D&D General Help a newer DM with homebrew world ! How do I complete the story !

[zebby]

Hello !

I tried on Reddit, but didnt receive any feedback, so I decide to come to a more specialised forum for help
I'm looking for advice, pointers on how to make this story "whole".

I'm blocking on how to translate the main goal of the campaign into an actual concrete idea/mechanism ...
Here are general info about my campaign, which I dubbed The Green Continent.

Group
New D&D group, with 2 kids of 10 years old, and 2 older veterans dads.

Campaign Story
The large story is : Religious war between the God of Nature/Chaos/Wilderness and God of Sun/Order/Civilisation.
Each Gods have a full continent working for them. The Sun God went to 'sleep', causing a long winter. The Nature God used that time to freeze the sea, and invade the Sun's civilisated continent. Spring came, beasts where fought and chased away, and was it is time to fight back.
The Sun God asked the 7 big Noble Families to send their eldest sons ( suns ) to lead a major offensive/colonization attempt on the Green continent, to put some order back in this chaotic land. So 7 younger lords, have to each pick 4 trusted generals (one of them picked the PC ) to help them acheive a specific goal : To be the 1st to own a legendary title : 'Conquerors of Nature' and with it, legetimize his claim on the crown and be named King of the Sun (the Throne is vacant since centuries).

3 core system
I incorporated in the game 3 different ways to play, since everyones interest were differents.

1- is Legendary Monster Hunts. I bought Heliana's kickstarter and will use their hunts system. Each of these Hunts feature a legendary boss-monsters that is the embodiement of the chaotic and natural forces on the continent.

2- is base/city developpement (birthright). One of the kid love the idea of 'building his own city' and have asked for it. I will use kingdom and warfare, which I own but never was able to play. It is losely a 1v1 kingdom war, and when you clear your enemy, you can keep going vs a new one.

3- is more classic D&D. Since there is 7 Noble Sons, and I gave them each an over-exagerated virtue they embodied (their friend is Sacrifice), to balance things out Nature will have created their Chaotic counterpart, based on the 7 Sins. They will interract and show up in the campaign, as an evil organisation bend on foiling the invasions (BBEG).

Gameplay exemple that binds the 3 systems together
They will arrive on the actual continent in the wrong city next week, and they will run into a large scale invasion from an Orc Horde. They will run for it, and be chased around until they manage to get back to their settlement with the survivors, but they will have to make sure they arent followed ( like destroying the only bridge over the huge dangerous river) to stop the Horde army. Once in town, they get to start their base building, with a limit on time since the Orc Hordes will be on them soon (Birthright - #2). I will let them choose if they want to proceed with a Monster Hunt (#1) and use the reward to boost their strengh for the upcomming invasion, or if they do some Quest for allies(#3).

Conclusion
1st .. thanks for reading it through
And this is what the campaign will be like, cycling through 'chapters'. each chapters will feature one Legendary hunt, 1 Chaotic Champions hunting a Noble Sons and 1 group to defend/invite with their city. Normally, after each chapter, I jump like a month into the futur, where the new big things happen, and give them imput on how the story evolved, what each important person did, etc.

Now ... this is where I need help !
But here is where I'm stuck.
I feel like the my concept is good and fun, and theres enough interesting lore, and it's going well since we started 3 sessions ago but ... How do they "win" ?
Some campaigns are going to walk toward : BBEG try to (objective) and PC stops him. Demons invade, PC stops them. PC destroys the evil ring.

In my game ... How do their Noble friend get named a 'Conqueror of the Wild' ?

.. I was juggling with the idea of an artefact of the sun that you can find on the place of an old war-ending ritual (think atomic bomb). It could be more thematic if related to the legendary hunts. Or is it simply conquer the 7 provinces one at a time Birthright style and that's it. Or linked to the 7 Chaotic champions, each having an item that can be build into .. w/e. I just got no clue about what to do in the 'bigger picture', and having no clear idea on how the story ends makes it hard for me to 'move' the importants NPC / organisations forward. I dont want the whole world to be a 'static' where actors do nothing until the PC steps close to them.

any though on the campaign ?

 

[Yora]

Well, to simplify things first: Either the PCs defeat the forces of the green god, or they lose against the forces of the green god. Though perhaps there might be a third option to come to some kind of compromise with the servants of the green god. And I guess a fourth option that both sides effectively annihilate each other.
I think for a really fun and memorable campaign, all four of these outcomes are on the table. It should be left to the players actions to determine which of those it will be.

Killing the green god and all its followers and taking control of the entire world is probably not on the table. So you would have to define how much land the players actually have to conquer to have the sun god consider it a victory.

 

[Stormonu]

That’s a lot to unpack!

My first reaction is “Don’t write the ending yet”. For now, don’t worry about a win condition, you’re a bit early in the campaign. Let the characters develop a bit, and then it should become easier down the road to build towards an endgame. Just be aware, some campaigns don’t work towards a final confrontation/ending, they just end when the current story is done.

