How to write your first D&D campaign arc

welcome back to Tales Arcane where we talk about d and d ttrpgs and fantasy storytelling in a recent video I talked about how you can break down your D and D campaign into a series of more manageable mini campaigns usually spanning uh three to four sessions and focusing on a single Adventure now in the aftermath of that video a few people wanted to know how I go about structuring those mini campaigns how I structure those D and D Adventures so that's what we're talking about in today's video I have covered this before but it was quite a long time ago I use a five-step template uh to structure my my mini campaigns my mini arcs and so in this video I'm going to take you through the five steps of that template and show you how you can apply that to your own games as always I want to quickly mention that everything I do here on the channel is made possible by the wonderful people who backed me over on patreon uh if you join the tales Arcane patreon you can get access to more than a thousand pages of my own home brew D and D content it includes encounters Adventures campaign settings GM resources and the access to the Tails Arcane patreon only Discord if you want to join the the patreon you can head to a link below this video or if you want to just stay here and support me on YouTube liking and subbing to the channel is greatly appreciated now let's talk about that five-step template for structuring your D and D Adventures when I talk about a campaign Arc or a mini campaign I basically mean a d andd Adventure that has a set up uh a bit of progress throughout the middle and then a challenge that is overcome at the end there's usually One Core villain that the players are focusing on and even if the players never go on to complete the campaign as a whole if they complete that Arc they will get a sense of resolution at the end and then towards the end of the arc you're usually placing some some small foreshadowing elements to hint at what the next Arc is going to be I should also point out here that we're not planning a railroad a railroad is where you force your players to go down a certain path regardless of their choices when you're planning a campaign Arc that's not what you're doing you're just working out roughly what you think will happen if the players are trying to overcome a certain goal and uh you're going to set that goal up at the start but you're then going to let your players do whatever they want to try and Achieve that goal if the players are trying to solve a murder it's not railroading to know who the murderer is and to know what Clues might be out there for the players to find and we're not going to force the players to find the clues in a certain order we're just going to give the players a goal and then apply this template to give the whole thing a little bit of structure now as I said before there are five steps in this template steps one and two cover the first session three and four cover the second session and five is usually the final session now this is a very loose template you could apply this across 10 sessions you could apply this across an entire campaign theoretically but for the purposes of planning a shorter Arc we're going to imagine this playing out across three sessions Step One is the Call to Adventure this is where we want to establish what the player's primary objective is and what is at stake here why do the players want to do this what will they get if they succeed and what will happen if they fail one of the simplest ways to do this step is to Simply have the players come into contact with the questgiver so the players perhaps arrive in a new town and uh you know they arrive looking like adventurers with their weapons and their Road dust and soon the local mayor seeks them out and says hey none of our local people have got the the the skills or the desire to go and deal with this problem but we've got a dragon up in the mountains can you go and deal with the dragon uh if you don't it's likely that the dragon is going to swoop down here and destroy the town as he attempts to do once every 100 Years and we're almost at the the 100y year anniversary and um also if you succeed in uh slaying or driving this dragon off then we're going to give you x amount of gold and or perhaps even you get access to the Dragon's horde so very quickly we establish that the goal is to kill a dragon uh we establish that uh what is at stake is the town the town will be destroyed if the players fail and what's also at stake is that if the players succeed in in slaying the dragon they're going to get access to the Dragon's horde a great mound of gold Buri in the mountains very clear what the the players have to do now you could do this with a little bit more subtlety perhaps the players arrive to find a a furious argument going on in the center of the Town between those who think everyone should flee the town before the dragon attack and those who say that they should stay and defend their home against inevitable destruction the players arrive and are almost sort of called into mediate as outside observers and at that point they say well maybe there's a middle way and that middle way is us going and defeating the dragon the sooner you have all this established H what your trying to do what happens if you fail what happens if you succeed uh the the sooner the players start to get invested they they get a clear sense of what they need to do and they start taking actions that move them towards it one of the the worst things that can happen in the early parts of a of an arc is a lack of clarity around what the players are meant to be doing unless you're running something that's a very low States kind of chilled out campaign you want the players to quickly get a sense of mission because if they don't have that they'll just start