Chapter 8: Campaigns
Just As a D&D adventure is a series of encounters strung together into an overarching story, a campaign is a larger story that ties those adventures together. When you’re ready to construct your own campaign, let this chapter be your guide. At its most fundamental level, a campaign is the story of the characters in your game. You don’t have to give a lot more thought to it than that: It’s fine to run adventures in an episodic format, with the characters as the only common element. But you can also weave themes through those adventures to build a greater saga of those characters’ achievements in the world. Planning an entire campaign seems a daunting task, but don’t worry—you don’t have to plot out every detail right from the start. You can start off with the basics, running a few adventures (whether published or those you design yourself), and later think about larger plotlines you want to explore. You’re free to add as much or as little detail as you wish. This chapter includes the following sections.
✦ Published Campaigns: An overview of how published campaigns can give your campaign a solid start and lots of fuel for adventures to come.
✦ Campaign Theme: Ideas for creating a campaign from adventures with a common link.
✦ Super Adventures: How to build a campaign consisting of just one long adventure.
✦ Campaign Story. Advice on developing the campaign, looking toward its conclusion, and planning how the characters will get there.
✦ Beginning a Campaign. How to get started—keep it small at first.
✦ Running a Campaign. Tying adventures together in a way that makes sense.
✦ Ending a Campaign. How to bring the story to its natural conclusion, in a fun and satisfying way.
Published Campaigns
You don’t have to create an entire campaign from nothing. A published campaign makes starting and running a game as easy as possible. Chapter 11 of this book presents a brief example of a published campaign. It includes a starting area, a short adventure, and plot hooks and story ideas for further development. You can continue from that starting point, using other published adventures (for example, Keep on the Shadowfell, Thunderspire Labyrinth, and Pyramid of Shadows) or designing stories of your own. A complete campaign setting, such as the FORGOTTEN REALMS setting, goes quite a bit farther than this introduction. A published campaign isn’t quite like a published adventure. You can run an adventure right away, with only a minimum of preparation, or customize it to fit your play group. Although you can start a published campaign as soon as you crack open the book, you’ll get more out of using the tools and ideas it contains as inspiration for crafting your own adventures in that setting. The FORGOTTEN REALMS Campaign Guide provides a starting area—the town of Loudwater—complete with interesting characters and encounters, but that’s just a taste of what awaits. That town lies in the Gray Vale, just one region in a richly detailed fantasy world. The FORGOTTEN REALMS setting is full of mysterious ruins, evil plots, and deadly threats. You can build your own adventures from those details, use published ones set in that world, or draw on years of FORGOTTEN REALMS novels for inspiration. The Campaign Guide will help you weave those ideas together with story threads to bring the campaign setting to life. Your players can even make characters custom-fitted for the world, using the rules in the FORGOTTEN REALMS Player’s Guide. Everything you need to keep a campaign going for years is readily available in these resources.
CHARACTER ORIGIN AND BACKGROUND
The Player’s Guide for a published campaign gives your players rules and background information to make characters who feel as though they belong in the setting. Your job is to find common threads to tie those characters together at the start of the campaign. In a FORGOTTEN REALMS campaign, for example, one player might bring a heroic scion native to the Gray Vale, reared on tales of her parents’ and grandparents’ adventures. Another might play a horse barbarian from Narfell, traveling the world in search of a way to free his homeland from the icy grip of winter. A third character could be an escaped slave from Thay, haunted by years of servitude in that land of evil magic. With just these simple backgrounds, your players have already given you a lot to work with. Start by learning more about Thay and Narfell in the Campaign Guide and think about what led those characters to the Gray Vale or why they met. You can also let your players take on that responsibility: They can play characters of any background, but they have to give a good reason for them to be in the starting area. (This tactic is also an incentive for players to learn more about the world.) Perhaps the escaped slave has heard whispered tales of the heroic scion’s grandparents, who won renown fighting against the Red Wizards of Thay a hundred years ago, and has come seeking them. The slave might have run into the horse nomad during their travels, regaling him with tales of those legendary figures and inspiring him to seek them out as well. How will the two react when they find out that the great heroes’ only surviving heir is no more accomplished an adventurer than they? Your campaign is off to an interesting start.
THE CAMPAIGN START
A setting’s Campaign Guide provides introductory material to familiarize yourself and your players with the setting. You can get going right away in the starting location, and the book supplies a few short adventures as well as pointers to further story ideas. While you’re playing through these, look for hints, plots, and other hooks that grab the attention of you or your players. You can develop your campaign by following those ideas to interesting parts of the world. On the flip side, you might first read through the Campaign Guide to find a story element that captures your imagination, then plant the seeds of that story in the very first adventure. To grow the campaign, work in some connection to the larger world—ties between the adventure’s main antagonist and a larger villainous organization, or foreshadowing of some greater threat to come. Now you’re ready for the next steps.
NEXT STEPS
By the time you get close to wrapping up the introductory adventures of your campaign, you should have some idea of what to do next. Maybe you’d like to run another published adventure, or you feel ready to strike out on your own. Either way, you’ll need to come up with a theme. A campaign’s theme has a clear direction and gives the players a sense of purpose. (There’s more about campaign themes in the next section.) It might be an exciting villain whom you want to expand on, an organization that sponsors adventurers, or a worldshaking threat that grows more urgent as the campaign progresses. Your theme can carry your campaign all the way to epic levels, or be a short-term issue that evolves or disappears as time goes by. It might fit in neatly with elements at the start of the campaign or be completely unrelated—it’s all right to shift gears, introducing new themes and plots after the players have gotten their feet wet. A Campaign Guide is a treasury of good ideas, bundled with the tools you need to adapt them to your game. Use the guidelines in Chapter 6 to help you customize published adventures for the setting and choose the ones that work best with your campaign. Say you’re running a FORGOTTEN REALMS campaign that revolves around the shades of Netheril. You can easily relate the plot of a published adventure to the far-reaching ambitions of the shades, regardless of geographic setting. You might make its key villain into a shade, then create other adventures featuring that organization more prominently. Ultimately, the characters might dare the floating cities of Netheril itself.
