Writing the first D&D session in a new campaign

hello and welcome back to Tails Arcane my goal for this year as many of you know is to try and post our new uh Tails Arcane video every week at the the more produced scripted videos I do where I have moving images behind me and I'm trying to convey as much information as possible per minute in a relatively short video in between those videos I want to post more relaxed conversational videos like this one where we have minimal editing we just have one standard image that appears behind me throughout the video and I basically just talk about something that's on my mind that relates to DND or ttrpgs these videos are going to be a bit more rambly but I hope that for those of you who watch and enjoy these ones you're finding some value in them and I hope that you don't mind my posting them because it gives me a little kind of detox elements between the the longer videos and it allows me to keep posting and chatting to you guys even when I don't have time to do something that's a little bit more in-depth and so the topic of our last video in this style this sort of relaxed video was um starting a new campaign and the World building for that new campaign how much energy I was putting into the world map into individual regions and building on that I want to talk today about the first session of that campaign the first session of a new campaign with new player characters who all are acting as they don't know each other in the game obviously they're friends in real life but in the game they're all strangers to each other and I've had to essentially work out a first session that brings them all together gets the Action Moving and also starts developing the themes and aesthetic of the the campaign and the the world that they're in because it's an entirely new setting and from the word go I want to start making them feel like this is this new Gothic dark a horror setting that we're moving into after a more classic fantasy one in the last campaign now I actually have already run the session I ran the session last night I'm not going to talk in too much depth about the intricacies of that session and how it all went down because it pretty much all went down the way I expected it to uh what I will just talk about really is the planning process how I prepped for that session and uh what elements I tried to build in bearing in mind that it was the very first session of the campaign uh intervals throughout this video I'll probably stop and drink from this enormously oversized water bottle so the the real process for prepping this session began with the individual players and their backstories I went to all the players and I said uh send me over your backstory and then I will find ways to slot that Baxter into the world they didn't know anything about the world beyond the fact that it was a sort of vaguely medieval slightly horror themed setting so they all wrote their characters up they sent me the backstories I then approached the backstories and moved some small edits to them just to make sure that they fit into the world and the setting and these left some place names blank I filled them in with place names from our world and then I went back to them and I said these are phenomenal Now give me one thing you want to do in the starting zone that I told them a little bit about the starting zone the duchy of witherville which is a kind of a regional area that they all have time probably across 10 to 20 sessions to explore and get to know and maybe longer depending on what they do and I said here's the map of that here's a little bit of lore and tell me what you want to do in this map and so one of them wanted to go in a bit about the spiritual pilgrimage and visit a particular ancient tree that has importance to the people who've brought him up uh one of them wanted to join the military um as kind of a way to get away from their dark past so they're on their way to try and sign up to this kind of elite military force that is based in witherville the region uh and and so on and so as I developed these or as they developed these ideas of their goals they relate them back to me and I started to build those goals into the world as well flashing out certain areas because I know now that those are the areas the players are probably going to go and visit and engage with but the key thing here was that I was able to start looking at the trajectory that the players would be going on to get to their goals and I was able to start developing the the setting and the plot to make sure that those trajectories all uh intersected and and brought the the party together because often the hardest part is to find a organic natural way to bring all these strangers together then get them to fuse into an adventuring party and stick together that's not always easy to do so I essentially made a couple of tweaks to their current stories and to make sure that they all end up in the same place and that could be as as little as just saying okay in your backstory you said you were entering weathervale from uh this area instead it would be great if you could have come in through this Valley instead because the first time you'll hit is hollow bridge and that's where I want the game to begin and with another player it was a matter of saying okay I know you're going to the north and hallow bridge is in the South uh but your family is in the South so perhaps you've gone to see them first and now you're going on your pilgrimage to the north and uh so you have to go through Halo bridge and suddenly we've got a little bit of an intersection there and so on and pretty soon we had all the players with pretty justifiable reasons to end up in the town of halibridge in the southern kind of lower area of the map so now we've got all the players in one place how do we bring them together uh now I am a sucker for a Tavern star I know that it's a bit cliche but I really love the fantasy feeling of