I just finished running a 2 year 5e campaign with an open world setting, absolute player freedom and a twist no one saw coming.
I need to caveat that what I’m about to describe can become a part time job for this one campaign to run. There are a lot of ways it could be improved if I was insane enough to do it again but I thought I’d share how it worked in case anyone else could learn from it. If you want to skip the read, here are the key learnings;
Similar to how you describe a scene to make up for a players lack of literally being in a dungeon, long-term open-world campaigns benefit from detail and flavour in politics and world events.
Tracking the passage of time in a campaign isall it’s cracked up to be.
Throw away NPCs can become the most important NPCs if you let them.
When revealing the hidden player as the big bad make it super obvious because it might tank your session if the landing doesn’t stick.
Have a plan for how/what players can do with downtime
How to read this: I’m not going to over-explain a lot here, rather I’ll be collecting all the ideas I used to bring the world to life and the lessons learned.
First principles: a list of fundamental rules that I wouldn’t break myself (there ended up being exceptions, but only two times over 58 sessions).
Time passing matters; when time passes for the players even the world off screen would be playing out. To implement this I’d journal after each session about what the key factions and major NPCs were doing in that time. Nothing intensive, just a couple of dot-points on each.
Accept waste; to keep the players autonomous I had to accept that some scenarios, NPCs or even entire geographies I’d prep might end up getting very little air time in the finished product. Some of the most ‘real’ moments occurred because characters the players never met lived and died “off screen”.
The hidden player; the highest level single threat in the campaign world was role-played by another player in secret. I gave them constraints and sparingly used a veto on them doing certain things, but this added a crucial piece of chaos into the campaign.
Super condensed synopsis of the campaign
Gorebark, Eiko and Karsyl are on an escort mission for a retired fantasy hero who carries a powerful artefact with him. The fantasy hero dies, activating the artefact which summons a floating island in the sky and the party are the only ones who know about it. Over the course of 7 years the party weather a global conflict and slowly carve out a city that sits on the hidden portal to the fortress.
As the years progress their eventual conflict with the reigning general of the Empire, Gregarious Skywind seems fated. When the final duel occurs, it becomes apparent that a puppet master had been orchestrating the party and Gregarious against each other. By the time this was obvious, too much bad blood had built between them - only Gregarious or the party could survive.
World Building:
Geography - regarding maps, I mostly only used maps in campaigns similar to what pre-renaissance cartographers produced. Notable landmarks, general shape of land and major cities. The one thing I’d offer as being important here is trade routes, specifically roads and specific waterways that offer better travel speeds over other methods.
Emphasis on time being a valuable resource to the players means where they go and how they get there becomes a meaningful decision in most sessions. This should also inform how fast information travels, if the players burn down an enemy outpost and head directly back to town it is deeply unlikely the news will beat them there.
Races - In my world I used an extremely streamlined list of races, my reasoning for each of their cultural quirks to feel unique including all races from 5e would be difficult. What’s important here is to be transparent about the races in your setting from the outset and offer options if players can’t access what they’re interested in.
I did throw in a race that had some lore reasons for being able to access any racial buff (with a minor downside) and look like just about anything to enable player choice.
Factions - I had 5 factions, all homebrew. A lot of this can be fleshed out during gameplay but here is an example of what I built up front for two of the five factions.
Faction Example 1
Faction name: Burian Empire
Military: Roman style reporting lines, but they LOVE naval combat
Societal quirk: Communist but with a caste system, no one goes hungry but each caste has defined roles to keep the system functional. Copper Caste = tradespeople and laborer's, Brass Caste = knowledge workers, scientists etc, Steel Caste = warriors of all kinds, Platinum Caste = Royalty and nobility. You cannot be promoted between castes but you can marry into a different caste.
Geopolitical Tensions: They commonly compete with the Kingdom of Rhoknur for resources
Notable NPCs in the faction: Caedus Field, Gregarious Skywind
Icon/ sign/ banner: Twin headed dragon with a blacksmith hammer (these folks are about industry and power)
Faction Example 2
Faction name: Free Merchant Orthodoxy
Military: None; if they need to they’ll appeal to various lords or hire mercenaries
Societal quirk: Clout and respect is determined entirely by profits, only the upper echelons trade in intangibles regularly (e.g. information)
Geopolitical Tensions: None, but also everyone - no one inherently likes to deal with them but their merchant network is the most reliable way to trade
Notable NPCs in the faction: n/a
One key thing that was helpful is to create a mix of factions that are countries and some that were decentralized. The decentralized factions provided some flexibility in responding to the party being unpredictable. A notable example was the players wanted to buy an army, most of the local armies already had a side - so I inserted a Free Merchant Orthodoxy leader that sold slave armies. By not being bound to certain countries they can be just about anywhere.
