The "Gygax 75" technique for building DnD campaigns

creating your own dungeons and dragon setting can be an incredibly daunting task for anyone this is especially true if you're trying to make a setting for an old school style campaign where you have a vast open world that players can explore in any way that they want where do you even start you start by mapping out an entire continent figuring out its geology and its ecosystems do you start with building a realistic culture and an economy that makes sense you start out with mythology and history building up a setting that feels like it has depth and roots fortunately we have a detailed step-by-step guide written by someone who spent years of his life running these kinds of campaigns gary gygax in the april 1975 issue of europa magazine the co-creator of d d wrote an article with the delightful title how to set up your dungeons and dragons campaign and be stuck refereeing it seven days a week until the wee hours of the morning in it he proposes five basic steps that you should follow in order to get a campaign up and running the crucial thing here is the up and running part building a vast detailed middle-earth-like world can be a trap for dungeon masters almost all of us love world building and it can suck us in so much that we forget that we only really need to build the stuff that the players interact with in other words we don't need to build a world but a neighborhood a small local sandbox packed with enough adventure that players can play there for weeks without having to venture out by the time that they do we will have enough experience running this new world that expanding it will be a piece of cake because we will no longer be creating in a vacuum but in a world that already feels real and concrete and has a history partially formed by the players before we dig into gary's five steps though this video is brought to you by the afterthought committee and their funnel adventure for old school essentials zed and two knots trapped aboard a vessel accrued by prophecy driven shapeshifters unfortunate souls must band together or perish fight brutal monsters avoid devastating traps and test your wits against an inscrutable enemy use the links in the description below to check out zed and two knots at exalted funeral and keep an eye out for tangled their next funnel adventure coming soon all alright here's the five steps that gary proposes for getting your campaign started number one create the overall setting concept two create the immediate region that the players start in three map out at least three levels of a mega dungeon for the players to explore number four create the layout and inhabitants of the town nearest to the dungeon and then five slowly begin expanding the world from there as needed now we're going to go through these but if you want to follow along and build your own dnd campaign one of the best resources you can use is this free booklet called the gigax 75 challenge i'll put a link to it down in the description below it contains both gygax's original article and a five-week program created by ray otis for using gygax's advice to make a setting that you can play if you're new to this and you want each step broken down into tasks with uh check boxes and concrete examples it's a fantastic resource it's a great way to give yourself some structure and to shepherd you through until the end huge shout out to rey for creating it step one the concept what you're really aiming for here is an elevator pitch you want something snappy memorable and exciting you should be able to explain this concept to a potential player and have them immediately get the gist of what it will be about and whether it will be right for them is it going to be high fantasy or a grim dark slog through mud and blood what races or classes will be allowed what are some weird features about the setting that make it unique what are all the major forces within the campaign world that the party could ally with or oppose think about aesthetics and tone as well create a mood board on pinterest with images of monsters places and npcs that would fit within this setting think about books movies music and video games that have a similar vibe doing all of this will not only get the players amped up but also provide the limitations and the boundaries that you need to inspire creativity and to fight writer's block for example think about a setting like dark sun the tone is gritty savage and survivalist it has all of the standard races but many of them have twists like halflings being cannibals psionics are in the gods are out and arcane spell casters are hated and shunned unusual features include the lack of mental weapons city states run by mad sorcerer kings and the existence of only one dragon the aesthetics are basically fantasy mad max with just that short description you've painted a vivid world for the players and given yourself a solid foundation to build on step two build the local area to start building the local adventuring region you're going to need a hex map you can either print out a hexmap grid to draw on or use one of the many free hex map tools that you can find online i'll put some links down in the description below now when i'm building a hex map i usually think in terms of six mile hexes but gary actually recommends that you use a one mile hex for this zone this allows you to get a good amount of detail and prevents you from creating a region that's too large ray otis workbook recommends using a 23 by 14 grid with a map of that size a party of characters should be able to get anywhere on the map within one day i would use a variety of terrain types like forests hills lakes and so on in order to create some meaningful choices as to what direction the party explores you're also going to want points of interest to investigate probably the two most important are the main settlement in the region and the entrance to a dungeon which i would place half a day's journey away at most feel free to throw in a few other interesting locations as well like some minor settlements a witch's hut a goblin camp or a magical standing stone and so on in order to make exploring this area interesting you're also going to want a random encounter table you can design this any way that you want but using a table that uses a bell curve like 2d6 or 3d6 can be a good idea because you want to make sure that you can create encounters that are more likely and less likely try to get a mix of human and non-human encounters and don't make all of them necessarily hostile either encountering bandits that are too lazy or too fearful to attack can actually be a lot more interesting than a fight but also don't be afraid of throwing