wandering around and losing energy and momentum so we EST Lish this probably all within the first hour of your first session in the in the mini campaign now we come to step two and step two is going to cover the rest of our first session step two is the challenge that must be overcome to get to the main challenge so the main challenge is go and fight a dragon but the challenge that must be overcome could be for example uh the journey to the Dragon's layer so perhaps the dragon is high in a a dangerous mountainous region and so the players are going to have to make a perilous Journey up to the the dragon's layer and as they do that they're going to encounter some minor threats along the way so for example maybe the players have to climb a very steep Cliff to get up to the Dragon's Lair and as they're doing that some small flying monsters perhaps even a a Wyn that's been uh skullking around the area comes flying down and starts trying to attack them and now there's a a smaller challenge before they even get to the main challenge that they have to overcome along the way and that will essentially beef out the rest of that first session to further illustrate this step imagine IM we're doing something that's more like an investigation the players have to solve a murder well the first challenge might be finding a key witness that key witness is going to lead them to some other clues that eventually lead them to the murderer but first they have to find that witness they know that perhaps the the murderer was witnessed by someone with flaming red hair and a distinctive green cloak uh you can tell I've been reading the the Name of the Wind recently um as the the players have this information their first goal is to find that person and so they maybe have to do a lot of role play walking up to people in taverns asking around maybe people are scared to talk about this because they're worried that the murderer might Target them too if they hear that they've been talking to the investigators there's just an initial challenge maybe a roleplay challenge maybe a combat challenge or an environmental challenge that has to be overcome before we get to the meats of this story by the end of that first session the players are probably about halfway through or maybe even close to completing the challenge that stands between them and the main challenge which brings us onto our second session and the third step of the template now depending on how long long the players take to get through step two that uh initial challenge to reach the main challenge uh the second session might be taken up with quite a lot of that because that bit usually takes longer than expected um but towards the midpoint or the end of the second session we're going to be getting towards that main challenge the players will have got through the Wilderness and they're getting close to the Dragon's layer or the players have found all the clues they need and they're closing in on the murderer so on uh at this point we're going to move towards step three and step three is is a larger combat encounter or challenge that needs to be overcome that to the players will feel pretty much like the the climax of this this Quest they've been on it's potentially not the climax but they they initially think it is in our Dragon Adventure the players maybe enter the dragon's layer they find it to be an old abandoned Dwarven Fortress filled with Undead dwarves maybe some Cobalts who have coming in service of this Dragon but they fight their way through and they get to the dragon and they say this is the main challenge let's go they take on the dragon in a a deadly combat encounter and maybe they even manage to defeat the dragon and the dragon dies uh at this point they feel that they've completed the task but uh as step three which is that sort of uh what feels like an ultimate combat encounter or an ultimate overcoming of the challenge as that starts to come to a close we reveal step four the fourth step is the twist it's the moment where something is revealed that the players didn't previously know that somehow recontextualizes what came before or adds an extra step that the players didn't anticipate the red dragon is slain it crashes to the ground but at the same moment uh a guttural roar Echoes up from a chamber deep below turns out that the red dragon was in fact a dracul and uh its felter was uh you know a few floors below in another room with a larger dead dragon and so its Soul immediately is transported down to the uh the gemstone in the in the chamber below uh into the the skeleton of this huge dragon and the players watch through the the windows of the the the castle that they're in as this uh enormous undead dragon flies up into the air lets out a a hideous Roar and goes swooping down towards the uh the town from which they came uh they now realize that there's an even bigger threat that has to be contended with an undead dragon which is now on its way to destroy the town alternatively in our murder mystery investigation the players find and defeat the murderer but then when they search through his possessions they find that he was working for someone else there's actually a cult in the town and the murderer was carrying out murders based on the the ritual specifications of this cult the players start looking into it and they quickly realize that the cult is comprised of the various powerful local officials that they've been perhaps coming across and who haven't been too helpful during the course of the investigation uh they perhaps put that down to just local officials not wanting to be involved in some kind of bad publicity but now they realiz realiz that there was this Sinister cult going on behind the scenes the whole time and now they have to rush to the Cults meeting to defeat the real villains of the of the campaign or just to give you