Gods - Older editions do this better, but DnD in general gives you way more than I will on examples of what a god might look like. The main thing though is correlating it to player impact - even if it’s abstract. E.g.
Xeno (god of resilience, no alignment)
Rewards: being consistent through adversity, pushing through sacrifice
Punishes: poor judgement of character, running away from challenges
Sarev (god of the void, no alignment)
Rewards: acceptance of the world, allowance of entropy
Punishes: invoking his name in vain, stopping souls from reaching the void
Player input - I’d take a tithe of lore from players as they onboarded, basically so I could work that in as easter eggs. In reality most players didn’t see or notice this when it came up in game.
Session flow
The sessions would break down into a few parts that formed a relatively well oiled machine by the end.
Session prep (usually fine tuning an NPC or two and maybe a battlemap)
Run the session (duh)
World events (During the in-game time from the last session - what decisions and interactions did major NPCs and Factions have?)
Hidden player session (this doesn't have to be fully roleplayed but what decisions/actions is this hidden player making)
Detailed notes on session flow:
It took around 2 months for the hidden player and the main party even notice each other in a material way organically (the campaign started at level 3 and the hidden player was CR20-ish)
Because the hidden player is incredibly high level it’s likely the party will want to communicate with them; in my case there was an extra NPC I controlled that had an in-story reason to prevent this.
My advice - have a back-up Godzilla monster to whip out at the 11th hour if the hidden player and the main party decide to join forces. I didn’t need mine, but having one in the chamber removed a lot of stress.
World events come before the hidden player session, because the chances are high that the hidden player is Emperor Palpatine to the random rebel trooper at the back at the start. As the party close the power gap the hidden player will be looking less at armies, policy and logistics decisions and more at specific role playing interactions
Expect throw away characters to become mainstays as the party grows in power. An open world setting with active geopolitics encourages the players to gather an entourage, build towns, commandeer ships. As a consequence random NPCs with little to no meat on them will become significant. My plan was that Dane, Lynsee and Harnum would be two background NPCs and a weapons vendor - the relationships the players built with these characters defined several months of the campaign.
Downtime can become sessions on in their own right if you let them. This can let players effect the world in different ways without relying on you to force an option on them;
2 weeks: train an animal as a pet, write a ballad
3 weeks: Retrain a subclass (5 class levels or less), re-train a spell (3rd level or less), craft a high quality weapon
My full list had examples ranging from 1 weeks to 10 weeks. In a couple of instances the party wholesale opt'd to take months of downtime to advance goals that wouldn't have been as compelling as regular session. Gotta build those houses and train those armies somehow.
“World events” is a great time to turn the scenarios the players didn’t think were important or as interesting into world building. This one town in my world called Gryting changed hands between 3-4 factions over the course of the campaign, the party was only involved in one. They still heard about the other times a faction took control and who was in power at Gryting influenced the decisions they made throughout the campaign.
Lastly, putting any of this together was largely dependent on some content creators who I watched and rewatched with reckless abandon over the course of the campaign.
EQ came to me some significant time ago with the idea of introducing an organic chaos into a game he was running. I was compelled with the idea, and thought, hell yes.
From my side, it was the most unDnD style of DnD that I have ever played. I tend to enjoy low level heavy character roleplaying, so the idea of playing a 1v the World epic tier character was fascinating. The selling points to me were that I had played in an EQ campaign over COVID, and saw they style game that he was looking to run. He tends towards a heavy consequence, grimdark, world building RTS hybrid. If it were a traditional dungeon crawl, Forgotten Realms clone I would have been less interested.
But where EQ was coming from was that he wanted some external decision making that would affect the world in real ways.
Rather than get bogged down in the whole campaign, I'll stick with my initial thoughts of what my role would be that framed everything that would follow, and the first two significant choices that I made that had impact of the campaign players proper.
I was at all times aware that I was not a player. I was a sentient NPC. I was not the main character in any way outside of my own defined world. I knew that I was going to be the Big Bad to the campaign, but this was an exercise in understanding that every villain thinks they are the hero of their own story.
That said, I went to work.
