I'm Trying to write my first campaign, but am having a classic case of writers block. Can anyone give me any Ideas?
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“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
Start with a town and give it a problem. Is it having issues with undead? Cultists? Raiders like goblins or kobolds or orcs? Maybe a lone monster that stalks the forests or fields or alleys at night?
From there build out a couple of social encounters to learn about the problem or investigate things. Maybe some sort of hazard that the party has to overcome. And then develop an easy combat or two as well as a set-piece boss battle of sorts.
Once the boss battle has come to an end, add some interesting thing in the leftover treasure that might lure the party o another location and do it all over again. Keep doing that until you develop a through-line story.
My advice is this: Start writing your campaign when you feel inspired. If this is your first campaign and you don't have any ideas, it's not time to write it. If you just try and force it, you'll end up hating it and starting over anyway. Read some fiction. Watch some movies. Gather some things you like from those external sources and mix them together. Start small - you don't have to write all the lore at once. Create a single adventure and build your overall story from there. Things like goblins attacked a small town ... why? Did someone hire them, or were they pushed there because of something bigger taking over their territory? Who hired them? What creature is now lurking in their tunnels? You can literally expand in any direction you want once you decide on a starting point. Don't over think it.
Oh and have fun doing it. If it becomes a source of frustration, it's not worth it.
First advice: don't start trying to write a campaign. RPGs are not novels, whatever grand arc you come up with is probably not going to survive the PCs, and if you're not writing for publication it doesn't have to. Instead, write a seed that has plenty of room to grow. It's helpful (but not entirely necessary) to have a sense of the larger scale struggle the current problems are a part of, and/or hints about future challenges, but limit detailed preparation to the stuff that's actually within their current capabilities.
This is going to sound flippant, but it's really not meant to be. If this is the first game you've ever run, my advice for writing a campaign is... don't. Don't attempt to create a whole world and 20 levels of adventure from scratch. It can be a lot of fun, if you are enjoying it. But, as Lathius says, if you aren't inspired to write, it can be a chore, frustrating, and overwhelming. If you have never run a single game, the best advice I can give is to find a level 1 one-shot adventure and use it. Learn from it how adventures are made. Spend your energy on learning the rules, figuring out how to handle the players in the game, and making it fun. Or just write enough to fill one small dungeon, outside of a town with one tavern and a general store. Metamongoose has solid advice on doing this.
If you have already run your first game, but are looking to expand your scope and try a whole campaign, then it's still often best to start in a similar way. It can be tempting to try to plan ahead for 10 levels of an epic plot, but your players will make sure it never happens the way you thought, and all that work goes to waste.
Here's the method that works for me. First find out what kind of game your players want. The tone, the setting, the power level. Do they want a gritty epic or swashbuckling heroics? What kind of characters are they excited to play? Do they like combat more, or political intrigue, or dungeon delving survival? Do they have a favorite monster? Do they like airships? Abandoned temples with lost treasure?
Whatever they say, make a note. It's all going in your game somewhere. When they tell you their character ideas, ask them to describe the town/city/tribe they are from. Have them give it a name and something it is known for. Let them populate the world. If they mention one day that they think dragons are super cool, well your campaign definitely has dragons now! Ask them about a meaningful person in their past, a mentor, rival, or friend. That person is definitely involved in the plot at some point now. Your players will give you so many ideas to spark your imagination. And seeing them come to life will be a joy for them.
Once you have a lot of notes, make a local map. Not the whole world, but their place in it. Put their hometowns on it. A major city. A few interesting terrain features. Make some place names up that sound like they have a mysterious history... The Loathsome Caverns, Wilderumble Woods, Pride's Fall Tower. You don't have to know what they are yet. Your players will tell you.
Now write that first night's adventure. That goblin cave, or cult gathering, or monster eating the cows. Something simple set in their starting town. Mention things from their backstory during it. Have the shop owner say she is waiting for a new grain shipment from one of their hometowns. Have the mayor express condolences when he hears one of the characters is from a town that was attacked by ogres a few years ago. It will instantly make the world feel alive, and make the players feel involved.
Then, after they beat that first boss, give them 3 things:
First, a mysterious object among the treasure. A banner with a strange icon on it. A letter written in code. An ancient key with unusual markings. You don't even have to know what it means yet. You will tie it in to your major plot later when it comes together. 10 games into the story, you might have decided they are going to face a lich as the boss. That banner, letter, or key was tied to him all along.
