Why One Piece is a great D&D Campaign | Kraken Week

hey do you want a pirate campaign that will get your players hooked well it's Kraken week a community event organized by Genie D and pointy hat where tabletop RPG YouTubers make videos about the ocean and give you an excuse to discover a bunch of new channels you might have not seen before for so if this is your first time seeing my channel hi I'm TK I'm a game designer and I make videos about some Advanced Techniques for game Masters and today I will use a three-year long pirate campaign I have run as an example so I can talk about Adventure structure let's say you have a vague idea of a campaign you'd like to run how do you turn that idea into an adventure your players will care about let's talk about [Music] that everyone has a different starting point when creating a campaign personally I wanted to run a campaign inspired by one piece with a bit of Atlantis sprinkled on top of it in other words my starting point was aone the thing is pirate media exists on a pretty wide spectrum on one end you've got Pirates depicted as dirty violent criminals it's dark grimy smelly rum is cheap and human life is even cheaper it frequently falls into the horror genre too you'll often find Undead Pirates or lovecraftian Monsters lurking in the abyss waiting for you to give them an opportunity to stare back the sea is mysterious and dangerous it will remind you time and time again that it is the biggest Bond and you are the smallest fish and I guess because game Masters are deeply disturbing people it turns out that most pirate themed RPG books fall into this style you can check out deficient Master's video about Pate Bor or indestructable review of Co from the deep but two great examples of that style but one piece in Atlantis are on the exact opposite end of the spectrum where you've got pirats depicted as Charming Rascals who are all about Freedom passion and witty onliners they portray the members of a pirate crew as being a found family with unbreakable bonds it's all about having an adventurous Spirit buckling some swashes and sticking it to the man the sea is beautiful it's full of life colorful and rather than a place of dread it's a place of endless opportunities where you can go anywhere do what you want to do and be who you want to be there might still be danger but it only serves to portray the Pirates as Plucky for facing it if regular DND goes from Grim dark to heroic fantasy then I guess pirate media goes from Grim damp to anti-heroic Fantasy so when I started working on this campaign I also picked up a third party book called CES of vodi that felt more in line with what I was trying to do and so when I heard about Kraken week I reached out to its Publishers angry fish games to ask if they'd like to sponsor a video and they agreed so now on top of talking about a book I like I get to also give you a discount code for it so yeah I wanted one piece meets Atlantis and vodi is pretty much exactly that as you can probably guess from its world map and the giant Perman hypercane in the center of it this is a world where most of the land sank under the waves after a Divine conflict so now you've got all of your usual fantasy folks like goblins and wood elves stuck on a bunch of tiny Islands trying to rebuild and reinvent themselves the world is filled with ruins from before the catastrophe both above and underneath the waves which is a great way to introduce the concept of dungeons to your world Building without breaking anything there's also a bunch of factions for the players to interact with and of course there's always the big mystery of what would you find if you managed to read the center of the storm on the mechanics side you've got a bunch of player options as well as some pretty solid rules for ship customization a 50-page beast the and a starter Adventure this book as well as its sequel under the Seas of vodi are available both as PDF and hard cover on tribality and until the end of July if you use the discount code Kraken week you'll get 10% off and you'll support my channel now let's get into the meat and potatoes and talk about how to design an outline for a pirate campaign for those of you who haven't read or watched one piece yet yet it's a treasure hunt story where thousands of pirates all around the world are all looking for the same treasure the one piece which was left behind by the previous King of the Pirates but while a chiro Oda the author decided what the one piece would be before he even started drawing the first panel of the manga the rest of us still don't know what it is 25 years and 25,000 Pages later all we know is that there's an evil totalitarian world government who really doesn't want people to find it that's it but it doesn't really matter sure people are curious and there's a lot of fan theories going around about what the one piece might be but it's kind of like pop fiction where you never really learn what's inside the suitcase but you still have a good time because the characters and the journey they on are just that entertaining so let's take a look at the journey one piece has a story device which is great for treasure hunts the poneglyphs this is going to be a spoiler for chapter 818 or episode 770 which to be fair is over 8 years old at this point but if you do want to avoid the spoiler skip ahead to this timestamp okay here we go what the