Initially I knew that a general would have a retinue, but unlike a cookie cutter fantasy general, Gregarious surrounded himself with bards, farmers, logisticians, and trainers. His goal was to end war so that his caste (The Steel) could reforge their swords back into ploughshares. He kept his Bards around not to record his deeds, but to create stories of those that fell. He wanted to keep the memory of the defeated alive. Some misguided form of humility... but the important thing was that when the underbuffs (the retinue) were sent out into the greater world, that the campaign players would encounter enemies of a vastly different style and concept than they would by taking generic NPCs from the guides. It was a way I thought I could assist in the greater world build.
The second decision that affected the world was using his position to try to negotiate trade routes/alliances/ceasefires. While Greg's stats could have levelled most if not all critters on the planet, his goal was unification. Which going against the kingdom of the players would create ongoing shifting politics that would keep their world fluid and hopefully organic.
From my side, it was an amazing experience and whilst it wasn't my world I feel a significant ownership of the parts of the world that Impacted and built up.
This is definately not a format I would have engaged in had I not known EQ as well as I do, as the power Greg was given was potentially gamebreaking so a trust going both ways was essential. Trust that I wouldn't f*** around and trust that EQ would let Greg have real impact in the world.
The only advice/change that could be made has already been acknowledged by EQ and that would be the final battle. But gauging the whole by the final fight does the entire project an immense disservice.
It was a fascinating style experiment and if the DM is willing to put in the considerable amount of work this format has, I recommend it entirely.
This style of campaign does require some particularly in depth work to work -- you have to find a hundred little ways to ground the character in the world itself, to get the players to invest in it.
Every bit of your experience is dead on -- though note that you don't have to do political campaigns. The use of a PC as an enemy among us mechanism is harder than many, so congrats on pulling it off, and I bet this is a campaign where folks will tell stories of it down the road.
If you have the base world down and aren't bored by it, now you can continue with it -- and one of the fave things of my folks is to have the heirs of the last characters grow up in the world they changed.
if you do, see if you can increase character options in some way, and introduce a new faction or people or something.
Commerce is the engine of growth and survival in circumstances such as this -- i have seen a lot of "merchant" class examples over the years, reflecting how key the role is to a campaign such as this.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
That sounds incredible! I really appreciate this, cause it’s given me several interesting ideas for my campaign! The secret player thing is such an unexpected but EPIC idea. Dang! Sounds like a blast!
EQ came to me some significant time ago with the idea of introducing an organic chaos into a game he was running. I was compelled with the idea, and thought, hell yes.
From my side, it was the most unDnD style of DnD that I have ever played. I tend to enjoy low level heavy character roleplaying, so the idea of playing a 1v the World epic tier character was fascinating. The selling points to me were that I had played in an EQ campaign over COVID, and saw they style game that he was looking to run. He tends towards a heavy consequence, grimdark, world building RTS hybrid. If it were a traditional dungeon crawl, Forgotten Realms clone I would have been less interested.
But where EQ was coming from was that he wanted some external decision making that would affect the world in real ways.
Rather than get bogged down in the whole campaign, I'll stick with my initial thoughts of what my role would be that framed everything that would follow, and the first two significant choices that I made that had impact of the campaign players proper.
I was at all times aware that I was not a player. I was a sentient NPC. I was not the main character in any way outside of my own defined world. I knew that I was going to be the Big Bad to the campaign, but this was an exercise in understanding that every villain thinks they are the hero of their own story.
That said, I went to work.
Initially I knew that a general would have a retinue, but unlike a cookie cutter fantasy general, Gregarious surrounded himself with bards, farmers, logisticians, and trainers. His goal was to end war so that his caste (The Steel) could reforge their swords back into ploughshares. He kept his Bards around not to record his deeds, but to create stories of those that fell. He wanted to keep the memory of the defeated alive. Some misguided form of humility... but the important thing was that when the underbuffs (the retinue) were sent out into the greater world, that the campaign players would encounter enemies of a vastly different style and concept than they would by taking generic NPCs from the guides. It was a way I thought I could assist in the greater world build.
The second decision that affected the world was using his position to try to negotiate trade routes/alliances/ceasefires. While Greg's stats could have levelled most if not all critters on the planet, his goal was unification. Which going against the kingdom of the players would create ongoing shifting politics that would keep their world fluid and hopefully organic.
From my side, it was an amazing experience and whilst it wasn't my world I feel a significant ownership of the parts of the world that Impacted and built up.
