Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Endymion Hawk" data-source="post: 9486841" data-attributes="member: 7047503">To elaborate briefly, his campaign at the time was structured such that there were three story arcs running simultaneously, each with a unique villain and genre; a war story against a mind flayer thrall nation, a political story about a crisis of succession in the dominant dragonborn empire, and a conspiracy/looming threat story about a necrotic cloud across the globe as Vecna and his cultists try to usurp the Raven Queen's position as a unified God of Death, Undeath, and Secrets.By setting up a toybox of villains and factions relating between those three arcs and tying his PCs into them, he could improvise campaign events in real time, structure episodes around specific characters to highlight their relationships with the arcs, and ALWAYS have campaign pressure as needed because the players need to deal with three distinct threats with their own ebbs and flows. Each arc provides its own types of gameplay, encounters, and tone, so when players need or want a break from one they can naturally switch as they want.This blew baby-me's mind, and I've used this structural technique for four campaigns at this point; a Strahd game (though that one has the central villain), a Dark Sun hexcrawl game, a megadungeon, and my current Saltmarsh/BloodBorne/Darkest Dungeon riff. It's absolutely fantastic advice, flexible between campaign styles, and keeps players VERY engaged.</blockquote>

Verification