MAKING IT YOURS
Even though you’re using a published setting, always remember: It’s still your campaign. You should never limit your creativity to what the book says—any book. A Campaign Guide is a source of ideas and a toolbox. You don’t have to use that material exactly as it stands. You can and should change things you don’t like, incorporate elements you like from other campaigns or adventures, and put your own distinctive stamp on the world. Altering a published campaign to suit your tastes can be tricky if the setting is familiar to one or more of your players. It’s a good idea to establish at the outset that not everything in the book is necessarily true in your version of the world. Otherwise, the game can get bogged down by arguments about the details, such as whether the adherents of this or that deity would do the things your adventure calls for them to do. It’s your game, and the players should understand that its events make sense in your vision for the setting. In short, use a Campaign Guide as it’s intended—a springboard for creativity—and let your imagination run free. It doesn’t matter whether you’re putting your own personal stamp on a published campaign or making up your own and incorporating elements you like from a published setting. The campaign is just as much yours either way.
LOOTING FREELY
Even if you want to create your own campaign, you don’t have to do all the work yourself. A lot of really creative fantasy is already out there, and you can pick and choose from that rich body of material to make your game more colorful and exciting. Perhaps you have an idea for a campaign with a strong elemental theme, ultimately pitting the characters against one or more primordials. Your world might incorporate the elemental-touched genasi race from the FORGOTTEN REALMS Player’s Guide, but can also borrow heavily from other sources. The Avatar: The Last Airbender animated television show is full of wonderful imagery and ideas to suit an elemental plotline. The AL-QADIM campaign setting for the D&D game, published in the 1990s, drew on the legends of the Arabian Nights and featured efreets and elementals. What and how much you borrow doesn’t matter. The final product is uniquely yours, and your players will marvel at its detail.
Campaign Theme
Just as the personality of a setting shapes the adventures that take place there, the theme of a campaign gives a distinctive flavor to its stories. A freewheeling series of adventures, in which the characters travel from one dungeon to another with little or no connection, feels very different from a years-long struggle against cultists of Orcus that culminates in a final showdown with the Demon Lord of the Undead himself. This section gives overviews of some typical campaign themes, as well as different ways of handling them.
EVOLVING THEMES
You don’t have to stick with a single theme from the start of your campaign through thirty levels of play. The characters grow and change over the course of a campaign; so should your world. You can wrap up one storyline after a few levels and start a new one, or introduce multiple themes at various levels and weave them subtly together. Breaks between tiers are natural points for concluding one theme and bringing in another. For example, the characters might spend their first twenty levels fighting the temples of evil gods, then discover the even greater threat of a primordial uprising. At epic levels, they have to join forces with the gods—including the evil ones who were their former enemies—to defeat the primordials.
DUNGEON OF THE WEEK
This sort of campaign resembles an episodic television show. Each week, the main characters move from one distinct setting to another (a planet, a haunted house, an era of history, and so on). They solve that episode’s problems, then go on their way to deal with the next. Once they’re done, things return to pretty much the way they were at the start. A “Dungeon of the Week” is the simplest kind of campaign to run, since it requires little effort beyond finding or creating adventures. Each story has its own main villain, unconnected to the antagonists of any other. The D&D world is dark and full of threats, and they don’t need anything else in common.
ON A MISSION
Only slightly more involved than an unconnected series of adventures, this campaign theme quickly links the characters’ exploits with an overarching goal. It’s easy to overlay a mission or similar story on otherwise independent sessions. The simplest is one of exploration: The characters set out to map the region, the continent, or the whole world, encountering threats along the way. Perhaps they seek the ancient capital of a fallen empire, or are trying to find their way back to the home they left to fight in a recent war. Religion is a ready-made source of missions. For example, the characters could be pilgrims to some holy site, or members of a sacred order dedicated to defending the last bastions of civilization in an ever-darkening world. In more militant orders, they might be holy warriors dedicated to stamping out a particular kind of threat, such as aberrant creatures or demonic cultists. Whatever the story, it implies a stronger connection between adventures.
ULTIMATE VILLAIN
Episodic adventures against a certain kind of opponent, such as in the “holy warrior” mission above, lead naturally to a campaign focused on a single villain who’s ultimately behind everything. The characters might begin their careers fighting goblins and kobolds, only to discover that those monsters are the servants of foulspawn. Their continuing adventures lead them into the horrors of the Far Realm’s influence, with battles against aboleths and illithids, climaxing in an epic struggle against a mind flayer mastermind and its swordwing minions. That aberrant mastermind need not have been directly involved in the characters’ first adventures, but the existence of even the lowly foulspawn can be traced to its activities. You can build a villain-focused campaign from the top down or from the bottom up. In the first method, you first choose an epic villain for the campaign’s climactic battle (Orcus, for example), and then plan adventures toward that conclusion from the start of the campaign. In the case of Orcus, these encounters build on themes of cultists, demons, and undead. In the second method, you build encounters around low-level monsters that appeal to you (such as the foulspawn) and then create adventures involving similar or related monsters at higher levels.
Players can become deeply invested in a campaign whose main villain keeps coming back to vex their characters. One way to ensure that the final battle with their nemesis really is climactic is to give the villain a secret weakness. In order to ultimately destroy their archenemy, the characters need to discover this weakness and then exploit it. Then that last battle will be more than just a race to see who runs out of hit points first. For example, every lich has a phylactery, a magical receptacle for its soul that it keeps well hidden. The characters face the lich in combat and defeat it, believing they have ended its threat, only to find later that has returned to continue its evil schemes. Now they must discover the location of the phylactery, win their way past its magical and monstrous guardians, and ultimately fight the lich again, with the phylactery hanging in the balance. Destroying the item might itself become a quest in which time is of the essence— the characters might have to perform a particular ritual, or locate the forge of the phylactery’s creation to melt it down. Such a theme can carry a campaign well into the paragon tier. Epic-level characters might have to confront and overcome a creature of enormous power, such as the tarrasque, a demon lord, a deity, or a primordial. Such beings can be defeated only with special rituals or particular items. For example, the party must quest for and assemble the scattered pieces of the Rod of Seven Parts to have a hope of destroying the primordial called the Queen of Chaos. Even relatively ordinary foes can return again and again, protected by some means that the characters must discover and eliminate. A vile caliph performs a ritual to remove his still-beating heart and hides it in a chest at the center of a desert sandstorm. A wicked baron is cursed to rise
from the dead until the onyx shard that holds a splinter of his soul is found and destroyed. Naturally, when the characters start pursuing the means to kill a powerful villain, their enemy is sure to get wind of their efforts sooner or later—and try to put a stop to it. The villain will be prepared when they arrive for the ultimate confrontation or, more likely, will send out agents or otherwise try to prevent them from completing their task. The villainous response to the party’s actions can produce a wealth of adventures in itself.
