So my issue stems from the fact that I stepped into being the DM when the last one needed a break. My plan was to make a simple exploration focused (west march ish) style game to tide us over tell we could restart our main campaign. Unfortunately when the DM came back he simply wanted to join my campaign rather then go back. On top of that my group got bored pretty quick of exploration for explorations sake. While I always had a loose story idea, it has made me have to scramble to make more story focused content as well as hooks to get them to go out and find stuff.
My biggest issue right now is I feel like I backed myself into a corner content wise and I'm not sure what and how to do it.
So here is some of the campaign details:
The campaign plays out on a previously undiscovered continent, with the main hub city being the only colonized one from the old world.
No one has really explored very far before the party due to them being more worried about building up and protecting the city.
While the party is only just started recently learning about this, the area they are in used to be part of a kingdom that was fully wiped out by the first big bad guy.
The big bad guy is a dragon that now that he has effectively taken over the area (this happened years before the city was built) has grown lazy and given mostly free reign to the various monster races that comprised his armies. His only real current orders being to bring him tribute and more recently to try and drive away these new people. Overall the big bad is smart and powerful but very lazy and complacent since to him he already won years prior and this new city is just a minor annoyance, at least for now.
Also here is what the party has done so far outside of random exploration:
Took out a goblin warren that was causing trouble with the cities lumber operations.
Dealt with a wasp cult (this started as a joke due to constantly rolling for giant wasps on the encounter table).
Helped found a new mining city (the city started out as the first ruins they had found from the old kingdom).
Discovered and explored an abandoned mage tower that used to be used to train the kingdoms mages (this will act as a teleport location to other towers in the world once they get a part back from the big bad).
My current future plans are:
Have them meet the big bad sometime soon, similar to meeting Strahd early in his campaign.
Have the party have to defend the city from a large attack force of the big bads army.
Overall while I know where I want the party to end up, I'm not sure how to get the party there. I don't want them to immediately go after the big bad (they are nowhere near strong enough yet) but, I'm running out of reasons to make them go out and explore. I have various ruins and monster villages scattered about but no real hook to make them seek them out. My last hook that I have and used was they discovered that the old capital of the kingdom is down south (they don't now yet that it is in ruins). Basically I have mostly ran out of reasons to get the party out and exploring since they are now getting to far from the main city for me to reliably have some one in town ask them to check out unknown locations.
Once they get past the big bad it should not be so bad since they will gain access to populated areas. I just don't want to rush the current big bad because he is one of the five major bad guys in my story.
This is probably way to long as is so I'll stop here and just add more if someone has questions for me, also thanks in advance for any tips or advice.
Think of a series of breadcrumbs that you can leave in different locations:
Some breadcrumbs could let the party establish that all the "random" monster groups are really subservient to the BBG.
Other breadcrumbs can lead them to other adventure sites. Maybe they find some ancient writings (perhaps pre-BBG) that suggest the presence of other similar ancient locations - and maybe some great secret from the writings can help them overcome the BBG?
A simple breadcrumb would be a crude map with some X's on it. Or different sets of letters, instead of them all being X (the PCs will have to find out what each different letter set refers to). Or a crude map with several labels in different languages (again, the PCs will have to find out why different languages were used) - perhaps the map has passed down through the hands of many people, each with their own language?
A breadcrumb can be anything from a throw-away comment a monster NPC makes (, e.g. a dying statement about "so-and-so avenge my death!" or "you need to speak to X but he isn't here right now/is visiting Y currently"), a physical object, or pretty much anything else. Some people might call them McGuffins :-)
(Don't use a map with "G" marked in several different places though. My group of men aged 50+ were constantly giggling and referring to them as G-spots!)
I think you have all of the elements you need. I also would not have them meet the big bad guy for a long time yet. He is lazy, complacent and doesn't care. Put his lair far away from the location of the "city".
Also unless you have already made these "large" cities I would keep them relatively small - no more than 5-10k people is big enough to defend themselves without being overwhelming.
So - what is happening on the bad guy side?
You have a lazy dragon who "rules" the land mostly by receiving tribute from vassals. These folks do NOT want to get the dragon angry. You could add some history that the dragon forced and terrorized all of the "slave" armies to work with him to wipe out the original inhabitants. He runs his organization on fear and does not want to know when things aren't going well - he is likely to shoot the messenger.