This is definately not a format I would have engaged in had I not known EQ as well as I do, as the power Greg was given was potentially gamebreaking so a trust going both ways was essential. Trust that I wouldn't f*** around and trust that EQ would let Greg have real impact in the world.
The only advice/change that could be made has already been acknowledged by EQ and that would be the final battle. But gauging the whole by the final fight does the entire project an immense disservice.
It was a fascinating style experiment and if the DM is willing to put in the considerable amount of work this format has, I recommend it entirely.
I will say, for people looking to do the same/ similar by having a hidden player/ sentient NPC - it makes all the difference for that person to be someone that enjoys character building over mechanics. By virtue of being the BBEG and the campaign concluding at level 19, Greg's player had a lot of flexibility on his stat block.
Essentially the mechanics the BBEG has access to will impact the overall game much less than the character the sentient NPC is, so a sentient NPC played by someone who likes the crunchy side of the game might will create a really different experience to what we had.
Just wondering, what were some examples of how you implemented the secret player/sentient npc. Was it like every few weeks that happened in the campaign, secret player made a big move, or did you it depend on the amount of sessions or what the PCs accomplished during the session?
That's a good point on the politics side of things. I think it went the way it did because I wanted the campaign to;
Start during an active global conflict
Include a plot-hook that gave the players a reason to care about a specific location
There were a few times in the campaign where the players certainly wanted to divert from it being as politics heavy, I think the part of the world I set the campaign in limited their options on this front. They were in a fairly lightly settled location that had supply issues from the outset. The stage I set for them had some unintended constraints/ difficulties, which I'd change if I had the time again or decided to do another campaign in the same world.
Just wondering, what were some examples of how you implemented the secret player/sentient npc. Was it like every few weeks that happened in the campaign, secret player made a big move, or did you it depend on the amount of sessions or what the PCs accomplished during the session?
Yep, this example is from really early in the campaign. Running "sessions" for the secret player was more like writing a status report about what new information he would be aware of in after a session and then going through any roleplaying and most importantly any decisions he made. Because my secret player was a General of and army he would get most of his information from spies and through his reporting lines.
I'd also mix in reports/ information about other world events so in some cases it wasn't entirely clear to the secret player what intel was the main party vs what was just other things happening in the world.
Skywind's first set of goals in the campaign, agreed around player session 2 or 3 from memory. Blue for directly impacting the players and green for the players hearing about it in session:
Oopold with a team to Elveker to support the squad protecting the village
The farms are to start stockpiling over distribution and poison every 4th potion (the latter to be kept at facilities as a decoy) - note the "farms" were health potion production facilities
Identify the supply lines that support the blockade - at this stage Fort Gryting is receiving no known relief
Scour the northern frontier for the remainder of the Rhoknurian flotilla, only the seas around Mastos and North of Estrati remain
Send Mist and Saccharine to investigate rumours of an ancient relic, delaying the ship materials and the egg the Platinum asked for
Parley with Mastos using a small amount of potions and an untrustworthy quartermaster
Support the Hertug's siege of Fort Gryting - our troops have been sent with some of her Freemen to deter Haro from moving inland
Player session notes
Session 7 (14 in game days) - 925SCG, Casri 12, Ishyue
The party left Elveker with two Hunters
Karsyl spent 3 days in the ocean swimming with the barge
the party discovered a hole in the ocean
they sent the two hunters with the Vokosh to a meeting place
after multiple days on foot the party captures a howler, they dissect it and burn it
chased by howlers the party does a forced march overnight to arrive at the plume of smoke
the party discovers a creator full of the obelisks that they saw in Elks Hallow, the howlers were violently mating around them
the party retreated to meet with the Hunters at the Vokosh
on return to Elveker the party discovers that Adnus and the dwarves have left to join the Hertugs muster
Since Adnus had left, a Burian diplomat has entered the town and declared it under Burian protection
Session 8 (40 in game days) - 925SCG, Casri 38, Kesyue
Gorebark discussed the Burian protection of Elveker with their representative
The Burian Empire is there in response to local bandit activity
To solve this a Burian Counter-Insurgent specialist has been investigating - the counter insurgent was Oopold
the party made a quite exit from Elveker, leaving it in Burian “protection”
Gorebark (and the party) bestowed their estate on the Hunters and Lynsey to use as a lodge in replacement of the commandeered Elk Hall
Gorebark trained the hunters how to use messenger birds
The party travelled north in search of Harnum, he offered to craft items from them in exchange for the ingredients for his All-Spice
To make All-Spice the party must aquire some Monster Powder, Ooze Jelly and Abberation Ichor - locations marked on the map
While visiting Harnum, Bollsheck fell ill, revealling that he was actually Eckbert
The party hurried to the Brudsten Range and used the Sovergien Lodestone
The Lodestone turned into a fortress, floating in the sky
Taking their time to recoup, the party spent 3 weeks in downtime and leveled up
The thing that feels uncomfortable at first from a DM perspective is that the secret player's decisions won't immediately effect the players next session. If the passage of time matters and the secret player is hugely powerful and influential then sometimes it can take multiple sessions for a decision to land. In some cases the party might even walk right past some of this stuff without batting an eye. However as they grow closer to the secret players power level it starts becoming far more direct and impactful on a session to session basis.