WORLD SHAKING EVENTS
A campaign featuring a major villain often revolves around a diabolical plan that will result in significant changes to the world—presumably for the worse— which the characters must stop. In other campaigns, the world faces a crisis without a villain’s involvement, and the characters have to prevent or at least minimize the impact of such an event. Campaigns of this nature have a deadline that looms over the course of dozens of adventures. The dreaded event will take place at a certain time unless the characters succeed. Perhaps the Elemental Chaos is eating away at the stable fabric of creation, drawing the world toward ultimate entropy; the characters must collect scattered shards of divine energy to shore up the pillars of creation. Or a primordial entombed at the center of the earth is extending tendrils of reality warping energy toward the surface, forming dungeons that spew forth hideous monstrosities. The characters must clear the dungeons and cut off their connection to the primordial before they engulf what shattered remnants of civilization remain. The threat to your world might be mundane in nature, but no less devastating—in the last days of a great empire’s decline, orc hordes menace the frontiers while decadence and corruption undermine the empire’s foundation.
UNFOLDING PROPHECY
This type of campaign puts an interesting spin on world-shaking events, casting them as the unfolding fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. A villain might be helping to bring about the foretold doom, furthering his own plans, or try to keep the prophecy from coming true (for example, killing the child who is destined to destroy the villain). The beauty of a well-crafted prophecy is its ambiguity. Classical myth is full of examples of tragic misinterpretation or ultimate vindication of what has been foretold. Since it’s always open to a variety of interpretations, many different ways can exist to fulfill the prophecy. The villain might try to bring it about in one way, while the characters struggle to find a solution that betters the world instead of plunging it into ruin.
DIVINE STRIFE
The ongoing struggle between good and evil is the basis for many tales, myths, and campaigns. In a conflict between two gods, or between groups of deities with different alignments, taking sides becomes a matter of cosmic importance. In a campaign built around divine strife, the characters aren’t just fighting evil creatures—they’re servants of good deities warring with the agents of evil ones. They might be champions of a single god, such as Bahamut, dedicated to overthrowing the temples of Bane. In such a storyline, the enemies of their adventures are connected to the opposing deity: priests of Bane, hobgoblin warlords devoted to that lord of conquest, and angelic servitors of the god himself. Bane might be planning to seize power from Bahamut, or to conquer the Celestial Mountain where Bahamut, Moradin, and Kord reside. Or Bahamut might instigate the struggle, bent on exterminating an ancient enemy.
PRIMORDIAL THREAT
Even more fundamental to the world than conflicts among deities is the gods’ ancient war with the primordials, embodiments of chaos and elemental power. From the earliest times, gods and primordials fought over ownership of the cosmos, and the gods emerged victorious. The surviving primordials could yet arise as a threat to the whole of creation, seeking to return it to the Elemental Chaos of its birth. In the early stages of such a campaign, the characters might battle a goblin cult of a minor fire spirit, then discover that it is just one manifestation of a worldwide madness. More cults dedicated to destructive elemental forces are springing up everywhere, channeling power to the entombed primordials in preparation for their escape. Ultimately, the epic-level characters might have to fight alongside the gods themselves to oppose these mighty foes.
FANTASY SUBGENRES
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a fantasy game, but that broad category has room for a lot of variety. Many different subgenres of fantasy exist in both fiction and film. Do you want a horrific campaign inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith? Or a world of muscled barbarians and nimble thieves, along the lines of the classic swords-and-sorcery books by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber? The D&D game can handle either of these models, and many others.
Vampires brood on the battlements of their accursed castles. Necromancers toil in dark dungeons to create colossi of undead flesh. Devils corrupt the innocent, and werewolves prowl the night. All these elements evoke horrific aspects of the fantasy genre. If you want to put a horror spin on your campaign, you have plenty of material to work with. The Monster Manual is full of creatures that perfectly suit a storyline of supernatural horror. The most important element of such a campaign, though, isn’t covered by the rules. You must create an atmosphere of building dread, through careful pacing and evocative description. Your players contribute too—they have to be willing to be scared. Whether you want to run a full-fledged horror campaign or a single creepy adventure, you should discuss your plans with the players ahead of time to make sure they’re on board. Horror can be intense and personal, and not everyone is comfortable with such a game.
The corrupt vizier schemes with the baron’s oldest daughter to assassinate the baron. A hobgoblin army sends doppelganger spies to infiltrate the city before the invasion. At the embassy ball, the spy in the royal court makes contact with his employer. Political intrigue, espionage, sabotage, and similar cloak-and-dagger activities can make for an exciting D&D campaign. In this kind of game, the characters might care more about skill training and making contacts than about attack powers and magic weapons. Roleplaying and interaction-focused skill challenges take on greater importance than combat encounters, and the party might go for several sessions without seeing a monster. Again, make sure your players know ahead of time that this is the kind of campaign you want to run. Otherwise, a player might make a character such as a dwarf paladin focused on defense, only to find he is out of place among the half-elf diplomats and tiefling spies.
Who stole three legendary magic swords and hid them away in a remote dungeon, leaving a cryptic clue to their location? Who placed the duke into a magical slumber, and what can be done to awaken him? Who murdered the guildmaster, and how did the killer get into the guild’s locked vault? A mystery-themed campaign puts the characters in the role of investigators, perhaps traveling from town to town to crack tough cases the local authorities can’t handle. Such a campaign emphasizes puzzles and problem-solving in addition to combat prowess. A larger mystery might even set the stage for the whole campaign. Why did someone kill the characters’ mentor, setting them on the path of adventure? Who really controls the Cult of the Red Hand? In this case, the characters might uncover clues to the greater mystery only once in a while; individual adventures might be at best tangentially related to that theme. A diet of nothing but puzzles can become frustrating, so be sure to mix up the kinds of encounters you present.