If you get the dragon directly involved then you have already broken the lazy and complacent stereotype. Why would this dragon get himself out of bed to go encounter a small group of weak humans? That if he considered them any sort of threat he would just kill off?
Strahd is a different case ... in CoS most of the demiplane is created by him, the adventurers are a source of amusement and some sort of weak challenge to fight off his centuries of boredom. Strahd is trapped in his own hell and tempting, torturing and playing with adventurers is one of his only pleasures. As a result, he has lots of reasons to engage, intimidate, torture, almost kill but still let the party live until he decides they just aren't worth his time anymore. For Strahd, it is almost like a game of chicken, he is trying to see if any of the adventurers might be a worthy successor without really wanting to find one, he waits, prods, tempts and tortures them until he finally squashes them. However, there is a risk if he leaves it too late or if the adventurers get too powerful.
None of this applies in your scenario unless you want to re-write the dragon motivations or modify the storyline (which is COMPLETELY possible since your players know very little of it so far).
Anyway ... on with your story. You have a corrupt power structure with a lazy and cruel ruler and a bunch of toadies divided on factional/racial bounds that probably don't get along with each other. They don't want to tell the dragon what is really going on but all want to claim the credit for eliminating the city. This sets you up to have multiple bad guys - at the very least the leader of each race. Each of which wants to take out the city or the "heroes" defending it. There also may be conflicts between these groups. You could have one group being yuan-ti who claim to be survivors from the original civilization (they could live in jungles to the south). They recruit the characters to help wipe out one of the monstrous races with the plan being to kill off the characters after they help them eliminate the monstrous race thus killing one of their enemies and earning the favour of the dragon.
So what could the favor of the dragon be? It could be he is so lazy that he lets one of the subordinate races handle the day to day operations of his empire. This lets them skim off the top of the rewards while still passing along most wealth to the dragon.All the monstrous races in his former army fight to earn the favor so that they can enrich themselves and lord it over the rest.
Anyway, that is just one possible plot line - there are many options available. However, it depends on how much scope and how long you want the campaign to run. You can have giants/yuan-ti/orcs/goblins/bugbears and many others represented. The dragon himself when finally roused will be a formidable foe especially with his minions in tow - but that is if you are looking to have an end game tier 4 type campaign that is capped off with the destruction of the dragon and any special source of power he could have.
However, the players never need to know about this until you want them to. The individual members of each race may not know much - they live in fear of something but they are more afraid of their leaders and the other monstrous races than some distant ruler that they never see. As you play it out, the players are only aware of the local "mini-boss" and it may take a while before they learn any more about a bigger picture.
(Some other twists you could throw in ... while the characters are off on a mission against one of the races, another race takes advantage to invade and sack the town killing many before the defenders can force them back. This leaves the party with a conundrum in choices about how best to defend the town while still fighting the bad guys).
Anyway, you don't need incredibly detailed plans - just the information for the current events that the party is involved in and let the adventure evolve (assuming that you want to keep running it long term rather than going back to playing sometime soon ... if you want to go back to playing you could have the current story arc terminate with the defeat of one of the local monstrous races without the players being aware of the other much larger threats looming ... which gives you the opportunity to pick the campaign back up later if folks are interested.
----
Some other ideas -
- artifact collection (to restore defences of the previous inhabitants or acquire a particularly powerful magic item)
- tomb exploration - resting place of the leader of the previous inhabitants (a simple dragon should not have been such a big threat as to defeat an entire advanced civilization - what other edge did he have? Demonic allies? Access to an artifact of power? This could provide information and direction leading to the defeat of the dragon so you might not want to introduce it too early - the tomb could be buried in the remains of the largest city of the former inhabitants of the continent - far from the new settlement.
---
Basically, your current setup is perfect for any number of great plot lines since there is so much unknown area and the players are unaware of whatever situation they might be stepping into - so I wouldn't worry about having a plot all mapped out - you have an open world with lots of plots going on simultaneously which you can develop in almost any direction you wish.
First off thanks for the responses, they have given my some things to think about. I'll also mention that this is my first non premade campaign (not use to having to come up with all the details).