Second, a hook to the next adventure. When they return to town after defeating the monsters, the mayor is grateful but seems distracted by news he just received. The shop owner still hasn't received her shipment and thinks something might have happened to it. If the characters don't know where to go next, you have already laid the groundwork. You have until your next session to figure out what that adventure really is.
Third, give them the map. The one you made with all their hometowns on it, and the wondrous place names. Have the mayor offer it to them, or the shopkeeper just got it in for sale. Let them end the night excitedly pouring over it and pointing out the places they know. Let them talk about what might be hidden in the mysterious ones they don't know. Pick whatever ideas they imagine that you like best. Give it a twist. And now you have a whole world to explore (or at least a kingdom).
This is what works for me. You might find you need more structure, or want to build your own ideas into it. You might not like it at all. Every table is different. But the campaign will come to you in time. It will grow naturally. Your players will inspire you. You will find adventures in everything they do. They will change your plans. Roll with it. You'll all have a great time.
Echoing what other people have said here: you job isn't to write the campaign.
Instead think of your job more as the design department of a film or TV show. You're the one building the world. You design the look, the feel, the shape. It's your job to craft the world and the sandbox in which the players will be telling the story as a group. That's the point of this game after all is to engage in collaborative storytelling.
I don't know that it's talked about enough, but you know those tables in the DM's guide? They are there to take a lot of the hard work away from you. Now granted with the power creep thats happened with newer and newer source books they're a little less helpful but they're a great start. Ultimately, there are only eight different types of quests/missions/assignments that possible:
So start with a location. Think about what type of climate it is in: tropical, arid, temperate, or arctic. From there you've got the look and feel of a town. Now, you've already got eight quest starters. It really doesn't matter too much what you fill the blanks in with at this stage. Assign each quest to an NPC. Don't worry about NPC backstory. That's not important at the planning stage because they are largely interchangeable. Simply give them a job and a place they can be found in the town. Now you've got eight quests and eight people that your party might encounter.
To this point you'd have created the skeleton of a world. The basics of everything we all do. Now what separates the basic from the intermediate is the level of description that you use. As with learning to write in school it all comes back to indulging the five senses. If it's an arctic climate it's not just cold and snowy.
The wind slices across your face freezing any trace of water. The constant screech of the wind makes it difficult to hear any speech not shouted out in the open. Your nose is so cold that you can't feel it or smell anything. As you enter the tavern though a blast of warmth rushes over you, as you begin to thaw you can smell the hearty beef broth being tended to by the hearth. As you close the door the constant white noise of wind is hushed beneath the hubbub of people talking to one another. Approaching the bar, you are handed the traditional welcome spirit. You slug down a drink that tastes of caramel but warms your throat leaving a smokey aftertaste.
And this really is it. There's no actual writing required. Most can be done simply by closing your eyes and imagining yourself in this new place.
Now that we've got the design the last thing to do is simply to create a reason behind the quests on offer. If the party are asked to find a lost wedding ring it's going to be obvious why the NPC wants the wedding ring back. Sure you can throw in twists and turns, but it's not necessary at this stage. However, if a farmer goes asking you to kill a pack of goblins, we might want to know why. Again the reasons are actually largely interchangeable, but if you want to add depth, maybe the goblins ransacked the farmer's wagon en route to the mill. Maybe the goblins killed the farmer's daughter. Largely the best reason behind a quest is the one that will speak most to the party.
If you're dealing with a greedy party then coming up with a reason beyond treasure usually isn't important (but that type of player is often quite boring to both play and DM for). If you're dealing with a party who are overworked and fed up, then you should look into the character backstory. What is there in there that might help the party decide to accept the task? I say again here though that gold and treasure make for good rewards but are among the most basic and dull quests in my experience.
The only difference then between this and the more expert world builders out there is the ability to weave this all together with Geopolitics, Intrigue, Power Struggles, External Threats, and a Truly living world. At the moment, and I don't mean to be rude here...that's likely beyond you if you're asking for help with ideas. There is truly nothing wrong with a campaign in which there is no Big Bad or antagonist in the campaign. There's a reason why many people ignore both main quest lines (Dragons and Empire) in Skyrim for example. Some of the best fun I had as a player was episodic and basically a string of one shots that were all in the same world on a regular play schedule. As you develop the world around your players you can then start thinking about adding a bigger challenge, but honestly that's best coming from having built the world first. Get the basics right and keep it simple.