Rapier-wielding sailors fight off boarding sahuagin. Ghouls lurk in derelict ships, waiting to devour treasure hunters. Dashing rogues and charming paladins weave their way through palace intrigues and leap from balconies onto waiting horses below. You can have grand fun modeling your campaign on the swashbuckling adventures of pirates and musketeers. The characters typically spend more time in cities, royal courts, and seafaring vessels than in dungeon delves, making interaction skills important (though not to the extent of a pure intrigue campaign). Nevertheless, the heroes might end up in classic dungeon situations, such as searching storm sewers beneath the palace to find the evil duke’s hidden chambers. A swashbuckling theme is slightly anachronistic for the medieval setting of the D&D game, so you might want to make some cosmetic changes—particularly where heavy armor is concerned. Rapiers and acrobatic combat moves don’t go well with heavy, clanking metal. The paladin who normally wears a suit of plate mail might instead sport a relatively light breastplate. In this case, you might need to adjust the armor bonus to match that of plate in a standard campaign.
A grim, hulking fighter disembowels the high priest of the serpent god on his own altar. A laughing rogue spends ill-gotten gains on cheap wine in filthy taverns. Hardy adventurers venture into the unexplored jungle in search of the fabled City of Golden Masks. A swords-and-sorcery campaign is old-school D&D, a tradition that goes right back to the roots of the game. Here you’ll find a dark, gritty world of evil sorcerers and decadent cities, where the protagonists are more motivated by greed and self-interest than by altruistic virtue. Martial characters tend to be far more common than arcane or divine ones. In such a pulp fantasy setting, those who wield magic often symbolize the decadence and corruption of civilization.
A hobgoblin army marches toward the city, leading behemoths and giants to batter down its walls and ramparts. Dragons wheel above a barbarian horde, scattering enemies as the raging warriors cut a swath through field and forest. Fire archons muster at an efreet’s command, poised to assault an Astral fortress. Warfare in a fantasy world is rife with opportunities for adventure. A war campaign isn’t generally concerned with the specifics of troop movements, but instead focuses on the heroes whose actions turn the tide of battle. They might be sent on specific missions: capture a magical standard that empowers undead armies, gather reinforcements to break a siege, or cut through the enemy’s flank to reach a demonic commander. In other situations, the party might support the larger army, by holding a strategic location until reinforcements arrive, killing enemy scouts before they can report, or cutting off supply lines. Information gathering and diplomatic missions might supplement the more combat-oriented adventures.
When their mentor disappears mysteriously, his young students must hunt down the oni that’s terrorizing the village. Accomplished heroes, masters of their respective martial arts, return home to free their village from a evil hobgoblin warlord. The rakshasa master of a nearby monastery is performing rituals to raise troubled ghosts from their rest. Chinese martial-arts movies (or Japanese anime) form a distinct fantasy tradition. A campaign that draws on these elements can still feel very much like D&D. Players can define the appearance of their characters and gear however they choose, and powers might need cosmetic changes to flavor so that they better reflect such a setting. For example, when the characters use powers that teleport them or shift them several squares, they actually make high-flying acrobatic leaps. Climb checks don’t involve careful searching for holds but let characters bounce up walls or from tree to tree. Warriors stun their opponents by striking pressure points. Such flavorful descriptions of powers don’t change the nuts and bolts of the rules but make all the difference in the feel of a campaign.
It’s a good idea to mix things up once in a while, so that your players can enjoy a variety of adventures. Even if you’re running a tightly themed campaign, you can stray now and then. If your campaign involves lots of intrigue, mystery, and roleplaying, your players might enjoy the occasional dungeon crawl—in the end, it might turn out to be related to a larger plot in the campaign. If most of your adventures are dungeon expeditions, shift gears with a good urban mystery (whose solution leads the party into a kind of dungeon crawl in an abandoned building or tower). If you run horror adventures week after week, try throwing in a villain who turns out to be quite ordinary, perhaps even silly. Comic relief is a great variation on almost any D&D campaign, though players usually provide it themselves! Make sure you provide a variety of opponents as well. Even if your campaign is all about invading hobgoblins, your players will get tired of fighting an endless series of them, week after week. Hobgoblins are accomplished beast trainers, so mix in pets and war animals to vary your encounters. Even better, take a break once in a while from the hobgoblin armies and introduce a new threat. Perhaps gnolls from the nearby hills take advantage of the chaos of war to raid the characters’ supply lines, providing a chance to fight a very different flavor of humanoid opponent.
Super Adventures
A super adventure is a type of short campaign—really one long adventure—that focuses on a single, limited setting. The characters’ exploration of this one site might form part of a larger campaign, or be itself the entire campaign. A super adventure combines the best features of a short campaign and a narrow theme. You don’t need to tie adventures together or link different villains to a single grand plot. The climactic battle at the end is a tidy way to end a campaign—before you begin your next one! Super adventures share a number of traits:
✦ They are limited to a single setting.
✦ They often allow for free-form, nonlinear exploration.
✦ They might involve different quests and multiple expeditions.
✦ They encourage character specialization.
Each of these attributes is discussed in more detail below.
SINGLE SETTING
The setting for a super adventure has to be both large and compelling, providing enough material for characters to explore over several months of play. You might create a massive dungeon with many floors, each more dangerous than the last, or design a secluded wilderness site with small dungeons scattered throughout. The adventure site could be a vast network of Underdark passages, leading the party ever deeper into the earth. A super adventure demands the most compelling setting you can imagine, with a striking personality and lots of potential for interesting locations. Classic published super adventures have been set in the fabled ruins of Greyhawk; Castle Ravenloft with its mysterious lands; the Forbidden City, nestled in a crater choked with jungle overgrowth; and the Vault of the Drow, hidden deep underground. You might create a new classic of your own: the Blackmire, a miasma of madness and disease surrounding a slumbering primordial; or the haunted forest of Grimmendeep, which has swallowed many ancient castles in its tangled briars. Designing a super adventure is easier if you divide the larger setting into smaller units. That way, you and your players can better keep track of where they are and what they’re doing. A dungeon is a convenient and traditional design for separating encounter areas. Its multiple floors have limited connections, whether stairs or shafts, and each can have its own distinct personality. A vast locale such as Grimmendeep can also contain multiple smaller areas with a variety of flavors, though they’re all overlaid by the larger site’s personality (in this case, the choking roots and vines of the haunted forest).