Thanks! That’s really cool and I can’t wait to try it out in my campaign! That helps a ton, especially when I’ve been thinking how to run a genius schemer type villain.
There was a genius schemer in the campaign, but he wasn't the secret player. The true villain of the campaign was the secret players spymaster who was a persistent thorn in the parties side throughout the campaign.
Generally my take is that these characters work best when the passage of time matters and they are really well resourced but aren't omniscient. If the players can't win portions of the cat and mouse game then it'll feel like they're playing to beat the DM, not the evil genius.
Your take on the passage of time is an insight more people need. I lean hard into that, training, downtime activities, seasons, background events/politics/wars/etc. all add wonderful progression to the narrative in play.
Cool. Hey was wondering, how did you work in some classic dungeon crawling into the campaign, where all the players had their 10 foot pole and handheld mirrors, where it is normal for someone to be rolling up a new character afterwards.
Just curious how you went about making your dungeons for a bit of that old school feel.
Completely agree, it was actually something that I think I picked up from a Matt Covill episode that he slotted in as a bit of a throw away comment. I will say though it was an awesome moment when some players actually wanted to do downtime instead of the next dungeon because it was another way they could impact the game world. Of everything I experimented with this campaign it's the number one thing you could add into just about any game and I thoroughly recommend it.
Cool. Hey was wondering, how did you work in some classic dungeon crawling into the campaign, where all the players had their 10 foot pole and handheld mirrors, where it is normal for someone to be rolling up a new character afterwards.
Just curious how you went about making your dungeons for a bit of that old school feel.
I still had those and they worked more or less the same as they would in any other instance. The most memorable dungeon was probably right at the start of the campaign. A huge tree that grew inside a mountain with three levels of root structures and a magical grotto at the bottom.
This one felt super old school because of a couple of key things;
Creatures weren't always hostile, but most were dangerous
Every level had more than one entrance/ exit
There were traps but most had a reward (even if it was just a shortcut or lore)
Bringing all points together by using the dungeon itself to tell a story
On the last point, there was something causing the tree to rot and the party was trying to figure out. So the root system was a mix of creatures that were "naturally occurring" even though the context was pretty magical and then there was also creatures that were more aggressive rot-themed creatures that increased the danger as the party went deeper. The party could also tell this because the descriptions of the tree roots changed as they travelled through the dungeon as well as describing smells and sounds etc.
In all cases I try to build dungeons where if the party tried to clear every room without a long rest then they'd likely TPK, but no (or only one) single encounter is a risk to TPK. IMO the fun part of the old school feeling is the dungeon that tells a story and encourages room-by-room decision making over one that just feels super-hard.
On open world settings specifically, the hardest part is if you want the players to play open world you'll need to accept that some dungeons/ideas you have might not get used. I have one dungeon in particular that was fully built and didn't get used in this campaign.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I just finished running a 2 year 5e campaign with an open world setting, absolute player freedom and a twist no one saw coming.
I need to caveat that what I’m about to describe can become a part time job for this one campaign to run. There are a lot of ways it could be improved if I was insane enough to do it again but I thought I’d share how it worked in case anyone else could learn from it. If you want to skip the read, here are the key learnings;
How to read this: I’m not going to over-explain a lot here, rather I’ll be collecting all the ideas I used to bring the world to life and the lessons learned.
First principles: a list of fundamental rules that I wouldn’t break myself (there ended up being exceptions, but only two times over 58 sessions).
Super condensed synopsis of the campaign
Gorebark, Eiko and Karsyl are on an escort mission for a retired fantasy hero who carries a powerful artefact with him. The fantasy hero dies, activating the artefact which summons a floating island in the sky and the party are the only ones who know about it. Over the course of 7 years the party weather a global conflict and slowly carve out a city that sits on the hidden portal to the fortress.
