low level characters - are walking through large city at dusk when a demonic portal opens and belches out a demon. A fight erupts, and the heroes kill the creature, but the portal is still open. After investigating the portal, one of the players suggests to 'hand off' this issue to a 'high level NPC', as clearly 'someone else' should handle it.

Now, I just want to be clear: the portal was not a 'random encounter'. The heroes were dancing around the issue of a demonic manifestation in the city for several sessions, so the portal was not a big surprise, and actually a story element.

But - to be completely honest (and hence the post-morterm), I never even considered the players would go and search for 'somebody else' to fix this portal issue for them.

Big mistake.

I mean - what was I thinking? A demonic portal, a large city, and a group of low level characters? I should have planned for them to go and seek someone to figure this out…

So here are some points to consider, analyzing myself as a DM:

1. I see the PCs as the 'main event' of the campaign. I therefore tend to downgrade NPCs to a point of making them weaklings. Authorities, local rulers, high-level wizards, all have 'reasons' why the PCs should handle things, or 'excuses' why they can't do it themselves. It's wrong, and it breaks the suspension of disbelief. The PCs are the stars of the movie, but in order for the movie to succeed the stands and the rest of the cast should come into life when needed, make an impact, and dissolve into the background right after their scene is done
2. Running a D&D session as the Dungeon Master is the Art of Moving Forward. If something doesn't go as planned, the DM's job is to smooth the corners and keep the story moving. I did recognize the players' valid reasoning as they expressed the need for a higher-level official to handle a demonic portal in the middle of a bustling city, but I got stuck on making excuses instead of saying yes and moving forward. The art here is to identify you're in a "no" mode, and quickly move into a "yes, but…" mode.
3. I wrongly assume that the players see the story from the same perspective as I do. That's simply a bad way to look at things. The DM's screen should be a good reminder that the players might perceive and experience the game in a very different way than the DM. Building on the movie metaphor - they are like actors who don't see the whole picture, don't have access to the complete script, and get to act in front of a green screen. The DM's job is to make sure the players know what's going on, feed them with bite-size story chunks, and challenge them appropriately. 

So what did I learn from this, as I write my new campaign outline?

1. If I want the players to try and overcome a challenge, it should be within their abilities to overcome. It might be difficult or dangerous, but within their limits. Placing the bar too high might drive them away - which is good if that's the purpose of the challenge. But if you want engagement, the problem at hand should be within their capabilities to solve.
2. The keyword in the above bullet is "try". The players should have choices to make, and walking away from an encounter is a valid choice. As long as the story moves forward, and the players are now presented with the consequences of their choices, all is good. The trick is to present meaningful choices, and for that, the players might need to know the consequences up ahead. Easier said than done, though.
3. The story should always be present. As a shadow, or as an aura, but always there. The story should develop slowly, but consistently. Slowly, to allow the players to digest, and to allow you to diverge if the players don't show an interest. Consistently, because the players don't see the whole picture, and consistency over time helps them understand something is going on, grasp its importance, and make good decisions up the road.

And for the name of my new campaign: The Ancient of Days, set in the Forgotten Realms, in the small town of Port Llast, where rumors of a Seer amassing power in the northern city of Luskan makes the locals nervous….

Enjoy!