all the players strangers sitting around the tavern being drawn together by an incitant incident for me the problem with Tavern starts traditionally is that they are a bit awkward because you end up with all the players sitting around a table in the tavern trying to find reasons to talk to each other the best way to get around that is combat and you just throw a combat encounter in there get everyone involved and instantly the awkwardness is gone because everyone's focusing on staying alive and trying out their new cool abilities that they've got so uh I had the The Tavern be quite quiet and I plan to have basically one regular drinking at the bar a board a Tavern keeper behind the bar and a couple of strangers in from foreign parts and of course those strangers of the players and uh just as it's getting to closing time and the players are wondering whether they should and go upstairs and buy rooms or go elsewhere none of them have interacted yet uh the door opens and essentially a zombie bursts in and I should say as well I planned this out and it worked quite well in the night I made sure to ask all the players like how they sit in the bar how they engage with the space are they off in a corner watching the door are they quite confident chatting to the bartender up at the bar just giving them a little moment to for each other's sake display their characteristics and how they operate in public which is a good way to kind of get a bit of flavor for the character but anyway the inciting incident was a zombie powered by Clockwork his heart has been removed and it was replaced by a strange Clockwork device this uh sort of Undead automaton burst through the door and starts going nuts kills or almost kills the um the the local regular who's drinking at the bar and is going to set about the tavern keeper and of course the tavern keeper a little village person not able to defend themselves The Players leap up get into the free and take down this Clockwork zombie and instantly we're off to a great start all the players get a little chance to flex their new characters a little bit see what the characters and their builds are capable of and they all have a little bonding moment because they all were engaged in the same dangerous situation and helped each other survive it uh it also creates an interesting question instantly they go okay this is a zombie we're playing a horror set and that makes sense but then they go what's this weird Clockwork device built into its chest something else going on here something artificial and man-made is going on behind the zombie so there's a big question mark that all of them are now kind of eager to to answer uh my next plan was basically to quickly get them to a clear objective we've got past the the initial awkwardness of the tavern opening and all the characters being brought together by the inciting incident now we need a reason for it to stay together for at least a little while we have the local Constable arrive and this is kind of the local law man who is you know a bit older and usually deals with maybe some some sheep theft or a bar fight now he's got a Clockwork zombies lying on the floor of the Local Tavern and he's like this is above my pay grade so he sees his competent Outsiders who've shown up taking down the zombie and goes oh great I can offload this problem onto them so he he goes them and says look we have reason to believe that the zombie came from the MERS to the east because the zombie is actually the resurrected body of a Minstrel who passed through here a few weeks ago and went out in the murders and we never saw him again and he said he was heading east and we didn't expenses him again now he's back and he's an undead automaton so uh please go out with the mirrors try to find out what's going on and uh I'll pay you and he offers to pay them a little bit just for going out in the mirrors and quite a sizable chunk more if they can resolve the issue and find out who's putting weird Clockwork devices into dead bodies in the mirrors so immediately the players have a very clear objective and I even made clear to them roughly where in the mirrors they should look the minstrel said he was going to stop off at an old standing Stone ring because he wanted to uh develop a song he was working on he thought the ring would kind of give him inspiration and the history of the ring and all that so he went to see these old Standing Stones uh the stone ring and he was hoping to uh you know get in tune with the story he was writing obviously died in the process so the players know there's a location on the mirrors they can go to that will probably yield answers and they set off the next day so even at this point I don't need to worry about how long they're going to stay together I know they're going to stay together as a party until they've resolved this little mini Quest and by that time they'll be getting kind of comfortable with it with each other and hopefully taking a liking to each other and then we get to our second combat encounter I wanted to make the first session quite combat heavy and so when they get up to the standing stones uh to investigate the Sun is setting it's getting quite dark and quite kind of ominous dark clouds overhead and while they're rooting around here wolves attack dire wolves no it's a bit of a meme in the DND Community to say that the worst kind of encounters are the ones where you just throw some wolves at the players and it's not really plot Focus it's just a random encounter but I actually really like this because firstly dire wolves are really fun if you have a pack of dire wolves attacking and they're getting the benefit of pack tactics and they're dragging players down onto the ground and knocking them prone uh you can get a really fun sort of strategical encounter where the players are trying to uh Keep the Wolves apart to make them less dangerous and uh you know it can be quite intense the rules move quite fast