The benefit too of keeping it simple is that you temper player expectations. Remember, your job in planning a campaign or individual sessions is to build the world. DMs do not tell the story in their planning sessions. It is the players (DM included) who tell the story where they are all together around the table (real or virtual). So think less like a writer, and more like a world builder.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
So, In other words. would a Political peace talk between 2 nations be a good start? Thanks for the advice!
Potentially? The question has to be "what interesting things can the PCs do there?". Typically what would happen is that some people are up to skullduggery at the peace talk (either to disrupt the peace talks, or for some side purpose) and the PCs have to investigate and put a stop to whatever plotting is going on. This can be fun, but is a somewhat hard type of adventure to run, and has a risk of some characters not really having anything useful to do because they have neither strong investigation skills nor strong social skills.
So, In other words. would a Political peace talk between 2 nations be a good start? Thanks for the advice!
This could be a good starting point, so long as it involves the PCs and causes them to coalesce into a group aimed at a goal.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
So, In other words. would a Political peace talk between 2 nations be a good start? Thanks for the advice!
The question would be 'why are your party there?'
Your average adventurer party should be thought of like a squad of mercenaries. Is your average mercenary going to be invited to the UN in the real world? Unless they've achieved some kind of great deed recognised nationally/internationally, the answer is no. So, from that frame of reference, while your party could have fun there you're going to need to come up with a reason for them to be there.
Now you could have the backdrop to the world being a peace treaty. Maybe the party were in the army before the war and now need to find something new to do, so they decide to set off into the world to make their fortunes. Maybe they decide to take a contract from a shady figure wanting to sabotage the talks.
So, the setting is great. It's how you present that setting that will matter.
Echoing others...if this is your very first campaign, I wouldn't recommend working up a full Home Brew right out of the gate. Take it slow. Start with a published work, and expand on it, add to it. Get the feel for it. Then can gradually end up doing your own. I personally never run a published work as is (except for my very first one). It is fun to put your own spin on things, and fit it to your campaign.
Writing up a campaign should be fun, not a chore. If it becomes that, take a step back and try to expand on a written one first.
Good luck, regardless! Have fun.
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I'm Trying to write my first campaign, but am having a classic case of writers block. Can anyone give me any Ideas?
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
Start with a town and give it a problem. Is it having issues with undead? Cultists? Raiders like goblins or kobolds or orcs? Maybe a lone monster that stalks the forests or fields or alleys at night?
From there build out a couple of social encounters to learn about the problem or investigate things. Maybe some sort of hazard that the party has to overcome. And then develop an easy combat or two as well as a set-piece boss battle of sorts.
Once the boss battle has come to an end, add some interesting thing in the leftover treasure that might lure the party o another location and do it all over again. Keep doing that until you develop a through-line story.
My advice is this: Start writing your campaign when you feel inspired. If this is your first campaign and you don't have any ideas, it's not time to write it. If you just try and force it, you'll end up hating it and starting over anyway. Read some fiction. Watch some movies. Gather some things you like from those external sources and mix them together. Start small - you don't have to write all the lore at once. Create a single adventure and build your overall story from there. Things like goblins attacked a small town ... why? Did someone hire them, or were they pushed there because of something bigger taking over their territory? Who hired them? What creature is now lurking in their tunnels? You can literally expand in any direction you want once you decide on a starting point. Don't over think it.
Oh and have fun doing it. If it becomes a source of frustration, it's not worth it.
First advice: don't start trying to write a campaign. RPGs are not novels, whatever grand arc you come up with is probably not going to survive the PCs, and if you're not writing for publication it doesn't have to. Instead, write a seed that has plenty of room to grow. It's helpful (but not entirely necessary) to have a sense of the larger scale struggle the current problems are a part of, and/or hints about future challenges, but limit detailed preparation to the stuff that's actually within their current capabilities.
Welcome to the world of DMing!
This is going to sound flippant, but it's really not meant to be. If this is the first game you've ever run, my advice for writing a campaign is... don't. Don't attempt to create a whole world and 20 levels of adventure from scratch. It can be a lot of fun, if you are enjoying it. But, as Lathius says, if you aren't inspired to write, it can be a chore, frustrating, and overwhelming. If you have never run a single game, the best advice I can give is to find a level 1 one-shot adventure and use it. Learn from it how adventures are made. Spend your energy on learning the rules, figuring out how to handle the players in the game, and making it fun. Or just write enough to fill one small dungeon, outside of a town with one tavern and a general store. Metamongoose has solid advice on doing this.