A few thoughts:
- While the BBG is a dragon, lore wise he would be like an ancient dragon with access to spells, particularly necromancy spells and polymorph since his humanoid form is the one the party would first meet and that I have already referenced to the party through various notes and journals they have found. Outside of his most loyal servants no one knows that the dragon and this Lord Blackwall are the same person. To him he already won his prize years ago and spends most days indulging himself with whatever catches his fancy. The meeting was originally designed as a way for him to finally take notice and at first just try to get the party and the city to leave his lands since he doesn't feel like putting in any more effort then needed. As of now I'm unsure if I still want to go forward with it or at least hold it off tell much later.
- I do like the idea that was brought up about finding some powerful magic item. One of my issues was how the party was going to kill the BBG since the campaign goes on after he is dead (he is the first of 5 BBG dragons). A powerful relic of some sort that is used against dragons could be my answer, at least for the first one or two ones.
- The idea of the monster races having there own factions is good and I have somewhat already done that, I'm just not sure the best way to handle it.
- As for how long the campaign will run, I know I want to at least go tell the first BBG is dead. Fully though there would be 4 more BBG dragons, each with there own slice of the continent. Each area would be different, for example one of them basically rules his kingdom while being disguised as the kingdoms version of the pope, this part of the campaign would be much more intrigue and social driven. The last part of the campaign would be about discovering about where the continent and dragons came from. I figure if I can keep with it the party could definitely get to level 20 by the end.
Overall I think things might get better once they get past the first BBG since those areas will be much more populated.
My big current issue is I have this very large continent map and at least for the current area they are in, I'm having a hard time filling it with content since all the towns in the area are in ruins. The only spots that currently have much to do are the ares that the monster races took up residence, but they are so far from the hub city that I'm not sure how to get the players to go there. I'm currently debating on just having it that once they get to the old capital they find mention of a weapon that they were developing but didn't finish in a place up in the mountain range. From there just push them to get it and then push towards taking out the first BBG. It might be rushing the content a bit but I'm running out of ideas for a area that has no real npc's for the party to get information from.
So firstly stop trying to fill a continent - continents are huge and your party is a handful of people. Tbh trying to come up with 100 pockets of things to do across a continent is barely any different to just rolling random encounters. 3-4 well crafted encounters will always top that.
stop thinking plot hooks start thinking arcs.
it sounds like your players want a good story, a reason to take notes and see pay off so start planning one. What you need first is a B plot, you have your A plot but don’t want to rush it to devalue it, so you need something to the side of it for your players to do to build out the world. You want narrative.
but going from zero to narrative arcs is not easy especially as you never intended it to be that kind of campaign. So let your characters lead the way.
out of game you need to do some planning and talking with your players. They are the ones that want this so they can contribute to the work. How deep are their backstories, if they are shallow get them to broaden them. Here is what I would do, more or less in this order.
1) have each PC give you privately 3 goals for their character, something they want, something they want to be and something that would complete their character arc
2) have each PC give you an NPC from their past that the group has not encountered yet
3) come up with an additional 1-2 NPC’s per player yourself and don’t tell the player
4)you ever noticed how in comics the hero’s all fight people with similar powers? Red skull, Sinestro, Zoom etc or maybe they come across characters with ideologies similar to them but taken further, Killmonger, Ultron et al. Reflections are a trope but can be a great skeleton to build interesting non end boss bad guys - to give an example I had a wizard that was lawful good yet kept being the player to suggest/do the darkest things, it became a running gag. So I crafted a villain that was a reflection a character that saw themselves as lawful good, that their ends justified any means because they were a good person.
5) think about your characters resolve and then try and break it. Look at three act movie structure - act 1 hero is good and confident and can take on any new comers, act 2 well that didn’t go well, act 3 “....it’s the return of the Mac...”
again its a trope but an easy one to utilise, think of each characters ideology, their outlook, the fundamental truths that shaped them. how can you challenge them, how can you lead the player to question them. Give them their act 2 low so they get the act 3 high.
6) by this point following steps 1-5 in a 5 character campaign you should now have 15 character goals, 15 NPC’s, 5 villains & 5 ways to challenge your players outlook. So it’s time to make a Venn diagram, find where they overlap.
