Sept 18th, 2020
Over the previous two articles in this series, we have discussed how to develop and present you campaign ideas with and to your players.
This article will be part one of a three-part series on how to design your campaign world. The emphasis here will be more on campaign building than world building, though some of the concepts will remain similar.
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We all start somewhere. I remember the first few adventures and campaigns I ever ran, they were distinctly 'not good.' This was also twenty-ish years ago, around the ancient year known as 2000. The world had just survived the deadly computer virus that threatened to doom us all and the first whispers of Coronavirus were still what, like four centuries away?
Foolishness and terrible years aside, every campaign starts with an idea; from that idea will hopefully sprout a story; and from that story, a campaign. Ideas are relatively easy: person A does thing B and event C happens. Simple and easy to come up with. Not so easy to make interesting enough for people to care or want to play multiple sessions in a story revolving around it.
We could get into multi-tiered plotlines, red herrings and macguffins but they are not important right off the bat. Right now, you need to ask some questions:
Who? Relatively simple, mostly this is the player characters who will become embroiled in whatever you concoct.
Where? Starting Location and Adventure Location both fall under this question.
Why? This will be a question you ask and the players answer. Except for the important NPCs, that's all you as well.
When? This will be a part of your timeline and history if you choose to even have one. I recommend it but try different things and see what works for you.
What? The nitty-gritty of this question is the story itself.
All the above questions, when answered, will put you on the road to a solid story if you work at it. And we may touch on them over the next three articles, but let's focus on the sixth question: how.
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There are many methods of creating a campaign, but I have only ever used three in my storytelling career:
1 - The Inside Out Method
2 - The Outside In Method
3 - The Seed Method
You can probably guess at this point why this is a three-part article, so I think its time to finish this preamble and get to it.
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The Inside Out Method
This method is great for first time and experienced storytellers alike. The benefits of this one as the choice for young storytellers are the simplicity and the help you get from your players. There is less ability to really and truly surprise your players but there is always time for that later. For now, some good adventures under your belt is most important.
Part 1 - The Players and Their Characters
Genuinely interesting player characters are key here. If your group loves character interaction and designing those meticulous backstories for your use later in the story, this method may be the best for your table.
Let your players create some interesting characters. Encourage them to talk amongst each other and determine how these characters know each other, what family bonds they have, property they may own and anything else that is interesting to them. By listening to and acknowledging these things your players create you can develop a story and plotline that you 100% know your players will love.
Nothing makes a role-player happier than getting to design their own role to play. And nothing makes a storyteller happier than having pieces and plots to move around and create with.
Encourage your players to create datils, not just statistics. A level 1 human fighter with a strength of 16 is far and away less interesting than Horace, the blacksmith's son, learning to defend himself for the first time outside his beloved's house as goblins attack and burn his small village. Maybe another player is a town guard who sees this untrained youth fighting for his life and joins in. Better still maybe a player will take control of his beloved, kick the door open and reveal she's been a badass wizard this whole time.
Insist on family and friends, not just backstory. A bard, grieving the lute he sold to pay for his family's farm on the outskirts of the capital, searching and yearning for something to spark that creativity and magic within himself once more is much better than a bard looking for a pub to play in. Maybe that bard has a friend in the college of a nearby city, a friend who also is a player at your table.
The key here is finding reasons to say yes to your players' ideas without hindering your ideas or infringing on how your world works. Let them weave the threads needed to create a great adventuring party. This allows a focus on the players as well and makes them feel intrinsically involved in the goings on of the adventure.
Part 2 - The Starting Location
This can be anywhere honestly. From tropes like the pub or on the road in a chance meeting; to standing before the Duke in chains or stepping off the ship onto a pier together. What the starting location is, is unimportant. What is important is having a starting location.
There are some obvious exceptions to this; if you are running a pirate/sea focused campaign and everyone wakes up in the middle of a desert, there better be a good reason or some eyebrows will certainly be raised.
A good starting location will mean something to the players and their characters. Whether this is because the bartender, Kenneth, gives the party free drinks sometimes or because Kenneth's daughter just happens to be the party's resident healer.
This is a benefit to the party, a safe place to rest and recover from the trials of adventuring is worth far more than gold. I have had sessions where little more is done than eating a meal in a tavern and recounting their stories to the local innkeeper. It was a deep immersion role-play session but what it really did was give me all my players opinions on what had happened. It also made opening for me to slip some things the group missed into the innkeeper's dialogue.
This is also a liability for the party. A place where people they care about live and thus, a place for the bad guys to strike. Little is more compelling to a role-player than a character they know and love being in danger.
But remember, you do not want to endanger the players' safe places and loved ones every session. The reaction to this is universally to not like or trust any NPCs at all. Which kind of makes things a lot more boring. So, let the players think up an NPC they care for, it will always mean more to them that way and makes it look as though you simply are reacting to their creation.
Part 3 - The Adventure Location
The adventure location is where the entire adventure or campaign takes place. If it is a secluded valley with a town an old fortress and the dungeons beneath the fortress, then the adventure location is the valley and you need not make anything beyond it until the adventure calls for it.
With the players leading the way on what they like and want to see, the list of things you as storyteller need to work on is narrowed significantly. This process also allows for easy expansion of the area. After the old fortress is cleared, the next adventure can take place down along the river that runs out of the valley to parts unknown to the players at the start of the campaign. Or the fortress could be the entrance to a wider set of tunnels and caves beneath the mountains nearby. Maybe a lost dwarven kingdom or a cabal of monsters, who knows.
Adventure location is important in this method as it is in any campaign design, but when you use this method it takes on less importance in terms of creating the location. The location should be a logical extension of everything else you and your players create.
As for the specifics of what the actual location is, that is not for the scope of this article. Placing walls, traps and roaming monsters is all part of crafting dungeons, a topic that needs much more depth than this article can provide.
Suffice to say, the adventure location needs only to have a hook to draw the players in. Something that makes the players want to go there and work their way through whatever lies there. If that's where Kenneth the bartender is taken when the bad guys kidnap him, then the players will rush to his rescue. At least hopefully they will.
In addition to a hook, the location needs a reward, something valuable to the players and/ or their characters. This could be information they need or experience to grow their characters. It could also be valuable, such as gold or gems, or even magic items. At least if your world has such things.
Short list: a hook to get them to the entrance of the location and a reward at the end of it. Those two things will cover the needs of most characters involved. And with the information you glean in Part 1, you can throw in some extra tidbits to make the story extra interesting.
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Overall, the Inside Out Method allows you to create 'pieces' of the story and put them together like a puzzle to create an ever-expanding network of locations and adventures. This also works best with episodic style campaigns. I will do an article on Episodic versus Serial storytelling sometime down the road but until such a time, I will link some webpages at the bottom so you can check the ideas out a bit.
Part 2 of this article will deal with the Outside In Method, which is the one I have used most frequently in my storytelling career.
Remember though, no matter which way you go, the most important thing is the story and the fun you and your players have along the way. Sappy? Yes. True? Also, yes.
Eric
Today's links I found when googling 'episodic vs serial stories', they don't directly relate to the methods above, but the information is helpful regardless.