How to write your first Dungeons and Dragons campaign

if you want to write a dungeons and dragons campaign perhaps i can help all of my own long-running campaigns have been set in my own worlds with my own stories so creating a campaign from scratch is kind of my thing it just so happens that my current campaign the one i've been running for the last year is coming to an end in the next few months so i'm now in the same boat as you guys looking ahead and planning a whole new setting and a whole new campaign so i thought now would be a good time to cover some of the fundamentals of campaign creation in this video we're going to cover five key topics genre world building campaign structure the end game plot and story arcs i'm going to try and keep my focus on writing the campaign as a whole rather than focusing on how to write individual quest lines we'll cover that in a future video but for now let's begin with the big picture this section could also have been called flavor and vibes or atmosphere and mood it's a section about how we bind all the disparate elements of the campaign together using a general atmosphere dnd games can be quite disjointed as the characters move from town to town in place to place you can feel as if you're running a series of individual events rather than an overarching campaign having a clear genre is a good way to bind all your sessions together even if your plot is still segmented into a series of individual plot lines and quests for example mynet's campaign will be using a nautical slash pirate theme the players will be fighting bandits and exploring old ruins all the classic stuff you do in a d d game but all those individual elements are going to be flavored with the genre instead of fighting bandits they will fight pirates instead of exploring old ruins they'll explore shipwrecks and sunken temples on the ocean floor when they go into our town to sell their loot it will be a pirate town full of smugglers and sea dogs mechanically it will still be a classic d d game but the vibe will be distinct and unified across all the games cursive strat does this really well it takes all these elements that you would expect to find in a d d campaign vampires hags werewolves but it brings them together under this gothic genre umbrella and when it does that they all feel that they belong together and suddenly brovia isn't just another d d setting it's a very specific gothic setting think about movies and video games and books that you enjoy think about the genre that they play with and then take that to your players and find out what they want find a flavor that works for everyone whether that's a piratical swashbuckling theme whether that's an urban noir setting with narrow streets and gang fights the point is to find something that works for everyone and works across the course of the campaign once you have an idea for the campaign genre it's time to think about [Music] when someone says they're writing a campaign what they often mean is they're writing a campaign setting and that's awesome i'm writing a campaign setting right now available on patreon may 1st but here's the important bit creating a world for yourself and writing a setting for the players are two different things i know people who have been writing their dnd campaign settings for literally years with no end in sight and i understand it's a really fun creative process but if you actually want to start playing dnd in weeks or months rather than years you have to know when to stop you have to look beyond the world building process here's how i do world building i create a world map with countries named but no particular details i don't bother working out the internal politics of some country on the other side of the world that doesn't matter because my players probably won't get there for a long time if ever all of these names are really here so when one of my players says hey where's this wine from i can look at them and confidently give them a name which i've just pulled off this map next i choose one place one relatively small region from this nap that's going to be the campaign setting for the majority of the session in this example i picked the northern side of this circular bay the starfire coast i made this map about a week before our first session because it was a really short notice campaign just came out of nowhere i agreed to do it and then i had to come up with this world in a matter of days and honestly that was plenty of time i worked out some general details how the land was ruled what gods were in the pantheon a bit of culture and history but then i focused all my efforts on a very small area around the town of talankar where i knew the players were going to start i did not need to know what was going on in the town of pyrek on the other side of the country that was a 10-day journey from talankar so if my players really want to go to pyrex i'd have at least eight or even ten sessions to prepare for that since i do real-time travel the best advice i can give here is stop thinking of world building as something that has to be completed before the first session in reality all you really need to complete by the first session is the small starting zone where the players begin their adventure the rest of the world can be built between sessions as you play through the campaign you can lay out the world around the players as they move out into the blank space because world building is a lot of fun but it should never stop you from just playing d d the problem with planning out your dnd campaign far in advance is that the players are going to come in and they're going to upset most of your plans in my first campaign a large part of the plot depended on the characters joining a criminal syndicate they were going to come in at the entry level work for the gang boss work their way up and eventually be drawn into a larger conflict i had it all planned out the players started working for the gang boss i was delighted then they misinterpreted a few throwaway comments from an npc became completely paranoid and were convinced that the gang boss was going to betray them and have them killed so they left town and they never went back that taught me a valuable lesson and from that point onwards i tried to structure my campaigns on the assumption that the players would surprise me and that when they did it didn't ruin my plans it just brought some things forward and pushed other things back my mistake in that first campaign was building a plot that basically depended on the players