7) start planting seeds, foreshadowing and long term story telling are more satisfying than random people in a village handing out quests. You know what’s great for player and DM’s? When you reveal something and one of your players says “I knew that was a thing” you can’t do that if every adventure hook starts fresh from nothing.
8) work with your players. Like there is this idea that the DM creates the world/story and the players are the audience reacting to it. But I call BS. D&D is at its best with collaborative story telling, work with them, find out what moments they think would be cool for them. Maybe they are longing for a none shall pass brave sacrifice, maybe they want to change their characters alignment narratively, maybe they want to lose an arm heroically and play out learning from that. Another example - I have a paladin in another campaign that is an asimar only all the other players think they are a half elf. We have workshopped for a little while the reveal, the how, the why, the ways to make it cool. The other players don’t know, they are still the audience but by bouncing ideas of eachother we crafted a better story
The more I think about it, at least based on things in this thread and others I've looked at, I feel that maybe I should have started over once the players made it clear they wanted a more story focused campaign.
The whole idea of this campaign was:
- It was just something to pass the time with before going back to the old campaign
- I had recently found out about the whole west marches style game and wanted to try it
- Due to some players liking to make numerous characters and this only being a side thing, I put the focus on the guild the party was part of (letting the players switch characters whenever they want)
Just about all those ideas failed. The players wanted to keep playing it over the old one, none of them really liked a heavy exploration style game after awhile, and while some of the players take advantage of the guild system it really tied me down to the main city.
It also doesn't help that before this my specialty as a DM was mostly making and running dungeons of varying sizes. This type of campaign was way outside my norm.
I still want to finish it, or at least complete the first major arc, I just don't feel like I'm doing the campaign justice for the players.
So it doesn’t sound like you need advice from us, you know what you need to do here, you need to talk to your players. You were a substitute teacher now needing to make a full years syllabus. I don’t know what agreement you had with your DM but they have dropped you in it. If what you had agreed to was you running a temporary campaign until they returned with a newly prepped campaign and then they came back empty handed wanting to be a player then you need to speak with them.
somebody in your group needs to want to be the DM and from what you just said it doesn’t sound like either of you do.
I understand were you are coming from on your advice. No I'm not a huge fan of being the full time DM but, I'm willing to do it to keep our group together since I like the group and no one else really wants to DM. I feel I would have done much better with a dungeon crawl heavy campaign but everyone seems to be having a fun time with the current campaign, plus its probably good to get more practice with other DMing aspects then I normally do.
I came here to try and get ideas and hooks to better fill out the current arc. I managed to get some ideas from everyone's posts and I plan on at least finishing this arc they are in, how much I rush it I'm not sure yet.
I guess one last question: Do you guys have any tips or tricks on running a guild based party system. The players seem to like being able to switch characters but as they get farther and farther from the main base, it becomes harder to let them make use of it, I'm tempted to make them choose a main party and the others are just back ups if someone dies or players miss a session and we just make a party #2 for a bit.
I guess one last question: Do you guys have any tips or tricks on running a guild based party system. The players seem to like being able to switch characters but as they get farther and farther from the main base, it becomes harder to let them make use of it, I'm tempted to make them choose a main party and the others are just back ups if someone dies or players miss a session and we just make a party #2 for a bit.
Perhaps they can discover various locations which could act as "forward bases", so that some of the guild can be based in each of the forward bases. This allows the current party of active PCs to retreat to one of these bases and then can be swapped out for other currently-inactive PCs.
If the inactive PCs have particular skill-sets, then there could be an IC reason for the party to retreat to the relevant established base to pick up the required skill-set PC.
Since you were already planning on having teleportation towers/circles that the characters figure out how to activate ... you could just have their guild relocate to a ruin that contains a teleportation circle. This would at least make it easier for them to switch guild characters in and out since some of their adventures are going to lead to teleportation circles located elsewhere on the continent.
I've played in a campaign with a similar idea. We started playing Waterdeep Dragonheist but didn't feel like running the same characters all the way through a continuing campaign in Dungeon of the Mad Mage so we set up an Adventuring Company based at the Trollskull tavern that made it easy to swap characters in and out at the end of specific adventures.
With all the possibilities with ancient ruins, the previous inhabitants, lost magic items and artifacts, monstrous races vying with each other for power and to eliminate the new city ... there are an immense number of plot lines/encounters/dungeons/politics that you can easily fit in if you want to ... without even getting into the entire plot line with the five ruling ancient dragons and where they get their power from.
