Sculpting a Campaign, How do you do it?

[Nightfall]

Elrond,

If you are honestly feeling stuck, I suggest looking at Paizo's/Dungeon's Adventure Paths. Maybe something from there will spark an idea and thus give you something to work with.

If that's not your style, there's always Goodman Games and/or Necromancer Games.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Hello
I know that this question is addressed in many issues of dungeon, RPGtips, and various source books, but what i'm interested in is how you actually start crafting your campaign before the players even think of picking up any dice. I imagine that the responses (if any) will be wide and varied.

I, myself find it particularly hard to create a campaign. I've tried various methods but i never seem to produce enough information to satisfy the players curiosity. Another fault of mine (although i'm currently working hard at reducings this) is i always seem to miss a path, method or problem that a adventure's villian could use exploit or use. Often i realise this when one of the players asks "Why didn't he...".

When one of the players does that, smile mysteriously and say: "That's a good question, isn't it?"

Then take a note and work it out until next session. This also allows them to stew in their paranoia for some more time...


Apart from that, I echo the advice about starting with the main villains - but use them as shadowy masterminds from behind the scenes instead of letting the PCs encounter them directly. This allows you to throw a vast number of minions at the PCs whenever you can't think of something else.

 

[Nifft]

1/ Start small -- and don't be afraid of being vague about stuff, or about stuff not being known to PCs and NPCs. The players do NOT have a right to know everything.

2/ Love your setting -- it should never be made explicit, but it is really the DM's character.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Falldog]

I did something very simple before creating Midwood: I opened the Players Handbook and wrote down what races and classes I wanted to be local (and thus defining the first characters the players could create). Then I went through my monster books, especially MM1 (I knew I wanted it to be a mostly classic D&D game) and wrote down my favorite monsters, then closed the book.

<snippity-snip-snip!>

Maybe I've just been a moron all this time, but such an approach has never occurred to me. And now I find myself really, really wishing it had! I always tend to start big - with the theme, or the 'twist' of the setting - and then have to trawl through my too-many books to find monsters and characters to populate it. Doing it the other way round, though... I can see how, firstly, that would save heaps of time, and secondly, would give a lovely, well thought-out focus to the campaign.

OK, that's definitely how I'm doing it next time!

 

[Joshua Randall]

I'm not adding anything new, but what the heck.

I start with a big idea. I usually try to make it a disruptive one. (A god has died. The king has died. The orc horde has taken the western frontier. Magic has stopped working. All the good dragons have disappeared.)

Then I brainstorm the ramifications of this idea. How will it affect the game world? How with that trickle down to the PCs? And what sorts of adventures might be directly related to the idea?

I don't worry about why it happened or what can be done about it. Eventually, I will figure out the former, and the PCs will figure out the latter. (And I'll usually let their solution work, although of course I put obstacles in their way. The obstacles are known as adventures, or modules in old-school parlance.)

Then I brainstorm important character related to the big idea. If the king is dead, who stands to benefit? How will those people react? And who will oppose them? And then how will that filter out to other people?

I jot all this down on pieces of paper, and I end up with a big, disorganized mess. I recommend that you find a more organized way to do things, however.

If you are referring to nitty-gritty like maps and rivers and mountains and city names and and and... I just steal that from somewhere else; I'm too lazy and time-crunched to make it all up myself. Usually when I grab a map from a setting, I don't bring the rest of the setting baggage along. (E.g., I might use the Eberron map, but not warforged or changelings or the Draconic Prophecy.)

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yeah, if you've got no concrete ideas, pick up the War of the Burning Sky saga, and have others do the work for you.

Otherwise, start with a cool idea (a monster you like, a villainous plot you like), and work it into a town. Run from there.

 

[Kafkonia]

I did something very simple before creating Midwood: I opened the Players Handbook and wrote down what races and classes I wanted to be local (and thus defining the first characters the players could create).

I've done something similar for my campaign, except that I went through a few of my books (FF, MM2, MM3, MM4, LM, HoH) and wrote out a list of all of the lower-level monsters (CR<=4) that fit into the concept of the campaign. I had a few themes courtesy of the HM module I'm using as a springboard, so next I made up lists of which of those creatures fit particularly well (ie allips fit into the insanity theme, dusk giants fit into the immorality theme), as well as two or three base classes per theme.

I find that this approach not only helps solidify the concept, but gives me ideas I might not otherwise have had, such as incorporating the meenlock.