As the years progress their eventual conflict with the reigning general of the Empire, Gregarious Skywind seems fated. When the final duel occurs, it becomes apparent that a puppet master had been orchestrating the party and Gregarious against each other. By the time this was obvious, too much bad blood had built between them - only Gregarious or the party could survive.
World Building:
Geography - regarding maps, I mostly only used maps in campaigns similar to what pre-renaissance cartographers produced. Notable landmarks, general shape of land and major cities. The one thing I’d offer as being important here is trade routes, specifically roads and specific waterways that offer better travel speeds over other methods.
Emphasis on time being a valuable resource to the players means where they go and how they get there becomes a meaningful decision in most sessions. This should also inform how fast information travels, if the players burn down an enemy outpost and head directly back to town it is deeply unlikely the news will beat them there.
Races - In my world I used an extremely streamlined list of races, my reasoning for each of their cultural quirks to feel unique including all races from 5e would be difficult. What’s important here is to be transparent about the races in your setting from the outset and offer options if players can’t access what they’re interested in.
I did throw in a race that had some lore reasons for being able to access any racial buff (with a minor downside) and look like just about anything to enable player choice.
Factions - I had 5 factions, all homebrew. A lot of this can be fleshed out during gameplay but here is an example of what I built up front for two of the five factions.
Faction Example 1
Faction Example 2
One key thing that was helpful is to create a mix of factions that are countries and some that were decentralized. The decentralized factions provided some flexibility in responding to the party being unpredictable. A notable example was the players wanted to buy an army, most of the local armies already had a side - so I inserted a Free Merchant Orthodoxy leader that sold slave armies. By not being bound to certain countries they can be just about anywhere.
Gods - Older editions do this better, but DnD in general gives you way more than I will on examples of what a god might look like. The main thing though is correlating it to player impact - even if it’s abstract. E.g.
Xeno (god of resilience, no alignment)
Rewards: being consistent through adversity, pushing through sacrifice
Punishes: poor judgement of character, running away from challenges
Sarev (god of the void, no alignment)
Rewards: acceptance of the world, allowance of entropy
Punishes: invoking his name in vain, stopping souls from reaching the void
Player input - I’d take a tithe of lore from players as they onboarded, basically so I could work that in as easter eggs. In reality most players didn’t see or notice this when it came up in game.
Session flow
The sessions would break down into a few parts that formed a relatively well oiled machine by the end.
Detailed notes on session flow:
It took around 2 months for the hidden player and the main party even notice each other in a material way organically (the campaign started at level 3 and the hidden player was CR20-ish)
Because the hidden player is incredibly high level it’s likely the party will want to communicate with them; in my case there was an extra NPC I controlled that had an in-story reason to prevent this.
My advice - have a back-up Godzilla monster to whip out at the 11th hour if the hidden player and the main party decide to join forces. I didn’t need mine, but having one in the chamber removed a lot of stress.
World events come before the hidden player session, because the chances are high that the hidden player is Emperor Palpatine to the random rebel trooper at the back at the start. As the party close the power gap the hidden player will be looking less at armies, policy and logistics decisions and more at specific role playing interactions
Expect throw away characters to become mainstays as the party grows in power. An open world setting with active geopolitics encourages the players to gather an entourage, build towns, commandeer ships. As a consequence random NPCs with little to no meat on them will become significant. My plan was that Dane, Lynsee and Harnum would be two background NPCs and a weapons vendor - the relationships the players built with these characters defined several months of the campaign.
Downtime can become sessions on in their own right if you let them. This can let players effect the world in different ways without relying on you to force an option on them;
My full list had examples ranging from 1 weeks to 10 weeks. In a couple of instances the party wholesale opt'd to take months of downtime to advance goals that wouldn't have been as compelling as regular session. Gotta build those houses and train those armies somehow.
“World events” is a great time to turn the scenarios the players didn’t think were important or as interesting into world building. This one town in my world called Gryting changed hands between 3-4 factions over the course of the campaign, the party was only involved in one. They still heard about the other times a faction took control and who was in power at Gryting influenced the decisions they made throughout the campaign.
Lastly, putting any of this together was largely dependent on some content creators who I watched and rewatched with reckless abandon over the course of the campaign.