Anyway, if you WANT to keep the campaign going, I think you have the foundations to keep it going indefinitely for multiple groups of characters from level 1 to 20 or more. However, you sound a bit ambivalent about actually running a campaign like that so you'll want to think carefully about how long you want to run this.
You could also, potentially turn this into a shared world. The guild concept could allow you to have your own characters in the guild and play them when you swap DMs. Give someone else an undeveloped part of the world, let them know any big constraints or things to avoid and they can then create adventures in the same world allowing you to play while they DM. It really depends on how many DMs you have playing and whether they are about equally interested in playing as DMing.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Hello all,
So my issue stems from the fact that I stepped into being the DM when the last one needed a break. My plan was to make a simple exploration focused (west march ish) style game to tide us over tell we could restart our main campaign. Unfortunately when the DM came back he simply wanted to join my campaign rather then go back. On top of that my group got bored pretty quick of exploration for explorations sake. While I always had a loose story idea, it has made me have to scramble to make more story focused content as well as hooks to get them to go out and find stuff.
My biggest issue right now is I feel like I backed myself into a corner content wise and I'm not sure what and how to do it.
So here is some of the campaign details:
Also here is what the party has done so far outside of random exploration:
My current future plans are:
Overall while I know where I want the party to end up, I'm not sure how to get the party there. I don't want them to immediately go after the big bad (they are nowhere near strong enough yet) but, I'm running out of reasons to make them go out and explore. I have various ruins and monster villages scattered about but no real hook to make them seek them out. My last hook that I have and used was they discovered that the old capital of the kingdom is down south (they don't now yet that it is in ruins). Basically I have mostly ran out of reasons to get the party out and exploring since they are now getting to far from the main city for me to reliably have some one in town ask them to check out unknown locations.
Once they get past the big bad it should not be so bad since they will gain access to populated areas. I just don't want to rush the current big bad because he is one of the five major bad guys in my story.
This is probably way to long as is so I'll stop here and just add more if someone has questions for me, also thanks in advance for any tips or advice.
Think of a series of breadcrumbs that you can leave in different locations:
Some breadcrumbs could let the party establish that all the "random" monster groups are really subservient to the BBG.
Other breadcrumbs can lead them to other adventure sites. Maybe they find some ancient writings (perhaps pre-BBG) that suggest the presence of other similar ancient locations - and maybe some great secret from the writings can help them overcome the BBG?
A simple breadcrumb would be a crude map with some X's on it. Or different sets of letters, instead of them all being X (the PCs will have to find out what each different letter set refers to). Or a crude map with several labels in different languages (again, the PCs will have to find out why different languages were used) - perhaps the map has passed down through the hands of many people, each with their own language?
A breadcrumb can be anything from a throw-away comment a monster NPC makes (, e.g. a dying statement about "so-and-so avenge my death!" or "you need to speak to X but he isn't here right now/is visiting Y currently"), a physical object, or pretty much anything else. Some people might call them McGuffins :-)
(Don't use a map with "G" marked in several different places though. My group of men aged 50+ were constantly giggling and referring to them as G-spots!)
I think you have all of the elements you need. I also would not have them meet the big bad guy for a long time yet. He is lazy, complacent and doesn't care. Put his lair far away from the location of the "city".
Also unless you have already made these "large" cities I would keep them relatively small - no more than 5-10k people is big enough to defend themselves without being overwhelming.
So - what is happening on the bad guy side?
You have a lazy dragon who "rules" the land mostly by receiving tribute from vassals. These folks do NOT want to get the dragon angry. You could add some history that the dragon forced and terrorized all of the "slave" armies to work with him to wipe out the original inhabitants. He runs his organization on fear and does not want to know when things aren't going well - he is likely to shoot the messenger.
If you get the dragon directly involved then you have already broken the lazy and complacent stereotype. Why would this dragon get himself out of bed to go encounter a small group of weak humans? That if he considered them any sort of threat he would just kill off?
