Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7400395" data-attributes="member: 29398">If that's all a campaign consists of - a single story arc - it's a campaign I'm not going to bother with.I look for something with multiple interweaving story arcs, dealt with by multiple parties that now and then meet and merge and split, where as one story ends another is half-done and a third is just getting started, where the characters come and go but the party (or parties) is forever, where there's no time pressure and the campaign can go on for many real-world years.For that, I'll design a world.Until you start trying to interweave them and need to know exactly who is where when and what happens where to see with influence if any is had on other PCs or events.  For this, quite precise tracking of time and place becomes rather essential.Example: I as DM know Party A is spending most of the month of Eolna in Torcha (a town), training and sorting out their treasury.  While running Party B (some of whom are known to Party A) it becomes clear they too will reach Torcha around mid-Eolna...which means there's a very good chance the parties will meet and be able to swap stories and info - and characters, and players, if they want.  What this informs me as DM is that sometime soon I'll probably need to either run a joint session of both parties or be ready for a storm of emails.The trick, I've learned, is to put the depth in the right areas.  History is vital.  Geography is vital to a point.  Pantheons are vital.  Cultures are vital to a point.  And the local stuff is far more vital to have in place ahead of time than the non-local stuff the PCs aren't likely to see for a while.You're making an assumption, which in my case at least is incorrect: I don't recycle my settings.  New campaign = new setting.But for players coming in partway through, yes there's lots of lore to catch up on.  Kind of unavoidable.Why does that matter?  When I'm doing this stuff I don't have players yet.Depends on your players, I suppose.  I'm not sure what would happen were I to one night look at my players and say "Hey, I've got nothing in mind as DM - what do your characters do next?".  Maybe I'll try this at some logical break point when they're in town after an adventure, see what happens. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The end of having it known by all that there's a solid foundation underpinning all this.Lanefan</blockquote>

Verification