CritCrab: https://www.youtube.com/@CritCrab
All Things DnD: https://www.youtube.com/@allthingsdnd
Web DM: https://www.youtube.com/@WebDM
Runesmith: https://www.youtube.com/@Runesmith
BlackMagicCraft: https://www.youtube.com/@BlackMagicCraftOfficial
DungeonDad: https://www.youtube.com/@DungeonDad
DungeonMasterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/@DungeonMasterpiece
And not DnD channels but for characters and world building these are off the charts;
OverlySarcasticProductions: https://www.youtube.com/@OverlySarcasticProductions
HelloFutureMe: https://www.youtube.com/@HelloFutureMe
A further note: if anyone else has run something like this I'd be super keen to know what you think of this?
While I devoured a lot of content I didn't really have any other active DMs to bounce ideas off.
Hi all,
The secret player, Gregarious, here.
EQ came to me some significant time ago with the idea of introducing an organic chaos into a game he was running. I was compelled with the idea, and thought, hell yes.
From my side, it was the most unDnD style of DnD that I have ever played. I tend to enjoy low level heavy character roleplaying, so the idea of playing a 1v the World epic tier character was fascinating. The selling points to me were that I had played in an EQ campaign over COVID, and saw they style game that he was looking to run. He tends towards a heavy consequence, grimdark, world building RTS hybrid. If it were a traditional dungeon crawl, Forgotten Realms clone I would have been less interested.
But where EQ was coming from was that he wanted some external decision making that would affect the world in real ways.
Rather than get bogged down in the whole campaign, I'll stick with my initial thoughts of what my role would be that framed everything that would follow, and the first two significant choices that I made that had impact of the campaign players proper.
I was at all times aware that I was not a player. I was a sentient NPC. I was not the main character in any way outside of my own defined world. I knew that I was going to be the Big Bad to the campaign, but this was an exercise in understanding that every villain thinks they are the hero of their own story.
That said, I went to work.
Initially I knew that a general would have a retinue, but unlike a cookie cutter fantasy general, Gregarious surrounded himself with bards, farmers, logisticians, and trainers. His goal was to end war so that his caste (The Steel) could reforge their swords back into ploughshares. He kept his Bards around not to record his deeds, but to create stories of those that fell. He wanted to keep the memory of the defeated alive. Some misguided form of humility... but the important thing was that when the underbuffs (the retinue) were sent out into the greater world, that the campaign players would encounter enemies of a vastly different style and concept than they would by taking generic NPCs from the guides. It was a way I thought I could assist in the greater world build.
The second decision that affected the world was using his position to try to negotiate trade routes/alliances/ceasefires. While Greg's stats could have levelled most if not all critters on the planet, his goal was unification. Which going against the kingdom of the players would create ongoing shifting politics that would keep their world fluid and hopefully organic.
From my side, it was an amazing experience and whilst it wasn't my world I feel a significant ownership of the parts of the world that Impacted and built up.
This is definately not a format I would have engaged in had I not known EQ as well as I do, as the power Greg was given was potentially gamebreaking so a trust going both ways was essential. Trust that I wouldn't f*** around and trust that EQ would let Greg have real impact in the world.
The only advice/change that could be made has already been acknowledged by EQ and that would be the final battle. But gauging the whole by the final fight does the entire project an immense disservice.
It was a fascinating style experiment and if the DM is willing to put in the considerable amount of work this format has, I recommend it entirely.
It sounds like everyone had a blast.
This style of campaign does require some particularly in depth work to work -- you have to find a hundred little ways to ground the character in the world itself, to get the players to invest in it.
Every bit of your experience is dead on -- though note that you don't have to do political campaigns. The use of a PC as an enemy among us mechanism is harder than many, so congrats on pulling it off, and I bet this is a campaign where folks will tell stories of it down the road.
If you have the base world down and aren't bored by it, now you can continue with it -- and one of the fave things of my folks is to have the heirs of the last characters grow up in the world they changed.
if you do, see if you can increase character options in some way, and introduce a new faction or people or something.
Commerce is the engine of growth and survival in circumstances such as this -- i have seen a lot of "merchant" class examples over the years, reflecting how key the role is to a campaign such as this.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
That sounds incredible! I really appreciate this, cause it’s given me several interesting ideas for my campaign! The secret player thing is such an unexpected but EPIC idea. Dang! Sounds like a blast!
I will say, for people looking to do the same/ similar by having a hidden player/ sentient NPC - it makes all the difference for that person to be someone that enjoys character building over mechanics. By virtue of being the BBEG and the campaign concluding at level 19, Greg's player had a lot of flexibility on his stat block.