Strahd is a different case ... in CoS most of the demiplane is created by him, the adventurers are a source of amusement and some sort of weak challenge to fight off his centuries of boredom. Strahd is trapped in his own hell and tempting, torturing and playing with adventurers is one of his only pleasures. As a result, he has lots of reasons to engage, intimidate, torture, almost kill but still let the party live until he decides they just aren't worth his time anymore. For Strahd, it is almost like a game of chicken, he is trying to see if any of the adventurers might be a worthy successor without really wanting to find one, he waits, prods, tempts and tortures them until he finally squashes them. However, there is a risk if he leaves it too late or if the adventurers get too powerful.
None of this applies in your scenario unless you want to re-write the dragon motivations or modify the storyline (which is COMPLETELY possible since your players know very little of it so far).
Anyway ... on with your story. You have a corrupt power structure with a lazy and cruel ruler and a bunch of toadies divided on factional/racial bounds that probably don't get along with each other. They don't want to tell the dragon what is really going on but all want to claim the credit for eliminating the city. This sets you up to have multiple bad guys - at the very least the leader of each race. Each of which wants to take out the city or the "heroes" defending it. There also may be conflicts between these groups. You could have one group being yuan-ti who claim to be survivors from the original civilization (they could live in jungles to the south). They recruit the characters to help wipe out one of the monstrous races with the plan being to kill off the characters after they help them eliminate the monstrous race thus killing one of their enemies and earning the favour of the dragon.
So what could the favor of the dragon be? It could be he is so lazy that he lets one of the subordinate races handle the day to day operations of his empire. This lets them skim off the top of the rewards while still passing along most wealth to the dragon.All the monstrous races in his former army fight to earn the favor so that they can enrich themselves and lord it over the rest.
Anyway, that is just one possible plot line - there are many options available. However, it depends on how much scope and how long you want the campaign to run. You can have giants/yuan-ti/orcs/goblins/bugbears and many others represented. The dragon himself when finally roused will be a formidable foe especially with his minions in tow - but that is if you are looking to have an end game tier 4 type campaign that is capped off with the destruction of the dragon and any special source of power he could have.
However, the players never need to know about this until you want them to. The individual members of each race may not know much - they live in fear of something but they are more afraid of their leaders and the other monstrous races than some distant ruler that they never see. As you play it out, the players are only aware of the local "mini-boss" and it may take a while before they learn any more about a bigger picture.
(Some other twists you could throw in ... while the characters are off on a mission against one of the races, another race takes advantage to invade and sack the town killing many before the defenders can force them back. This leaves the party with a conundrum in choices about how best to defend the town while still fighting the bad guys).
Anyway, you don't need incredibly detailed plans - just the information for the current events that the party is involved in and let the adventure evolve (assuming that you want to keep running it long term rather than going back to playing sometime soon ... if you want to go back to playing you could have the current story arc terminate with the defeat of one of the local monstrous races without the players being aware of the other much larger threats looming ... which gives you the opportunity to pick the campaign back up later if folks are interested.
----
Some other ideas -
- artifact collection (to restore defences of the previous inhabitants or acquire a particularly powerful magic item)
- tomb exploration - resting place of the leader of the previous inhabitants (a simple dragon should not have been such a big threat as to defeat an entire advanced civilization - what other edge did he have? Demonic allies? Access to an artifact of power? This could provide information and direction leading to the defeat of the dragon so you might not want to introduce it too early - the tomb could be buried in the remains of the largest city of the former inhabitants of the continent - far from the new settlement.
---
Basically, your current setup is perfect for any number of great plot lines since there is so much unknown area and the players are unaware of whatever situation they might be stepping into - so I wouldn't worry about having a plot all mapped out - you have an open world with lots of plots going on simultaneously which you can develop in almost any direction you wish.
First off thanks for the responses, they have given my some things to think about. I'll also mention that this is my first non premade campaign (not use to having to come up with all the details).
A few thoughts:
- While the BBG is a dragon, lore wise he would be like an ancient dragon with access to spells, particularly necromancy spells and polymorph since his humanoid form is the one the party would first meet and that I have already referenced to the party through various notes and journals they have found. Outside of his most loyal servants no one knows that the dragon and this Lord Blackwall are the same person. To him he already won his prize years ago and spends most days indulging himself with whatever catches his fancy. The meeting was originally designed as a way for him to finally take notice and at first just try to get the party and the city to leave his lands since he doesn't feel like putting in any more effort then needed. As of now I'm unsure if I still want to go forward with it or at least hold it off tell much later.