If you have already run your first game, but are looking to expand your scope and try a whole campaign, then it's still often best to start in a similar way. It can be tempting to try to plan ahead for 10 levels of an epic plot, but your players will make sure it never happens the way you thought, and all that work goes to waste.
Here's the method that works for me. First find out what kind of game your players want. The tone, the setting, the power level. Do they want a gritty epic or swashbuckling heroics? What kind of characters are they excited to play? Do they like combat more, or political intrigue, or dungeon delving survival? Do they have a favorite monster? Do they like airships? Abandoned temples with lost treasure?
Whatever they say, make a note. It's all going in your game somewhere. When they tell you their character ideas, ask them to describe the town/city/tribe they are from. Have them give it a name and something it is known for. Let them populate the world. If they mention one day that they think dragons are super cool, well your campaign definitely has dragons now! Ask them about a meaningful person in their past, a mentor, rival, or friend. That person is definitely involved in the plot at some point now. Your players will give you so many ideas to spark your imagination. And seeing them come to life will be a joy for them.
Once you have a lot of notes, make a local map. Not the whole world, but their place in it. Put their hometowns on it. A major city. A few interesting terrain features. Make some place names up that sound like they have a mysterious history... The Loathsome Caverns, Wilderumble Woods, Pride's Fall Tower. You don't have to know what they are yet. Your players will tell you.
Now write that first night's adventure. That goblin cave, or cult gathering, or monster eating the cows. Something simple set in their starting town. Mention things from their backstory during it. Have the shop owner say she is waiting for a new grain shipment from one of their hometowns. Have the mayor express condolences when he hears one of the characters is from a town that was attacked by ogres a few years ago. It will instantly make the world feel alive, and make the players feel involved.
Then, after they beat that first boss, give them 3 things:
First, a mysterious object among the treasure. A banner with a strange icon on it. A letter written in code. An ancient key with unusual markings. You don't even have to know what it means yet. You will tie it in to your major plot later when it comes together. 10 games into the story, you might have decided they are going to face a lich as the boss. That banner, letter, or key was tied to him all along.
Second, a hook to the next adventure. When they return to town after defeating the monsters, the mayor is grateful but seems distracted by news he just received. The shop owner still hasn't received her shipment and thinks something might have happened to it. If the characters don't know where to go next, you have already laid the groundwork. You have until your next session to figure out what that adventure really is.
Third, give them the map. The one you made with all their hometowns on it, and the wondrous place names. Have the mayor offer it to them, or the shopkeeper just got it in for sale. Let them end the night excitedly pouring over it and pointing out the places they know. Let them talk about what might be hidden in the mysterious ones they don't know. Pick whatever ideas they imagine that you like best. Give it a twist. And now you have a whole world to explore (or at least a kingdom).
This is what works for me. You might find you need more structure, or want to build your own ideas into it. You might not like it at all. Every table is different. But the campaign will come to you in time. It will grow naturally. Your players will inspire you. You will find adventures in everything they do. They will change your plans. Roll with it. You'll all have a great time.
Good luck!
Echoing what other people have said here: you job isn't to write the campaign.
Instead think of your job more as the design department of a film or TV show. You're the one building the world. You design the look, the feel, the shape. It's your job to craft the world and the sandbox in which the players will be telling the story as a group. That's the point of this game after all is to engage in collaborative storytelling.
I don't know that it's talked about enough, but you know those tables in the DM's guide? They are there to take a lot of the hard work away from you. Now granted with the power creep thats happened with newer and newer source books they're a little less helpful but they're a great start. Ultimately, there are only eight different types of quests/missions/assignments that possible:
Find...
Protect...
Kill...
Investigate...
Explore...
Gather...
Deliver...
Persue/Capture...
So start with a location. Think about what type of climate it is in: tropical, arid, temperate, or arctic. From there you've got the look and feel of a town. Now, you've already got eight quest starters. It really doesn't matter too much what you fill the blanks in with at this stage. Assign each quest to an NPC. Don't worry about NPC backstory. That's not important at the planning stage because they are largely interchangeable. Simply give them a job and a place they can be found in the town. Now you've got eight quests and eight people that your party might encounter.
To this point you'd have created the skeleton of a world. The basics of everything we all do. Now what separates the basic from the intermediate is the level of description that you use. As with learning to write in school it all comes back to indulging the five senses. If it's an arctic climate it's not just cold and snowy.