NONLINEAR EXPLORATION
You can design your super adventure’s setting to let the characters choose which areas to explore and in what order, depending on the quests laid before them. This method requires more preparation time but rewards you and the players with a more interesting experience. The characters might decide to clear the drow out of the Phantom Tower before they deal with the raiders in the ruins of Dorbren Keep, for example. Those two locations are relatively small and self-contained, rather than full-fledged adventures, so you can have both ready for whatever the players decide to do. Each adventure area should contain eight to ten encounters, so the characters will probably advance a level when they complete its challenges. But when adventurers can travel to any area in any order, building appropriate encounters can be tricky. Fortunately, adjusting encounter difficulty is fairly simple. To account for characters who have advanced a few levels, you can boost the monsters’ levels to match, using the guidelines in Chapter 10, or add monsters to make the encounter more challenging. When characters leave a part of your adventure setting and venture back later, it should change in response to their actions. This kind of detail helps the setting seem more real and alive to the players. Monsters the party has killed should (usually) stay dead—the site shouldn’t just reset to the state it was in the first time around. But the second delve might well present new threats to the characters. Intelligent survivors of the characters’ first intrusion into their domain react appropriately, bolstering their defenses or evacuating the area. New creatures might appear in areas left vacant, such as predators drawn to shelter and prey opportunities. A living setting provides repeat play value and continues to hold the players’ interest. A free-form environment such as this feels very natural—the opposite of railroading. The players’ decisions seem to really make a difference to the course of the adventure. A possible problem is that the party might end up wandering around with no real idea of what to do. You can keep them from having to search for the fun by making liberal use of quests.
MULTIPLE QUESTS
A good way to start your super adventure, just as with any other adventure, is with a quest or two that draws the characters in. As the adventure unfolds, give them more quests that encourage them to move around the area. They might find clues in one area that send them to a different one. Quests might lead the party into a dungeon, back out again, and in again with a new purpose. With a number of quests at hand, characters can look at all their options and choose one. A given quest might seem the obvious first thing to do, or it could simply be more interesting. It’s better to offer too many quests than too few, but don’t go too far in either direction. They can be major or minor, aimed at the whole group or tailored to individuals (whether known to the whole group or secret). At the outset, you might design individual quests based on each character’s background and motivations. As the super adventure progresses, players might even suggest their own.
CHARACTER SPECIALIZATION
A super adventure usually has a narrow focus, such as a certain kind of environment or foe. Such a theme gives players the opportunity to choose specialized options for their characters that they might otherwise avoid. In a super adventure, the players know their characters will be fighting undead—or dragons or demons or gnolls, depending on the setting—for the duration of their careers. Published super adventures often include material specifically designed to allow this kind of specialization. When you design your own super adventures, consider creating or borrowing elements that let characters focus on what they are called to do: specialized feats, powers, paragon paths, magic weapons and armor, and the like. Remember also that characters can retrain as they advance, changing specialized skills as needed to face new challenges.
Campaign Story
The theme you choose for your campaign shapes the story it will tell. When you start a campaign, you should have some idea of its end and how the characters will get there. Fundamentally, the story is what the characters do over the course of the campaign. Keep that point in mind—the story is theirs, not yours, and not that of any nonplayer character in your world. The players’ job is to tell that story, develop their characters, and help chart the course of events through the choices they make. When you’re writing a novel, you have control over the protagonists, but when you’re creating a D&D campaign, they have free will and are apt to do unexpected things. That said, you can do a lot to shape the campaign story. You provide the context—the setting, the background, and the quests that hook the characters. You determine how the world responds to their actions. You set the stage on which their story unfolds with the adventures you design. For that reason, all the advice in Chapter 6 about creating adventures applies to campaign design as well. Offer strong hooks and meaningful choices. Present varied and exciting challenges. If the characters go in drastically unexpected directions, try to coax them back to the story you want your game to tell without railroading them. Build the campaign to a climax that’s even bigger than the smaller peaks of each adventure, and let the players feel as though their ultimate victory really makes a difference in the world. When you’re thinking about the story of your campaign as a whole, ask yourself these three questions.
✦ How does my campaign’s theme shape its story?
✦ What significant events took place before the start of the campaign?
✦ What’s going to happen in the campaign?
THEME AND STORY
A campaign theme should suggest the outline of a story, or at least give some idea about how things are likely to end up. Here’s advice on how to build a story using the themes discussed earlier in this chapter.
A highly episodic campaign doesn’t need to have an overall story, but it could. As the characters explore, they might begin to uncover common elements that link the disparate dungeons together, ultimately leading to the “Mother of All Dungeons,” figuratively or even literally speaking. You can also gradually nudge this sort of campaign toward any other theme, giving your campaign a new direction and ultimately an exciting conclusion.
In this kind of campaign, the characters’ purpose drives the story. How do they achieve their goal? That question is easier to answer for some missions than for others. If the characters are trying to explore a continent, their story might not end until they fill in every bit of coastline, riverbank, and mountain range on the map. But if they’re on a holy quest to stamp out evil, imagining a satisfactory conclusion is a little harder. In such a case, consider evolving the theme somewhat over the course of the campaign. For example, the characters might uncover corruption within their own church, and their goal shifts to rooting it out—ultimately confronting whoever is behind the evil within.
This campaign revolves around the characters’ efforts to foil the villain’s plot. Thus, this plot shapes the story of the campaign. Typically the ultimate villain exploits the plans of less powerful bad guys to further his or her ends. Think about those lesser antagonists along the way to the final conflict, and how their actions contribute to this greater goal. Do they know they’re helping the mastermind, or are they oblivious to this larger purpose? The answers direct the progress of the story, leading to a climactic confrontation.