mink tribe reveals to the straw heart crew is that they have one of the four Road poneglyphs each of these giant indestructible Redstone tablets tells the story of one Island from the thousands and thousands of islands in the world of one piece and if someone managed to read all four Road poneglyphs they would point to four Islands on the map draw an X and wherever the center of that X lands this is where the one piece is located this is an incredibly smart plot device on so many levels let's break it down first it doesn't matter in which order you find the four pornog glyphs which is great for a tabletop campaign because it means if we adopt this plot hook then we already have a nonlinear Adventure by default our players get to decide which of their four objectives they want to tackle first then because the poneglyphs are physical objects you get to come up with an interesting answer to the question is who has them right now in one piece we learn that the Mings have one which they sh care with the protagonist after being rescued by them but they also say that two of the most dangerous pirates in the world big mom and kaido also have one each so you get to come up with potential allies Rivals questgivers and anything in between and fill your world with factions for your players to butt heads with but because it's a knowledge based McGuffin you also have a situation where more than one person can have the McGuffin at any given time what that means is that each faction who owns a porog glyph or even just a copy of one has a vested interest in keeping it hidden protecting it from pesky Adventures building an entire dungeon around it it's also a plot device that lends itself very well to downtime which is very important for the pacing of a campaign if you've ever tried springing an endof thee World prophecy on your players at level three you're probably all too familiar with what happens when you don't leave space for downtown in a dndd campaign somebody wants to two weeks later smash the moment you place the urgency on the campaign's main objective you create a situation where your players can't really justify taking a single day of downtime every waking moment has to be spent trying to put out the giant fire but in one piece urgency only exists within a narrative Arc the fire is ignited when you reach a location of a poneglyph and it's put out when you leave with that pony it's a very healthy pacing where you still get to have your intense dramatic moments but you also get some very welcome down beats before and after each battle but between the different narrative arcs the players are free to rest do some low stakes roleplay try to tackle some personal objectives Etc in fact if you watch One Piece while it is a pirate Adventure you might have noticed that most of the actual adventuring only happens once the crew has landed on the new island they have a ship but it's more interested in making that ship feel like a home than making it feel like a weapon there's usually one or two of what would call Naval encounters per Arc but most of the time they're used to do some Exposition and some foreshadowing about the upcoming Arc there's also a different aspect to this plot device which is that it creates a lot of mysteries for your world building who created those tablets why and how because clearly they were made using techniques that have been lost to time so you can trick your players into caring about your world building by tying it to a big shiny treasure that they want there's just one tiny problem with this Blood device it to be old MAA and cute by having the four pphs draw an x on your world map which literally marks the spot for the treasure and that is super Charming but in Geometry if you have just three poly glyphs you're already restricting the search from the entire world all the way down to the edges of this one triangle no matter where the fourth poneglyph points to the one piece is going to have to be somewhere on these three lines and while Luffy is way too dumb of a protagonist to realize this if your players have gone past fifth grade they can probably untangle that mystery before Luffy does so we're probably going to have to adapt it a bit but the idea of splitting your treasure map into three or four different McGuffin that more than one person can have at the same time that is absolute Gold by doing that one piece has created a perfect structure for treasure hunt campaign so we're going to do what Pirates do best and steal od's entire life's work to turn it into a d andd campaign so how do we do that let's break it down we know we want our players to gather three to four McGuffin I personally limited it to three just to keep my campaign a bit shorter and make sure we still have some space for side quests without having to reach extremely high levels where D andd tends to break down then we know we want this to be a pirate campaign so in terms of verbs we probably want something that feels adequately pirate we could go with sell to for example but let's go with steel we're not sure at this point what we're going to steal or who we're going to steal it from but we are sure of one thing which is that our Quest will feel a lot more pirity if it's about stealing something than if it's about saving someone for example then we're probably going to need an introduction where the players get to learn about these three mcguins