- I do like the idea that was brought up about finding some powerful magic item. One of my issues was how the party was going to kill the BBG since the campaign goes on after he is dead (he is the first of 5 BBG dragons). A powerful relic of some sort that is used against dragons could be my answer, at least for the first one or two ones.
- The idea of the monster races having there own factions is good and I have somewhat already done that, I'm just not sure the best way to handle it.
- As for how long the campaign will run, I know I want to at least go tell the first BBG is dead. Fully though there would be 4 more BBG dragons, each with there own slice of the continent. Each area would be different, for example one of them basically rules his kingdom while being disguised as the kingdoms version of the pope, this part of the campaign would be much more intrigue and social driven. The last part of the campaign would be about discovering about where the continent and dragons came from. I figure if I can keep with it the party could definitely get to level 20 by the end.
Overall I think things might get better once they get past the first BBG since those areas will be much more populated.
My big current issue is I have this very large continent map and at least for the current area they are in, I'm having a hard time filling it with content since all the towns in the area are in ruins. The only spots that currently have much to do are the ares that the monster races took up residence, but they are so far from the hub city that I'm not sure how to get the players to go there. I'm currently debating on just having it that once they get to the old capital they find mention of a weapon that they were developing but didn't finish in a place up in the mountain range. From there just push them to get it and then push towards taking out the first BBG. It might be rushing the content a bit but I'm running out of ideas for a area that has no real npc's for the party to get information from.
So firstly stop trying to fill a continent - continents are huge and your party is a handful of people. Tbh trying to come up with 100 pockets of things to do across a continent is barely any different to just rolling random encounters. 3-4 well crafted encounters will always top that.
stop thinking plot hooks start thinking arcs.
it sounds like your players want a good story, a reason to take notes and see pay off so start planning one. What you need first is a B plot, you have your A plot but don’t want to rush it to devalue it, so you need something to the side of it for your players to do to build out the world. You want narrative.
but going from zero to narrative arcs is not easy especially as you never intended it to be that kind of campaign. So let your characters lead the way.
out of game you need to do some planning and talking with your players. They are the ones that want this so they can contribute to the work. How deep are their backstories, if they are shallow get them to broaden them. Here is what I would do, more or less in this order.
1) have each PC give you privately 3 goals for their character, something they want, something they want to be and something that would complete their character arc
2) have each PC give you an NPC from their past that the group has not encountered yet
3) come up with an additional 1-2 NPC’s per player yourself and don’t tell the player
4)you ever noticed how in comics the hero’s all fight people with similar powers? Red skull, Sinestro, Zoom etc or maybe they come across characters with ideologies similar to them but taken further, Killmonger, Ultron et al. Reflections are a trope but can be a great skeleton to build interesting non end boss bad guys - to give an example I had a wizard that was lawful good yet kept being the player to suggest/do the darkest things, it became a running gag. So I crafted a villain that was a reflection a character that saw themselves as lawful good, that their ends justified any means because they were a good person.
5) think about your characters resolve and then try and break it. Look at three act movie structure - act 1 hero is good and confident and can take on any new comers, act 2 well that didn’t go well, act 3 “....it’s the return of the Mac...”
again its a trope but an easy one to utilise, think of each characters ideology, their outlook, the fundamental truths that shaped them. how can you challenge them, how can you lead the player to question them. Give them their act 2 low so they get the act 3 high.
6) by this point following steps 1-5 in a 5 character campaign you should now have 15 character goals, 15 NPC’s, 5 villains & 5 ways to challenge your players outlook. So it’s time to make a Venn diagram, find where they overlap.
7) start planting seeds, foreshadowing and long term story telling are more satisfying than random people in a village handing out quests. You know what’s great for player and DM’s? When you reveal something and one of your players says “I knew that was a thing” you can’t do that if every adventure hook starts fresh from nothing.