they have like 50 feet of movement and uh the other cool thing is that these players are all fresh out of a campaign in which they were at sort of God to your power levels wolves were nothing to them and now to bring them back into the sense of being at the gritty bottom of the ladder with uh no plot armor no sense that they're going to necessarily be great Heroes they have to work their way up they're now at death's door because they're being attacked by a couple of wolves and we've got a really fun intense encounter on the night it was actually quite terrifying because I thought one of the players was going down um and yeah that was a actually a surprisingly successful so we've got a second combat encounter we've had a weird Clockwork zombie and a pack of wolves out in the mirror the players are getting warmed up and as the last wolf goes down the Sun is setting Darkness Falls they're thinking about maybe going back to the town because they've not found any sign of Foul Play Around the stones and then they look up into the hills they see off in the distance a little light glowing it looks like a cave with a lantern in it they think that's weird there shouldn't be anyone in these Hills there's no one to be pretty uninhabited and so we end the session with them setting off in the direction of the um the cave with a lantern I had actually plan more in the original session for the uh what they would find in the cave um but as is always the case especially with the first session things take a lot longer than you expect so on the night we only got As far as the end of the the wolf fight uh Nick session will get to the second part of what I planned for the first session which is uh that they get up to the cave and they find that essentially are a sort of almost like um a half Necromancer uh half artificer is up there bringing monsters and people and corpses essentially Back to Life by inserting Clockwork Contraptions into their bodies and she seems to be working for some other person she has letters which seem to be orders telling her to perfect her methods and help build this Army of of clockwork Undead automatons but it's not clear who's behind the letters who's paying her to do this so the players will presumably get through that they'll survive quite an intense encounter uh halfway through the encounter before the the all other players are being held off by some of the lower level zombies The Necromancer artificer is able to uh resurrect using Clockwork uh Manticore which then obviously spreads its wings and and is like the sort of boss of the encounter they'll sort all that out I hope they'll survive and they'll go back to turn they'll get paid and then because I've kind of pre-arranged some of the the locations I know they're all going to all their paths kind of lead in the same direction at least for another couple of days they'll all be on the road together and so the Constable is going to say to them look I'm basically I paid you everything I can pay you but please take word of this in this strange situation to the capital which is um kind of on the road and uh tell them what's happened and they might be able to give you a bit more money as kind of recompense for carrying this troubling news that someone's trying to build a clock zombie army and so the players will have a little bit more reason to step together and we'll continue on their roads we'll have more adventures and hopefully become increasingly fused as a as an adventuring party so that is basically what I'm doing for the first session uh what I did for the first session and what I'll be doing for the second session and I hope that's given you just some ideas of how you might approach the first session of a new campaign how you might approach a One-Shot where you're trying to bring all the players together very fast and get them into the action I think whatever when you're starting with new players or with new characters it can be awkward even if the players all know each other well and are experienced it really helps to get to the action bring the combat right to the players give them very clear goals it kind of takes the pressure off them to have to immediately find their feet and role play It's almost like okay I'll work out who my character is as I go along in the meantime I'll focus on Surviving this fight with a direwolf and I'm a great believer and kind of especially early on giving players plenty of structure to work within and then as they become more confident taking some of that structure away and letting them get off the rails and do what it is they want to do and letting them take the leads but initially I don't think there's any harm in taking the lead a little bit as a DM and saying no here's the stuff you can do here's the prepared content go and do it and then go on to do whatever else you want to do after that uh anyway that is me that's the video I I think I'll be able to put this out without any edits which might be my very first video without like a random cut halfway through uh which is very exciting uh thank you so much for watching as always just a reminder that my produced scripted videos will continue to appear in the channel uh hopefully every week this year that's the plan at any rate we'll see how that goes uh but these more relaxed videos will also pop up in between them and uh if you have any suggestions or questions for topics you'd like me to cover drop them in the comments below we'll talk about them in these more relaxed conversational videos uh if I'd get enough questions over the course of a couple of these videos I might do a video where I just answer some questions but uh these videos can be anything we want them to be they're just relax Hangouts essentially so look after yourselves and we'll catch up in the next video

Channel: Tales Arcane

Views: 39,900

Keywords: dungeons and dragons, dnd, D&D, ttrpg

Id: cBWEMbguoJo

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023