and a conclusion where they get to use the three mcguins to go find the treasure now because this is a tabletop RPG I would prefer giving my players a choice about who to steal from rather than force them to become enemies with a predetermined faction I chose for them so what I'm going to do is split these three chapters at the center into two parts first the players need to steal a special ship like a submarine an Airship or a spell Jama then they can use these special ships to sail to a location that they would normally be unable to get to a dungeon at the bottom of the sea another one in the plane of air and one last one in the astral sea and that is where the three McGuffin actually are now having a choice of who to steal from is nice but it's not going to be an informed Choice unless I create a way for me to introduce my players to the different factions they can steal from so let's add four optional side quests one for each faction and introduce the side quest through travel encounters each of these four side quests gives the players a choice between joining that faction if they mesh with its ideals fighting that faction or ignoring it altogether to me factions are all about going okay you've told me you wanted to be Pirates that's the premise we agreed on for this campaign now I'm going to spend the rest of this campaign asking you exactly what kind of pirate you want to be and any player character who has a strong opinion about this will generally want to participate in those side quests but just in case those side quests will also come with the promise of a bunch of rewards in the form of ship upgrades new allies magic item Etc but here's the thing if the players choose to participate in the side quest then regardless of whether they decide to join that faction or to fight it they are going to gain new enemies I'll give you one example right after the introduction my players sailed to the nearest city which was under the control of a totalitarian Colonial Empire and almost as soon as they landed the players were approached by two groups first a group of young Scrappy and hungry Rebels asked if they would like to help boot the evil government out of the colony and of course the Pirates who would help them establish a new Free Nation would probably be held as Heroes then all of 10 minutes later they were approached by a government official who offered to double their choices by offering them a privacy license some allies in high places and a chance to be in the room where things happen that is if they would just Infiltrate The rebellion and help the Empire tear it down from the inside by leaking some juicy Intel join the Empire and you inherit its many enemies join the rebels and all you're doing is freeing one Colony the Empire is still around and they still have a spell Jammer that you might as well deal right with this we have what I think is a pretty solid outline if we start our players at third level and make them gain one level whenever they finish one of these quests then we can already know that the campaign will last until 10th to 14th level depending on how many of the side quests they complete the only thing that's left to do is to decide what our treasure is so we can work backwards and decide what our M guffins are here's what I came up with a weird hybrid of one piece vodi and of course Morin because it wouldn't be a real critical eye video if I didn't drop at least one Elder Scrolls reference somewhere a long time ago there was an ancient empire of elves whose magic was extremely Advanced they used glowing blue crystals made of pure magic to power various constructs and artifacts until one day the ocean swallowed the Empire whole for an unknown reason nowadays countless Pirates privateers explorers and adventurers of all kinds are looking for the cave where the elves used to harvest their Mana crystals from as the legend goes whoever finds that cave first will become wealthier than every single country in the world combined and at the start of the campaign this is all I told my players but the truth is that the elves didn't actually Harvest their crystals from a cave instead they slew their own head deity the goddess of the moon and the crystals are shards carved from her giant heart however those crystals are extremely unstable and they will explode at the slightest shot so even if you knew where the remains of the Goddess are you wouldn't be able to actually Harvest them unless you knew exactly how to Chisel it properly by using three specific magic items to protect yourself one day the Elven Empire died and his two eldest Sons fought over the right of succession but during their battle the heart of the Moon Goddess was accidentally struck causing a massive explosion which shattered the moon and caused a small chunk of it to crash into the world below creating a a giant wave which swallowed all but the tallest mountains the heart Still Remains in the ruins of the Imperial Palace on the moon but the three artifacts required to carve it have been destroyed in the explosion in order to resume work on the heart someone would need to find the blueprints to these three magic items and then craft them and with this we have our McGuffin the blueprint all that's left is actually introducing them how do we do that well it also wouldn't be a real critical eye video if I didn't drop some nugget of ultra nerdy game