An EASY template for writing your FIRST CAMPAIGN

welcome to the table I'm Kelly and I'm going to go over an easy template that you can use to write your first campaign or your second or your third but not your fourth it can be used with any system and because it relies on your players backstories it will be different every time you run it I'll go over the template in general terms and then later on I'll share how I used it in my first campaign writing your own campaign can be a daunting task but it helps if you give yourself some sort of a structure or a skeleton to stick to and use that to organize your ideas this idea is not something that I came up with it's used in lots of pre-written campaigns TV shows and movies but it makes for an easy template and it helps you break down a big campaign into little arcs that are all tied together Step Zero of this template is to decide what character level you're going to play to I find it really helpful to decide this in the beginning so that when you create your villain and the threat that they pose it can be at an appropriate scale for whatever level your players will end up at how your player levels relate to the proportion of power that they have in the world will depend on the system and the world you're playing in if you're playing 5th edition for example and you're running a campaign to 20th level then you'll most likely need some sort of demigod villain whereas if you were running to the 12th level then the scale of your threat and the amount of social power that your villain wields can be less once you decide the scale of your campaign step one is to create your villain they don't need to be fully fleshed out since they'll be developed as you play but having a general idea of what they are what they want and why their goals are causing a threat to your players will get you started step two is to create the threat that this villain will bring to the world or town or continent depending on the scope of your campaign step three is to create a solution to that threat this could be knowledge of how to find your villain an item that would allow your players to summon the villain or an item that could counteract whatever the villain is doing to the world or anything else whatever it is it just needs to be essential in confronting or stopping the villain through dialogue or Exposition your players have to know that they need this in a order to solve the crisis step four is to create a MacGuffin whatever threat solution you came up with in step three you need to break it apart into the number of players that you have if it's knowledge then it can be in a hidden location and the directions to that location have been kept apart for security if it's an item then it can be broken apart needing to be reforged you can get creative with this you just need to have a number of steps equal to the number of players between the party and the solution step five is to hide one of your macguffins in each of your players backstories you don't need to do all of these at once probably just the first two and then you can create the others as you go it's pretty likely that the players at your table each have differing levels of detail on their backstory ranging from Orphan comma sad all the way up to a 10 page manuscript it will probably be easier to start with the most fleshed out backstory and then over the course of the campaign you can work with your other players to coax out more details from their past because you're adding lore onto the backstories that your players have created you need to be respectful of their material and what I mean by that is if they made their mom a sweet old lady don't make her secretly a cat killing psychopath you can definitely give the characters in their backstory secrets that were kept from your player but if your player made a character in their backstory that is generally a good person then try to keep that character's intentions good even if the outcome of their actions was not if you want to drastically change the moral alignment of a character from their backstory I would talk to that player first and just ask if that's all right step six is to start your campaign you can either start with an inciting incident that tells the players that there is a threat that needs to be stopped or you can start it with some sort of mysterious hook that will lead them to the first item then just run an adventure connected to each of their backstories where at the end they get another piece of the MacGuffin and a clue that sends them to the next adventure to start the campaign your players can have been brought together by fate or by Design whichever works better for your story perhaps one of the Gods created this item or passed down this knowledge and they they brought the players together to set them on their path or perhaps each of your players has been raised hearing Tales of a wondrous item that was destroyed long ago so they all went to the biggest library to research it once you get through the first Adventure I would introduce the villain it's great if they're shrouded in mystery and you slowly reveal more over the course of the campaign but they should have a presence and Hound the party throughout the villain doesn't physically need to be attacking them throughout the campaign but through sending Visions or minions they should be interacting with the party having the villain be present throughout the campaign will help make that final confrontation much more satisfying one thing to keep in mind throughout your prep and in your campaign is that until you have explicitly said something at the table it doesn't exist in the world so feel free to completely change your villains backstory or the McGuffin or anything about your campaign as you go there might be some themes that come up in your campaign that you didn't expect and if you can think of a way to incorporate those themes into your villain's backstory then that can make for a much much more satisfying resolution and that's it now you just need to run short little arcs involving each of your players backstories working with your player's backstories is great because they do a lot of the initial work for you and it also feels very personalized as a player I always enjoy when characters from my backstory come into the game otherwise it feels like I did a bunch of writing for nothing when I ran this campaign my villain was locked away in an extra dimensional space this villain had risen to power long ago when magic wasn't as strong at that time a secret Council decided that defeating this being wasn't an option until magic became more powerful so it was lured into a trap and locked away the item to access the extra dimensional space was then melted down into eight keys I know keys were a bit on the nose the threat to the world was The Escape of this villain the magic was slowly starting to fade and the villain was beginning to be able to cast magic through the keys on the material plane and it was slowly breaking itself out I hid one of the keys in either a location or on a character from one of the players back backstories once the players acquired all the keys they had to travel to the forge where the item was created reforge the item and then summon the bbeg in order to make each Arc feel different the adventures didn't always revolve around getting the key sometimes the party went to a character's home and the key was easy to retrieve but there were other things that the players needed to resolve before they could leave the way that I kept the villain present through the campaign was through wisdom saves and the threat of having visions or becoming possessed since this ancient prison was breaking down the villain could work at possessing a creature who was in close proximity to one of the keys the longer each player was close to a key the higher their chance of having a vision or becoming possessed for a short time I hope this inspires you to write your own campaign once you have a skeleton in place then you can keep writing as you go by stringing smaller Adventures into one big campaign if you're not looking to run a baker campaign but you still want to have a regular game maybe you should try running an episodic campaign you can check out this video here for some tips on running an episodic campaign and hey I appreciate you

Channel: Power Word Spill

Views: 48,552

Keywords: d&d, dungeons and dragons, dnd, dnd 5e, fifth edition, dm tips, dungeon master, d&d campaign, d&d 5e, 5th edition, ttrpg, tabletop gaming, DM, game master, GM, dungeons & dragons, how to play dungeons and dragons, wizards of the coast, how to, rpg, pathfinder, dungeon crawl classics, ose, tabletop roleyplaying, writing, fantasy writing, writing campaigns, homebrew, dnd homebrew, power word spill, easy campaign template, story structure

Id: QeqjAtTxE50

Length: 7min 3sec (423 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023