8) work with your players. Like there is this idea that the DM creates the world/story and the players are the audience reacting to it. But I call BS. D&D is at its best with collaborative story telling, work with them, find out what moments they think would be cool for them. Maybe they are longing for a none shall pass brave sacrifice, maybe they want to change their characters alignment narratively, maybe they want to lose an arm heroically and play out learning from that. Another example - I have a paladin in another campaign that is an asimar only all the other players think they are a half elf. We have workshopped for a little while the reveal, the how, the why, the ways to make it cool. The other players don’t know, they are still the audience but by bouncing ideas of eachother we crafted a better story
The more I think about it, at least based on things in this thread and others I've looked at, I feel that maybe I should have started over once the players made it clear they wanted a more story focused campaign.
The whole idea of this campaign was:
- It was just something to pass the time with before going back to the old campaign
- I had recently found out about the whole west marches style game and wanted to try it
- Due to some players liking to make numerous characters and this only being a side thing, I put the focus on the guild the party was part of (letting the players switch characters whenever they want)
Just about all those ideas failed. The players wanted to keep playing it over the old one, none of them really liked a heavy exploration style game after awhile, and while some of the players take advantage of the guild system it really tied me down to the main city.
It also doesn't help that before this my specialty as a DM was mostly making and running dungeons of varying sizes. This type of campaign was way outside my norm.
I still want to finish it, or at least complete the first major arc, I just don't feel like I'm doing the campaign justice for the players.
So it doesn’t sound like you need advice from us, you know what you need to do here, you need to talk to your players. You were a substitute teacher now needing to make a full years syllabus. I don’t know what agreement you had with your DM but they have dropped you in it. If what you had agreed to was you running a temporary campaign until they returned with a newly prepped campaign and then they came back empty handed wanting to be a player then you need to speak with them.
somebody in your group needs to want to be the DM and from what you just said it doesn’t sound like either of you do.
I understand were you are coming from on your advice. No I'm not a huge fan of being the full time DM but, I'm willing to do it to keep our group together since I like the group and no one else really wants to DM. I feel I would have done much better with a dungeon crawl heavy campaign but everyone seems to be having a fun time with the current campaign, plus its probably good to get more practice with other DMing aspects then I normally do.
I came here to try and get ideas and hooks to better fill out the current arc. I managed to get some ideas from everyone's posts and I plan on at least finishing this arc they are in, how much I rush it I'm not sure yet.
I guess one last question: Do you guys have any tips or tricks on running a guild based party system. The players seem to like being able to switch characters but as they get farther and farther from the main base, it becomes harder to let them make use of it, I'm tempted to make them choose a main party and the others are just back ups if someone dies or players miss a session and we just make a party #2 for a bit.
Perhaps they can discover various locations which could act as "forward bases", so that some of the guild can be based in each of the forward bases. This allows the current party of active PCs to retreat to one of these bases and then can be swapped out for other currently-inactive PCs.
If the inactive PCs have particular skill-sets, then there could be an IC reason for the party to retreat to the relevant established base to pick up the required skill-set PC.
I don’t have any tips that other people haven’t already thought of, but this sounds like a great campaign!
Since you were already planning on having teleportation towers/circles that the characters figure out how to activate ... you could just have their guild relocate to a ruin that contains a teleportation circle. This would at least make it easier for them to switch guild characters in and out since some of their adventures are going to lead to teleportation circles located elsewhere on the continent.
I've played in a campaign with a similar idea. We started playing Waterdeep Dragonheist but didn't feel like running the same characters all the way through a continuing campaign in Dungeon of the Mad Mage so we set up an Adventuring Company based at the Trollskull tavern that made it easy to swap characters in and out at the end of specific adventures.
With all the possibilities with ancient ruins, the previous inhabitants, lost magic items and artifacts, monstrous races vying with each other for power and to eliminate the new city ... there are an immense number of plot lines/encounters/dungeons/politics that you can easily fit in if you want to ... without even getting into the entire plot line with the five ruling ancient dragons and where they get their power from.
Anyway, if you WANT to keep the campaign going, I think you have the foundations to keep it going indefinitely for multiple groups of characters from level 1 to 20 or more. However, you sound a bit ambivalent about actually running a campaign like that so you'll want to think carefully about how long you want to run this.
You could also, potentially turn this into a shared world. The guild concept could allow you to have your own characters in the guild and play them when you swap DMs. Give someone else an undeveloped part of the world, let them know any big constraints or things to avoid and they can then create adventures in the same world allowing you to play while they DM. It really depends on how many DMs you have playing and whether they are about equally interested in playing as DMing.