When the foundations of the world tremble, the characters need some way to make a difference. How do these great events play out, and how do the characters influence them? Will they in fact avert the destruction or transformation of the world, and if so, how? It might be that they can’t prevent the calamity, but their actions can determine what follows in its wake. Perhaps they can’t stop the empire’s fall, but they might drive the orc barbarians back from the frontiers, then destroy the decadent emperor and establish a republic—or a stronger empire with themselves as rulers.
The prophecy itself is the story in this kind of campaign. You can imagine each “verse” of the prophecy as a series of forking paths: How one is fulfilled causes the following ones to unfold in different ways, with multiple interpretations all down the line. In the end, does the prophecy come to pass, or do the characters prevent whatever cataclysmic events it seemed to foretell? Perhaps they must venture to the Bright City and persuade Ioun herself to alter the prophecy. If they can’t, they might have to battle their way to the loom where the strands of fate are woven into the tapestry of history, there to cut the thread.
This campaign theme suggests an escalating conflict against increasingly powerful servants of the characters’ divine enemy. Ultimately, the party could face an evil god directly or play a pivotal role in a battle between gods. However you plan it, such a scenario needs to emphasize the characters’ importance— watching helplessly on the sidelines while two gods duke it out isn’t a fun or satisfying conclusion to a campaign. Perhaps Bane has imprisoned Bahamut, and the only way the characters can defeat him is to join together into a single, mighty avatar of Bahamut that combines their own abilities with an infusion of divine power. Some evil gods (such as Tiamat, Torog, and Zehir) are within the reach of 30th-level characters, who can win a final, epic struggle by themselves.
When the gods fought the primordials at the beginning of the world, they became the first adventurers, working in parties of four or five to challenge individual enemies. In a campaign revolving around a primordial resurgence, the characters might fight alongside their divine allies. Or they could follow in the gods’ footsteps, defeating a primordial as the pinnacle of their careers—and earning a well-deserved place among the gods as their final reward.
EVOLVING THEMES
If you’re thinking about evolving campaign themes, you’re already considering the overall story. What events bring this change about? Are they the actions of the characters, or do they result from external influence? Characters on a mission of discovery might unearth a world-shaking threat at some point in their explorations and alter their focus to deal with it. A party embroiled in a conflict between two gods might become aware of a growing danger from a primordial. At that point, the characters have to persuade the divine enemies to set aside their differences long enough to overcome the greater threat. (But will one deity use the climactic battle with the primordial to attack the other when his back is turned?)
WHAT HAS COME BEFORE
You should put some thought into the events that have brought your world to the point where the campaign begins. Don’t overdo it, though. You need only as much history as necessary to set the stage for the story you have in mind. The material in the D&D core rulebooks makes a few basic assumptions about the game world. Mighty empires rose and fell in the distant past: the dragonborn realm of Arkhosia, Bael Turath of the tieflings, and the eladrin Realm of the Twin Queens. Most recently, the human empire of Nerath covered much of the known world, uniting the civilized races into one great nation—but it, too, has fallen. If any empires remain, they are distant and foreign. The world as the characters know it is a dangerous place where civilized areas are small, flickering lights amid a greater darkness. This historical sketch provides a background against which the D&D game makes sense. Why is the world full of dungeons, where characters fight monsters and find treasure? Because ancient fallen empires leave behind both ruins and precious artifacts. The encroaching darkness is full of creatures that make their lairs in those ruins and hoard those treasures. Why do dwarves, tieflings, eladrin, and humans cooperate in adventuring parties? Because the human empire brought the different races together in its towns and cities, and they still live beside one another in most remaining communities. As well, the threats of the darkness are driving people from their ancestral holdings—for example, burning forests scatter the elves, who seek refuge in human towns. None of these principles are set in stone. You might adopt them wholly, tweak some of them to suit your campaign, or discard them completely in favor of a history of your own. They make a good starting point, though, for creating your own story. If you alter this assumed history, make sure you can explain the underlying assumptions of your campaign.
THE CAMPAIGN OUTLINE
Once you have some idea of how your campaign theme will shape the story and have developed a historical backdrop, you can sketch out its major events. Such an outline must be in broad strokes, since the characters’ actions have to make a difference, and their choices be meaningful. This sketch is likely to change significantly as your campaign progresses and new details are filled in. If nothing else, though, you’ll at least have an idea of the campaign’s climax and how the characters can get there. When they stray from your outline—and they will—you’ll have some sense of what adventures to create to get them back on course. One way to think about this outline is to divide it into adventuring tiers: heroic, paragon, and epic. You can use the Monster Manual to find out the kinds of threats the characters might face at each tier. Since characters need eight to ten encounters to gain a level, a tier consists of roughly a hundred encounters, or ten fairly short adventures. There are plenty of drow in the paragon tier, for example—perhaps at those levels the characters will be traveling through the Underdark realms. You can use that idea as a springboard for designing adventures to fit your broad story outline from 11th to 20th level.
Beginning a Campaign
The start of a campaign is a lot like the start of an adventure: You want to get quickly to the action, show the players that adventure awaits, and grab them right away. Give the players enough information to make them want to come back week after week to see how the story plays out.
START SMALL
You’ve spent some time thinking about the big picture of your campaign’s theme and story. Now it’s time to start building adventures and fleshing out the details. Start small. Don’t be intimidated by the size of the setting—focus on what’s close at hand. You don’t need to draw a map of the world right away, because the characters only know about the town where they start the game, and perhaps the nearby dungeon. You might have ideas about how this town’s barony is at war with a nearby duchy, or some distant forest is crawling with yuan-ti, and you should make a note of those things. But right now, the local area is enough to get the game off the ground. Above all, make sure you provide a common starting location for the characters—a place where they have met and decided to put their lives in each other’s hands. This starting point might be the village where they grew up or a city that has attracted them from all over. Perhaps it’s the dungeons of the evil baron’s castle, where they are locked up for various reasons, throwing them into the midst of the adventure. Whatever you choose, give that starting place only as much detail as it needs. You don’t need to identify every building in a village or label every street in a large city. If the characters start in the baron’s dungeon, you do have to design it—that’s the site of your first adventure—but you don’t have to worry about the names of all the baron’s knights yet. Sketch out a simple map, think about the surrounding area, and consider whom the characters are most likely to interact with early in the campaign. Most important, visualize how this area fits into the theme and story you have in mind for your campaign. Then get to work on your first adventure!