Essentially the mechanics the BBEG has access to will impact the overall game much less than the character the sentient NPC is, so a sentient NPC played by someone who likes the crunchy side of the game might will create a really different experience to what we had.
Just wondering, what were some examples of how you implemented the secret player/sentient npc. Was it like every few weeks that happened in the campaign, secret player made a big move, or did you it depend on the amount of sessions or what the PCs accomplished during the session?
That's a good point on the politics side of things. I think it went the way it did because I wanted the campaign to;
There were a few times in the campaign where the players certainly wanted to divert from it being as politics heavy, I think the part of the world I set the campaign in limited their options on this front. They were in a fairly lightly settled location that had supply issues from the outset. The stage I set for them had some unintended constraints/ difficulties, which I'd change if I had the time again or decided to do another campaign in the same world.
Yep, this example is from really early in the campaign. Running "sessions" for the secret player was more like writing a status report about what new information he would be aware of in after a session and then going through any roleplaying and most importantly any decisions he made. Because my secret player was a General of and army he would get most of his information from spies and through his reporting lines.
I'd also mix in reports/ information about other world events so in some cases it wasn't entirely clear to the secret player what intel was the main party vs what was just other things happening in the world.
Skywind's first set of goals in the campaign, agreed around player session 2 or 3 from memory. Blue for directly impacting the players and green for the players hearing about it in session:
Player session notes
Session 7 (14 in game days) - 925SCG, Casri 12, Ishyue
Session 8 (40 in game days) - 925SCG, Casri 38, Kesyue
The thing that feels uncomfortable at first from a DM perspective is that the secret player's decisions won't immediately effect the players next session. If the passage of time matters and the secret player is hugely powerful and influential then sometimes it can take multiple sessions for a decision to land. In some cases the party might even walk right past some of this stuff without batting an eye. However as they grow closer to the secret players power level it starts becoming far more direct and impactful on a session to session basis.
Thanks! That’s really cool and I can’t wait to try it out in my campaign! That helps a ton, especially when I’ve been thinking how to run a genius schemer type villain.
Glad to help.
There was a genius schemer in the campaign, but he wasn't the secret player. The true villain of the campaign was the secret players spymaster who was a persistent thorn in the parties side throughout the campaign.
Generally my take is that these characters work best when the passage of time matters and they are really well resourced but aren't omniscient. If the players can't win portions of the cat and mouse game then it'll feel like they're playing to beat the DM, not the evil genius.
We run games of a very similar style - your post has a fantastic format for anyone who might want to figure out how to do this. Well done
Thanks!
Your take on the passage of time is an insight more people need. I lean hard into that, training, downtime activities, seasons, background events/politics/wars/etc. all add wonderful progression to the narrative in play.
Let alone everything else!
Cool. Hey was wondering, how did you work in some classic dungeon crawling into the campaign, where all the players had their 10 foot pole and handheld mirrors, where it is normal for someone to be rolling up a new character afterwards.
Just curious how you went about making your dungeons for a bit of that old school feel.
Completely agree, it was actually something that I think I picked up from a Matt Covill episode that he slotted in as a bit of a throw away comment. I will say though it was an awesome moment when some players actually wanted to do downtime instead of the next dungeon because it was another way they could impact the game world. Of everything I experimented with this campaign it's the number one thing you could add into just about any game and I thoroughly recommend it.
I still had those and they worked more or less the same as they would in any other instance. The most memorable dungeon was probably right at the start of the campaign. A huge tree that grew inside a mountain with three levels of root structures and a magical grotto at the bottom.
This one felt super old school because of a couple of key things;
On the last point, there was something causing the tree to rot and the party was trying to figure out. So the root system was a mix of creatures that were "naturally occurring" even though the context was pretty magical and then there was also creatures that were more aggressive rot-themed creatures that increased the danger as the party went deeper. The party could also tell this because the descriptions of the tree roots changed as they travelled through the dungeon as well as describing smells and sounds etc.
In all cases I try to build dungeons where if the party tried to clear every room without a long rest then they'd likely TPK, but no (or only one) single encounter is a risk to TPK. IMO the fun part of the old school feeling is the dungeon that tells a story and encourages room-by-room decision making over one that just feels super-hard.
On open world settings specifically, the hardest part is if you want the players to play open world you'll need to accept that some dungeons/ideas you have might not get used. I have one dungeon in particular that was fully built and didn't get used in this campaign.