You have an opportunity here as you haven’t yet defined an endgame. Get the player’s input - subtlety or overtly - to find out from them what they may want. Let the players come up with a few ideas how to get their Noble friend his title and then choose one and go with it. Players are a creative bunch, they might just surprise you.

Also, I’d steer away from the X, Y, Z chapter progress. Mix things up a little bit and don’t let it get too predictable. A quest out of the ordinary will be refreshing from time to time and can shock the players out of complacity from rote adventuring.

Finally, you might want to consider that at some point during the campaign, switching sides might be tempting/the right thing to do. These are two complex forces/gods at work and rarely is one 100% good/bad, and it might be a “point of view” sort of situation where they discover there was a good reason for the God of Nature/Chaos to act the way they did (after all, the Sun God did go to sleep for a few hundred years on his worshippers….maybe its not as caring as it lets on, or Order may even be oppressive, like the New Order of Star Wars).

 

[Richards]

What happens if a greater threat suddenly rears its ugly head, causing the forces of Nature and the Sun to have to band together to deal with this new enemy? I could see the forces of Undeath being natural enemies of both the God of Nature and the God of the Sun. So when hordes of undead creatures start entering the lands where the forces of Nature and the Sun are having their little war, then what?

Johnathan

 

[AverageMojito]

My first reaction is “Don’t write the ending yet”.

I second that. In one of my last games, I had no clue how the party would "win" against the BBEG. I didn't even stat him or anything until 10 sessions in. He was there, from the very first session, as a voice through a monolith that catapulted the party into a race against time, but the "how to win" came entirely from the gameplay (as it should be most of the time, I'd say).

 

[overgeeked]

Wow. That's a lot. You're a newer DM you say? Maybe start smaller next time. Consider dialing this one back a bit.

Players tend to be way, way less interested in lore than the DM. Unless it directly related to what they're doing in the moment, it probably doesn't need to be there.

It sounds like you're skipping over anything not directly related to your "3 games" and summarizing the "downtime" in between. Is that right?

I'm looking for advice, pointers on how to make this story "whole".

The DM shouldn't be writing the story. The DM should be setting up interesting situations for the PCs to deal with. The story comes from the PCs interacting with the situations presented. The whole point of playing an RPG is the players getting to choose stuff. Left or right. This town or that town. You can't have the DM deciding on how the story unfolds/ends and the players having relevant choices and agency. RPGs are all about player agency. Not the DM telling the players a story.

I'm blocking on how to translate the main goal of the campaign into an actual concrete idea/mechanism ...

Not everything needs to be mechanics. What have the players told you they want for the main goal of the campaign?

 

[Tonguez]

youve already got 7 Factions (Lords), a set of Boss Monsters, a City/Nation to build AND a preset Victory condition - that is Everything You need to do, the rest is for the Players to do and discover In Game.

If anything I’d ask your players to set their own victory condition - ask each one to decide on a long term goal based on what ‘Conqueror of Nature’ means to them and then go from there

 

[Guest 7034872]

That’s a lot to unpack!

My first reaction is “Don’t write the ending yet”. For now, don’t worry about a win condition, you’re a bit early in the campaign. Let the characters develop a bit, and then it should become easier down the road to build towards an endgame. Just be aware, some campaigns don’t work towards a final confrontation/ending, they just end when the current story is done.

I sure did learn the truth of that. After all my brainstorming of possible paths, side quests, and weird narrative alleyways the party might take, it was right in session zero that I saw, "Nope, they're going to do something else." I agree with Stormonu, zebby: don't worry about the ending until you get a lot closer to needing one. Your players, I expect, are going to surprise you, and they're going to surprise you with just how much they'll surprise you.

Another thing I've learned is--when it comes time--to work out as many possible endings as you can think of. Don't just push this whole thing toward one ideal result: brainstorm all the possible conclusions to which a party might take it. Then brainstorm some more.

They are going to surprise you.

You have an opportunity here as you haven’t yet defined an endgame. Get the player’s input - subtlety or overtly - to find out from them what they may want. Let the players come up with a few ideas how to get their Noble friend his title and then choose one and go with it. Players are a creative bunch, they might just surprise you.

There you have it.

Last bit: I think this is something I learned from Matt Colville's videos, but my memory ain't what it used to be: don't plan out future chapters in great detail until the time for them approaches, because the unexpected twists your party will introduce in the meantime easily can change the whole thing's eventual shape. And that's good, not bad, IMO. I want my players to exert that level of influence on the whole thing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

First I want to give a counter to the “start small” advice you will always get in such threads. It’s certainly something to take into account, but it isn’t universally good advice.

You need to be excited to run the game. What I will say instead is, don’t try to detail every character and place. Try to keep your notes quick and easy to reference, maybe two lines per thing.

 

[Tonguez]

also if you have enjoyed the world building aspect as much as I do you can play your own minigame between sessions and roll up random events for each of your 7 Lords - brainstorm how thats affected the setting and then let the playets know whats happening in the world.

oh and for nation building games I‘d go chapter per seasons rather than per month (so 4 chapters per ic Year), that gives more time for quests and wars and also allows seasonal events