CHARACTER ORIGIN AND BACKGROUND
Once you’ve identified where you want to start your campaign, let the players help tell the story by deciding how their characters got there. Some players might have trouble coming up with ideas—not everyone is equally inventive. You can help spur their creativity with a few simple questions about their characters.
✦ Are you a native, born and raised in the area? If so, who’s your family? What’s your current occupation?
✦ Are you a recent arrival? Where did you come from? Why did you come to this area?
✦ Are you a transplant who has been in the area for a year or more? Where are you from? Why did you come here, and what made you stay?
This step is one of your best opportunities to get the players doing some of the work of world design. Listen to their ideas, and say yes if you can. Even if you want all the characters to have grown up in the starting town, for example, consider allowing a recent arrival or a transplant if the player’s story is convincing enough. You might suggest some alterations to a character’s background so it better fits your world, or you might weave the first threads of your campaign story into her history.
INFORMING YOUR PLAYERS
As you start to develop the ideas of your campaign, you’ll need to fill in the players on the basics. The easiest way to do this is to compile essential information into a campaign handout. Typical material to include in the handout includes the following.
✦ Any restrictions or new options for character creation, such as new or prohibited races.
✦ Any information in the backstory of your campaign that the characters would know about. This gives the players an idea of the theme and story you have in mind.
✦ Basic information about the area where the characters are starting—the name of the town, important locations in and around it, prominent NPCs they’d know about, and perhaps some rumors that point to trouble brewing.
Keep this handout short, sweet, and to the point—two pages is a reasonable maximum. Even if you have a burst of creative energy that produces twenty pages of great background material, save it for your adventures. Let the characters uncover it gradually.
STARTING AT A HIGHER LEVEL
Sometimes you don’t want to start characters at 1st level. A paragon- or epic-tier game might be more to your taste. Maybe you want to run a published adventure that requires higher-level characters, or you want to try a one-shot that pits 30th-level characters against Orcus. Whatever the reason, at some point you’ll need to create higher-level characters. This process isn’t much harder than making a 1st-level character. The steps for creating a D&D character above 1st level are almost the same as those ones outlined in Chapter 2 of the Player’s Handbook for a new character.
1. Choose Race. Remember that some racial traits improve at higher levels.
2. Choose Class. If your level is 11th or higher, choose a paragon path appropriate to your class. At 21st level or higher, you’ll also need to choose an epic destiny.
3. Determine Ability Scores. Generate scores as for a 1st-level character, applying racial modifiers. Then increase those scores as shown on the Character Advancement table in the Player’s Handbook, with increases at 4th level, 8th level, 11th, 14th, and so on.
4. Choose Skills. Make sure you meet skill prerequisites for a paragon path or epic destiny, if applicable.
5. Select Feats. You generally don’t have to worry about the level at which you gained a particular feat, since retraining allows you to have the feats you want at any given level. Do watch out for paragon and epic feats, though. For example, a 14th-level character can’t have more than seven paragon feats (those gained at 11th, 12th, and 14th level, as well as up to four retrained feats).
6. Choose Powers. You know two at-will powers from your class; remember to increase damage if your level is 21st or higher. The Powers by Class Level table summarizes the number and levels of powers you have in the other categories. These totals are not cumulative. The table assumes that you replace your lowest-level powers with those at higher levels, but you can keep lower-level ones if you wish.
7. Choose Equipment and Magic Items. Mundane equipment is much less important for higher level characters than it is when you’re starting out. Choose whatever standard adventuring gear you want from the tables in the Player’s Handbook. For magic items, choose one item of your level + 1, one item of your level, and one item of your level – 1. In addition, you have gold pieces equal to the value of one magic item of your level – 1. You can spend this money on rituals, potions, or other magic items, or save it for later.
8. Fill in the Numbers. After noting the bonuses you gain from feats and magic items (as well as your increased level), calculate your hit points, Armor Class, defenses, initiative, base attack bonuses and damage bonuses, and skill modifiers. The Quick Hit Points table provides a formula for hit points by class.
9. Roleplaying Character Details. Flesh out your character, using the suggestions in Chapter 2 of the Player’s Handbook or your own ideas.
Running a Campaign
Running a campaign boils down to running a series of adventures. Chapter 6 provides plenty of advice for making adventures fun and compelling. Here you’ll learn how to do the same for your campaign. The secret of a good campaign lies in how you weave adventures together to form a larger story, including the little things that give the sense of a coherent, consistent world.
LINKING ADVENTURES
Adventures that relate directly to your campaign’s story trace its development over the characters’ careers. A dungeon-of-the-week sort of campaign doesn’t necessarily need any link between one adventure and the next, and even one with a tight theme can include occasional adventures that are completely unconnected to other events. But a campaign story that connects the adventures lets the players feel as though they’re making real progress, not just racking up experience points. A simple way to tie adventures together is to use common foes, related quests, and linked events that are related to the campaign’s overall story. Each suite of adventures might contain enough encounters to advance the characters three or four levels, serving as a simple story arc. You need no more than that to take characters from 1st level all the way to 30th. The characters might spend most of their careers fighting the Nine Dread Scions, working their way through the nine dungeons where those villains reside, and then pursuing an epic quest to destroy their monstrous progenitor. Or they have to collect the pieces of the Rod of Seven Parts scattered in ruins across the world before confronting the primordial Queen of Chaos.