design theory that happened to solve the exact problem I'm talking about how to write a good introduction in this case in a 2006 study by Joseph C Nunes and Xavier Drees they got a car wash to start handing out Loyalty cards but the cards came in two kinds the first one had eight circles and if the customer got the eight circles stamped they would get a free car wash the second one had 10 circles instead of eight but two of them came pre-stamped so you would still only need to get eight stamps in order to get your free wash what the researchers observed is that the people who got the pre-punched card redeem their free wash almost twice as often as the people who got the regular card this study showed a phenomenon psychologists called the endowed progress effect basically if you give people an objective but then you give them a head start rather than have them start at the beginning they are much more likely to want to complete that objective it ties into the sun cost fasy where where people don't want to lose the progress they've already made even though in this case they didn't even have to syn a cost to make that progress in the first place you just gave it to them game designers use this all the time to increase the likelihood people will continue playing their games especially during the introduction to give players a reason to stay for the Long Haul for example the game XCOM Enemy Unknown is about creating an Elite Squad of soldiers and keeping them alive by making them climb up in ranks and doing some R&D to upgrade their gear but the game designers made sure that by the end of your tutorial Mission your one remaining Soldier would already upgrade from the rank of rookie to the rank of squady and that they would bring home the remains of the aliens they just fought so that you can start your first research project that tutorial Mission doesn't just teach you the mechanics of the game it also sets you on the journey it wants you to go on eventually so let's apply some of this to give this pirate campaign a good introduction the game starts with the players Shipwrecked after a storm the players wake up stranded on a beach covered in sweat and salt water with their ship so badly damaged it will take them a couple weeks to repair it minimum and to make things worse this novice pirate crew quickly realizes that the island they landed on happens to be Mania an island from which it is said nobody has ever come back they explore a bit to look for food and eventually stumble upon some hunters in the jungle who are surprisingly welcoming the hunters invite them to a feast to welcome them and celebrate the arrival of new people and during the feast the players realized that this entire island is the domain of a kind but very possessive dryad she loves the community she's built and they love her back but she can't risk it being discovered by the outside world so she uses her magic to charm anyone who lands on Mania and make sure they never want to leave except she's been doing this for a very very long time and as a result Mania happens to be the only place in the world where the oral tradition of the ancient Elven Empire is still alive and during the banquet one of the villages starts singing a traditional Fork song it's an old odd to The Three Families of Artisans who crafted the three magical artifacts capable of carving the heart of the moon goddess and creating a virtually infinite amount of Mana crystals and just like that your players have a piece of knowledge that nobody else in the entire world at least to their knowledge has access to if they manage to use it they could become the wealthiest pirates in the world all they have to do is find a way to leave the island an idea that the drad would really prefer they did not entertain so with this the outline of this campaign is more or less complete we have a pretty good idea of the tone we're shooting for we have verbs that match that tone we've made a lot of space for players decision and we made sure those decisions would be informed and and that they would be motivated and the cool thing is while I used a pirate campaign as an excuse to talk about Adventure structure the logic and the techniques I've talked about here are pretty much Universal so my hope with this video is that maybe you've been inspired to pick up a pen and start thinking about an adventure you'd like to run for your friends thanks again to CES of vodi for sponsoring this video and also massive thanks to my YouTube member for their support if you'd like to help this channel this is a really really good way to do it but if you can't no worries just make sure you tell me in the comments which was your favorite video from this year's Kraken Wei now a lot of you might be wondering how I handled vehicle combat during this pirate campaign so if you're interested in that here's a video that talks about exactly that topic but in the spirit of kraak and week how about instead a video about how to turn the bad guys from Pirates of the Caribbeans into 5 St blogs if that sounds cool come check out this video by my friend supergeek Mike that's it for today's video until next time have a good one

Channel: Trekiros

Views: 20,771

Keywords: kraken week, dnd, d&d, 5e, d&d 5e, dnd 5e, dungeon, dungeons and dragons, ginny di, pointy hat, antonio demico

Id: gUdEX8VYA_Y

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024