something really dangerous on there like a dragon don't have a dragon just drop out of the sky and eat them that wouldn't offer any interesting choices for the party but having a dragon fly by or just land nearby can be great for increasing a sense of wonder and for making things feel like a real adventure i have a whole video on random encounters if you want to dig more into this step 3 building the dungeon no old school campaign is complete without a tentpole mega dungeon these dungeons are the lifeblood of a campaign because they provide an enormous amount of adventure density a single well-fleshed out level of a dungeon provides gameplay for weeks with a minimal prep time on your end gary recommends that you flesh out three levels to get started and that seems very reasonable to me three levels is enough to demonstrate to the players that this dungeon has depth that you can go deeper and deeper and encounter more danger and more rewards while still leaving plenty of room to expand things as you get more ideas i have several videos going in depth on how to design old-school dungeons so i'll just hit some of the highlights here each level should have a theme of some kind to make them distinct from the others and add variety as the players explore vertically gary famously stated that level 12 of his mega dungeon castle greyhawk was full of dragons rey's workbook recommends 7 to 12 rooms per dungeon level but that's much too low for me personally i would start out with 20 to 40 rooms per level in order to give the party real room to explore remember that not every room has to have something in it but a good mix of monsters npcs treasure tricks traps and general strangeness is a good idea to keep the players excited and guessing what's behind the next door you can also help foster exploration by connecting the rooms in a network structure rather than a linear or a tree-like one there should be multiple ways to get to most rooms and paths that let you work your way around obstacles a lot of dms like to design the dungeon on paper but there's plenty of easy to use online tools that can really speed up this process the final thing you need is a wandering monster table for each dungeon level similar to the ones that you made for the overworld however the deeper the dungeon level the more dangerous the monsters generally are a good rule of thumb is that monsters on level two should be a good challenge for level two pcs and so on but you don't have to stick to this precisely encountering things that are much weaker or tougher than the party can make for the best encounters step four build the town every mega dungeon needs a nearby town to act as a base of operations where the pcs can rest and resupply but it can also be the site of even more adventure depending on how much detail you want to put into it the bare bones of a town should include several shops where players can buy weapons armor and equipment a place for them to sleep a place for them to hire help and a place to hear rumors and quest hooks in theory all of these could be the same location but it's usually more fun to break them up in order to add more flavor and more npcs to talk to gary also recommended adding locations themed around the different character classes like a thieves guild a temple to horrible deities forbidden wizards tower or a league of fighters this would give the pcs each ways to explore their background get training and form alliances you can make things even more exciting and dynamic by adding rival political factions gambling halls full of people looking to swindle the party from their hard-earned money and even gangs from nearby settlements clashing in the street most of all remember that towns are the place where most of the role playing is likely to happen the party can certainly encounter interesting npcs in the wilderness or in the dungeon but the town is where most of the theatrical players will likely gravitate towards so make sure to put plenty of npcs in there with interesting backgrounds goals and secrets bonus points if those npcs can be recruited to the party and that's it you now have everything you need to launch a full-scale open world campaign this material should keep you going for months with only some minor prep between sessions to update the world based on the player's actions once you feel comfortable with how things are going and the players begin looking out into the wider world you can start moving on to step five step five build the world step five is the step that continues on for the remainder of the campaign where you gradually flesh out the rest of your continent your planet and universe some of the elements that most campaign worlds will eventually need include a pantheon of gods a list of high-level npcs and villains a calendar to track feast days and other important events the political systems of nearby kingdoms artifacts and magic items to seal and plenty of rival factions to make trouble for the party generally it's best to focus on the parts of the world the players are the most interested in but if you get inspired to map out the geography of your entire setting all at once and go for it so that's how gygax recommended you start a campaign world if you want to read his original article and get that free booklet i mentioned check out the link in the description below also let me know in the comments what your process was like when starting your own campaign before we go a shout out to all of the new questing beast patrons who joined the patreon in april i couldn't do this without them they are vikjim cai yao ali pali reluctant artsy nicole van der hoeven tornado fur steve nix asher luke h christian taylor patrick mullen mataya d keolo dice monkey antoine furnier colin kahn spring villager paper herschel joshua allen k david ladage tristan skelding nicholas soakland raul andreas johansson joseph braxton jordan nygren gilligan game master circle rod nedlows ethan kemeny russell cox fnord friendly chris gilbert stephen nickel chris senior richie walker max martin alexander barrett and robert deluca thank you so much for supporting the channel everyone and thank you guys for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Questing Beast

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Keywords: questing beast, d&d, d&d 5e, d&d book review, d&d books, dnd, dnd 5e, dnd adventure, dnd book review, dnd module, dungeons & dragons, dungeons and dragons, old school d&d, old school dnd, osr, osr book review, osr book reviews, osr d&d, osr d&d review, osr dnd, osr dnd review, osr review, osr rpg, old school rennaissance, old school revival, old school rules

Id: d3Vm7Hzp4e4

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022