You can make a campaign feel like one story with many chapters by planting the seeds of the next adventure before the last one is finished. This technique naturally and smoothly moves the characters along. You don’t have to do this all the time—it’s all right for the party to have some downtime. But when you take the opportunity to introduce the right elements, you can hook the players and the characters effectively. If you’ve set the hook properly, when the characters finish the current adventure, they’ll naturally follow up on that “loose end.” Perhaps a character drinks from a magic fountain in a dungeon and receives a mystifying vision that foreshadows the next episode. The party might find a cryptic map or bizarre relic that, once its meaning is puzzled out, points to the next quest. Perhaps an NPC warns the characters of impending danger or implores them for help. Be careful, though, that you don’t distract the characters from the adventure at hand. Designing an effective hook takes some experimentation. It should be compelling, but not so much that the characters stop caring about what they’re doing right now. It should encourage them to finish the current adventure, preferably by requiring them to complete a related task. That way, they get interested early on, but they can’t start the next adventure until they’ve successfully completed this one. They might have to assemble all the pieces of a map in a dungeon to learn where it leads. Alternatively, they find the map but can’t decode it without the key, which they recover from the defeated villain. The best way to keep players from straying is to save your hooks for the very end of your adventures. The villain wields a bizarre relic that leads the characters to learn more about its history, or the party discovers a letter demonstrating that the villain is working for someone else.
HISTORY AND FORESHADOWING
You can make good use of the history behind your campaign by relating it to the unfolding story. Uncovering that history is a natural way to link adventures. For example, the ultimate villain might be some enormously powerful aberrant being that was imprisoned deep in the earth ages ago. Over the course of their adventures, the characters fight large numbers of aberrant creatures, slowly learning about this alien being. These hints foreshadow the climax of your unfolding story—the aberrant horror breaking free of its prison. Examples of such historical elements include the ruins of ancient temples devoted to the being, records of the destruction it caused during its rampages, copies of the rituals used to bind and imprison it, and hints to the location of its prison. Foreshadowing doesn’t need to have anything to do with history, though. If the party fights a lot of demons and undead over the course of adventures, your players will have a good idea that the campaign will end in a confrontation with Orcus. You can also use prophetic verses to hint at future events. Watch out for being heavy-handed or, conversely, too obscure. A well-designed prophecy is a kind of riddle that helps the characters recognize and deal with key events when they occur.
KEEPING TRACK
Details matter. Your players will more easily imagine that their characters are living in a real world if it makes sense. If the characters frequent a particular tavern, the layout of the building, the staff, and even the decor shouldn’t change dramatically from one visit to the next. Consistent details bring the world to life. On the other hand, the world should definitely respond to the characters’ actions. When the characters kill a monster, it stays dead; when they remove treasure from a room, it doesn’t magically reappear the next time they enter. If they leave a door open, it should stay open—unless someone closes it. If you’re meticulous about details, the players pay attention when things aren’t as they expect. No one’s memory is infallible, so it pays to keep track of such details. A simple method is jotting notes directly on your adventure map to keep track of open doors, disarmed traps, and the like. Events beyond the scope of a single adventure are best recorded in a notebook dedicated to your campaign. Whether it’s a literal book or some kind of electronic file, such a record is a great way to keep your notes organized. Your notebook might contain any of the following entries.
✦ Campaign Journal: This is the place for notes about your campaign theme and story, including the plot outline for planning future adventures. Update that outline as the campaign develops, adding ideas as they come to you.
✦ Campaign Handout: Keep a copy of the handout you made for your players. You might want to revise it from time to time, summarizing the major events of the campaign to date and adding hints of things to come.
✦ Adventure Log: This briefly summarizes each adventure to help you keep track of the unfolding campaign story. You can give your players access to this log as well, or to an edited version stripped of your notes and secrets. The players might instead keep their own record of adventures, which you should also read and copy to your notebook.
✦ Toolbox: Here’s where to keep notes whenever you create or significantly alter a monster, make up nonplayer characters, design unique traps, hazards, magic items, or artifacts, or generate random dungeons or encounters. (For more information, see Chapter 10.) That way, you don’t repeat your work, and you’ll be able to draw on this material later.
✦ NPC Notes: Record statistics and roleplaying notes for any nonplayer character the characters might interact with more than once. Here’s where to identify the two bartenders with their different voices, as well as their names, the tavern where they work, the names of other staff members—maybe even what’s on the menu. Keep notes on when and how the characters meet your NPCs, and keep track of the status of their relationships.
✦ Character Notes: Keep a running tally of the characters’ classes and levels, their goals and backgrounds, any individual quests they’re pursuing, the magic items they want, and any other details that might be significant to your planning. You might even maintain a copy of each character sheet, particularly if they’re in electronic form. It’s also a good ideas to make notes about the players—their motivations and play styles, what kinds of encounters they particularly enjoy, and what pizza toppings they prefer.
✦ Campaign Calendar: Your world feels more real to your players when the characters notice the passage of time. Here’s where you note details such as the change of seasons and major holidays, and keep track of any important events that affect the larger story.
Ending a Campaign
Wind your campaign up with a bang. As with the ending of an adventure, a campaign’s ending should tie up all the threads of its beginning and middle. Create an exciting and satisfying conclusion for the theme and story you’ve crafted. If your campaign has an ultimate villain, the campaign’s climax ought to feature a final confrontation. If some other threat has menaced the world, the characters should put an end to that threat—or if they cannot, take dramatic action to help the world weather the storm. A party on a mission should finally complete it, and an unfolding prophecy should be fulfilled one way or another. Even if your campaign is based on simple discovery, with the characters spending their entire careers exploring the world, it’s not enough for them to simply draw in the last few lines on the map. They need a final adventure that gives some meaning to that long quest and makes that last pen stroke truly significant. You don’t have to take a campaign all the way to 30th level. Ending it at 10th or 20th level can be just as satisfying, Whenever your story reaches its natural conclusion is where you should wrap it up. If you see the end approaching, and the characters are getting close to 10th, 20th, or 30th level, consider stretching out the last adventure or two to help them reach that level by the climax. Make sure you allow space and time near the end of your campaign for the characters to finish up any personal goals. Their own stories need to end in a satisfying way, just as the campaign story does. Ideally, try to link all the characters’ individual goals to the ultimate goal of the final adventure. If you can’t, though, give them a chance to finish those quests before the very end. Once the campaign has ended, a new one can begin. If you’ll be running a new campaign for the same group of players, you can really help them get invested in the new setting by using their previous characters’ actions as the basis of legends. Let the new characters experience how the world has changed because of the old ones. In the end, though, the new campaign is a new story with new protagonists. They shouldn’t have to share the spotlight with the heroes of days gone by.