a third option the players finally defeat the bandits that have been terrorized in the area only to notice that the bandits have a lot of really high quality Weaponry that seems to have been given to them by a wealthy benefactor and they find out that there's a local nobleman who has actually been trying to destabilize the region as the basis for a coup and has been funding various uh local groups to cause trouble so now the players can go and take on that nobleman as a as a final boss the point is just to make sure that whatever the players get at the start doesn't have to be the whole story there's some information that's held back from them the point here is not to show your players how clever you are as the DM it's not to have a gotcha moment it's to make sure that although the players got all the information they needed to understand the goals and the stakes at the start everything isn't predictable from that on out if there was no fourth step if there if there was no twist that leads to the fifth step step of the final challenge then the players would basically be able to predict everything from the start oh we need to go and kill a red dragon well this adventure ends with us killing a red dragon boom but no the adventure ends with the players back in the town trying to defeat a huge Draco Lich while also maybe evacuating people while trying to hold off this monster that's just something a little bit more unexpected or the players thought they were going to end up confronting a single murderer well now they're in an underground Temple under the mayor's house defeating a gang of high ranking cultists it's something that was unexpected now let's bring this all together in Step One the players receive a clear goal and a clear understanding of what happens if they succeed and what happens if they fail they don't have to wander around in the dark not knowing what they're meant to be doing step two there's a challenge that needs to be overcome before they can get to the the main event of the quest they have to go on a journey overcome some minor challenges through roleplay environmental threats or smaller monsters before they can get to the the main threat of the main antagonist they then go to step three which is the the challenge they were kind of always expecting fighting the dragon fighting the murderer uh overcoming whatever that challenge was that was set at the start but then step four brings in a a new mystery a new element they didn't see coming now they realize that there's a bigger villain to fight or another disaster to avert or another item they have to go and get there's always just some extra bit that they didn't get right from the start and that brings us to step five which is the final Challenge and when they complete that the campaign comes to an end and we set up the next campaign Arc and the the story continues if you're worried that using this kind of template will make your adventures feel too formula and predictable there's two things to remember thing number one is that when you plug different elements into each step of the fstep template you're going to get very different outcomes if the Twist on one occasion is that the boss as a final form just leading to an even more intense battle in step five that's going to feel very different to the twist being that the players find out that some even greater reward they have to go after and they have to go to some entirely different location and fight an entirely new boss to get that reward the players aren't going to look at those two events and think oh that was essentially the same story beats playing out the other thing to remember is that when your players get involved in the adventure you've planned all your plans will go out the window everything will feel different because the players are pushing buttons you didn't expect to be pushed they're going to places in in an order you didn't expect and that original template is going to start getting all mushed up and that's a good thing because again it's going to make the whole Adventure feel more unique imagine the players decide to take out an unusual route to explore the uh the dragon's layer before going up and fighting the dragon and they come across that dracolich skeleton uh down deep below next to the huge glowing fery crystal they're going to realize they're dealing with a dracolich so maybe they destroy the crystal first and then they go up and fight the the dragon in the chamber Above So now things are playing out in a very different order the point is you start with a template that generates all of the the events you think will happen and then you put your players in there and you watch all hell break loose and that is you know a good outcome so don't worry too much about things feeling stale or formula that is the video I hope that helped you I hope this template can be applied to your own games and your own creative process over time you'll probably use the template less and less or you'll Bend and twist it so much it kind of becomes your own template but the point is just to have a basic structure to start with when you're feeling overwhelmed about how to approach your preparations and pretty soon you'll be able to not even think about this just intuitively think what beat comes next in the story maybe a plot twist here maybe a payoff there it will just start being second nature to you anyway uh I hope you're enjoying everything we're doing here on the channel and uh if you get a chance like subscribe back me on patreon all that good stuff uh I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Tales Arcane

Views: 19,137

Keywords: dnd, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dnd prep, d&d prep, fifth edition, 5e, 5th edition, dungeon master, dungeon masters

Id: rjqjZUUbNK8

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024