finishing one piece of content before they could move on to the next piece of content it was a linear path and when inevitably the players struck off that path i was left with nothing prepared now i plan my campaigns not as a linear story but as a collection of mini stories which can all be initiated at pretty much any time with a few minor adjustments in the campaign i'm currently running the players have become a little sidetracked they've spent quite a long time trying to help a town with its local economic problems trying to resurrect the local timber industry that's fine but i can tell they're not going to go and deal with the bandit lord i have waiting for them up north at least not for the time being but that's fine because i have a plenty of other story arcs ready to go i'm going to initiate a demon invasion and that's going to be the story arc that we'll see them through probably the next 10 sessions it could have happened anywhere but it's going to happen here when those 10 sessions are over that bandit lord will have regrouped and brutally attacked the town the players saved before this will add a personal stake and hopefully draw them back into that original plot are writing a series of movable mini campaigns that can all be slotted into different places depending on when you need them is a lot more worthwhile than creating a single epic plotline that runs through the whole campaign and then having your players upend it but hold on you want one big epic plotline running through the campaign you probably want a big ultimate villain at the end of it that's a big part of d d you want sauron at the the final battle so how do we do that without sacrificing our mini campaigns the individual arts of my campaign are usually initiated by me the players arrive in a new town a coastal town and i take a story arc that i know can fit in a coastal town and i just drop it in front of them a quest giver approaches them an incident takes place in front of them in the street i don't have to wait until they stumble into the start of the campaign but the big end game plot with the final battle to save the world and the bbeg that's different instead of initiating the end game plot myself i want my players to gradually build up an interest in it and choose to pursue it themselves this is the pinnacle of the campaign this is the mission that might end up killing a lot of my players so i want them to choose their own fates at their own time when i write my campaign i sketch out roughly what that final story arc will be what is the end game who is the final villain what are the stakes in that final conflict then in each of my flexible story arcs i leave little clues and easter eggs which on their own don't mean a lot but over the course of a year or more of playing will add up to a tantalizing mystery a recurring symbol myths and legends that share oddly similar elements a rumor that the same malevolent entities behind multiple cults or multiple criminal organizations you don't want to be too obvious you don't want the players pulling on these threads too early you want them to just start to suspect over time that there is something bigger at play here after a year or so as the players are reaching those higher levels you might think it's time to initiate the end game content so you bring the clues closer together you make them a little bit more obvious and eventually the players start to focus on the big picture that's when the little story arcs fall away and we move into the end game but hold on let's talk about those story arcs and specifically how to structure them when i talk about these story arcs these mini campaigns i'm not talking about a single quest but rather a collection of quests often themed around a single area for example your players arrive in a small town that's fallen in hard times and you present to them a whole variety of small missions and objectives that if solved will improve the town's lot the mine of which the town's economy is based has been occupied by goblins bandits are attacking caravans on the road so merchants can't get into the town the local priest is hanging out with strange cult members there are giant rats in the basement or the tavern and some kind of monster seems to be living inside the local well some of those quests will be isolated incidents their rats in the basement are just big rats and as soon as the players have killed the mutated rat matriarch the tavern can get back to business as usual other plot lines will be more significant they'll interweave and form the larger backbone story of this small campaign arc so that cult who are working with the priest well they're also part of the bandit outfit they have a plan to try and destabilize the area they're maybe even arming the goblins and as a result of the kind of unrest they're fermenting they're hoping that they can then build on that to start a small uprising and take over the town establishing their weird new religious cult as a theocracy when the cult is defeated and the goblins are driven out the town will flourish again your players will feel a sense of achievement after just eight or ten sessions and they can move on to whatever arc you think is right for them next if you sketch out three or four of these arcs before you begin your campaign you're always going to have something ready if the players surprise you and leave town in a hurry [Music] we could go into all of these topics in a lot more depth and believe me i will in future videos but for now here are the broad strokes pick a genre to add thematic cohesion to your campaign prioritize local world building over global world building create a collection of flexible story arcs rather than a single long plotline and let the players gradually drive those story arcs towards a big endgame finale with the ultimate villain of the campaign and hey thank you for watching this is my first long-form video and it's also probably the least scripted thing i've done so far there is a script over there but it's more like a list of bullet points i'm sort of paraphrasing for you guys and i just really appreciate the fact that you've supported me this far that you've enjoyed the shorts and that you've stuck with the channel when it is just shorts hopefully there'll be more of these longer videos coming and uh well i hope you enjoy them i hope you get some value from them thank you

Channel: Tales Arcane

Views: 190,982

Keywords: dungeons and dragons, D&D, DnD

Id: 1NUwYyvFwIo

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022