Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shiroiken" data-source="post: 8006701" data-attributes="member: 6775477">I did something like this as a West Marches style game for D&D. Rather than a village, I eventually had to move it to a nearby city for it to continue to make sense ("why is all this happening in such a small area?!?"). There's two approaches, depending on how you work best: quest based or location based.If you want to design your quests first, focus on the NPCs of your village/town/city. They're the ones who need the PCs to do stuff, for the most part, so after coming up with about a dozen or two rough ideas, you can then design the region around the base (as well as the base itself) on the needs of the quests you have. The advantage to this is that if you have a specific location required for a quest (such as a mountain, desert, sea) you can just make sure it happens to be there. The downside is that your regional map may make very little sense geographically, which may or may not matter to you and your players.The other method, which I prefer, is to design the region and home base first. In general you want to try and have as many different terrain types you reasonably can, but some are just not going to be possible depending on how large your regional map is. Once you have the everything designed, you can look at it and think about what might be happening there. This then leads to the inspiration for the quests. The advantage is that the world should make a logical sense, and in theory your quests can be somewhat integrated without having an overarching plot. The downside is that once you design the region, you'll lock yourself out of certain adventure types without a LOT of work moving the players outside of the region (which can be very problematic if the players like the new region instead).As for the general layout of the campaign, I'd have the players hear about several things happening about town (quests), letting them choose what they want to investigate. Ideally, session 0/1 introduces them to the town and the various quests, which they will decide which to follow up on at the end of the session. This gives you the time between to fully flesh out the adventure for the next session, rather than having to design a bunch all at once. I would also periodically have quest not chosen to resolve without the PCs, either being done by other adventurers (possibly a rival party) or reaching their natural conclusion (failed adventure). This allows you to introduce new quests, while removing old quests the party obviously has no interest in. This also gives the feeling of a living, breathing campaign world that exists beyond the PCs.</blockquote>

Verification