The wind slices across your face freezing any trace of water. The constant screech of the wind makes it difficult to hear any speech not shouted out in the open. Your nose is so cold that you can't feel it or smell anything. As you enter the tavern though a blast of warmth rushes over you, as you begin to thaw you can smell the hearty beef broth being tended to by the hearth. As you close the door the constant white noise of wind is hushed beneath the hubbub of people talking to one another. Approaching the bar, you are handed the traditional welcome spirit. You slug down a drink that tastes of caramel but warms your throat leaving a smokey aftertaste.
And this really is it. There's no actual writing required. Most can be done simply by closing your eyes and imagining yourself in this new place.
Now that we've got the design the last thing to do is simply to create a reason behind the quests on offer. If the party are asked to find a lost wedding ring it's going to be obvious why the NPC wants the wedding ring back. Sure you can throw in twists and turns, but it's not necessary at this stage. However, if a farmer goes asking you to kill a pack of goblins, we might want to know why. Again the reasons are actually largely interchangeable, but if you want to add depth, maybe the goblins ransacked the farmer's wagon en route to the mill. Maybe the goblins killed the farmer's daughter. Largely the best reason behind a quest is the one that will speak most to the party.
If you're dealing with a greedy party then coming up with a reason beyond treasure usually isn't important (but that type of player is often quite boring to both play and DM for). If you're dealing with a party who are overworked and fed up, then you should look into the character backstory. What is there in there that might help the party decide to accept the task? I say again here though that gold and treasure make for good rewards but are among the most basic and dull quests in my experience.
The only difference then between this and the more expert world builders out there is the ability to weave this all together with Geopolitics, Intrigue, Power Struggles, External Threats, and a Truly living world. At the moment, and I don't mean to be rude here...that's likely beyond you if you're asking for help with ideas. There is truly nothing wrong with a campaign in which there is no Big Bad or antagonist in the campaign. There's a reason why many people ignore both main quest lines (Dragons and Empire) in Skyrim for example. Some of the best fun I had as a player was episodic and basically a string of one shots that were all in the same world on a regular play schedule. As you develop the world around your players you can then start thinking about adding a bigger challenge, but honestly that's best coming from having built the world first. Get the basics right and keep it simple.
The benefit too of keeping it simple is that you temper player expectations. Remember, your job in planning a campaign or individual sessions is to build the world. DMs do not tell the story in their planning sessions. It is the players (DM included) who tell the story where they are all together around the table (real or virtual). So think less like a writer, and more like a world builder.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
So, In other words. would a Political peace talk between 2 nations be a good start? Thanks for the advice!
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
Potentially? The question has to be "what interesting things can the PCs do there?". Typically what would happen is that some people are up to skullduggery at the peace talk (either to disrupt the peace talks, or for some side purpose) and the PCs have to investigate and put a stop to whatever plotting is going on. This can be fun, but is a somewhat hard type of adventure to run, and has a risk of some characters not really having anything useful to do because they have neither strong investigation skills nor strong social skills.
I would recommend Creating a Campaign from the DMG. Good advice in there about how to go about this task.
This could be a good starting point, so long as it involves the PCs and causes them to coalesce into a group aimed at a goal.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
The question would be 'why are your party there?'
Your average adventurer party should be thought of like a squad of mercenaries. Is your average mercenary going to be invited to the UN in the real world? Unless they've achieved some kind of great deed recognised nationally/internationally, the answer is no. So, from that frame of reference, while your party could have fun there you're going to need to come up with a reason for them to be there.
Now you could have the backdrop to the world being a peace treaty. Maybe the party were in the army before the war and now need to find something new to do, so they decide to set off into the world to make their fortunes. Maybe they decide to take a contract from a shady figure wanting to sabotage the talks.
So, the setting is great. It's how you present that setting that will matter.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
The main thing is to ask your players what kind of game they want to play.
Echoing others...if this is your very first campaign, I wouldn't recommend working up a full Home Brew right out of the gate. Take it slow. Start with a published work, and expand on it, add to it. Get the feel for it. Then can gradually end up doing your own. I personally never run a published work as is (except for my very first one). It is fun to put your own spin on things, and fit it to your campaign.
Writing up a campaign should be fun, not a chore. If it becomes that, take a step back and try to expand on a written one first.
Good luck, regardless! Have fun.