by Michael Shea
What about larger campaigns?
Maybe you’re just in the beginning stages of a big campaign. You need a lot more than this, right? Not really. In some later chapters, we’ll discuss ways to get our heroes together so they don’t just all start in a bar, but for the campaign itself, you don’t need to think much further than your first scene in your first game. Campaigns don’t need planning, and they are often more fun the less you plan them out. You might want to have an idea what the overall theme and plot of your campaign might be, but you don’t want to outline it all out at once or you’ll risk forcing your players down a single track. Instead, focus on the same three questions:
Where will your game begin?
What three potential paths lay ahead?
What are your three notable NPCs up to?
While a half dozen to a dozen other activities may fill your checklist, these are the only three required to keep things moving along. The next time you’re sitting down to begin your four-hour preparation session, try spending the first five minutes on this. It might end up being the only five minutes you need to spend.
With your 3x5 cards in hand, let’s take a closer look at all three of these concepts in the next three chapters.
Beginning Your Adventure
Of the three areas upon which to focus your energy, the first lies in understanding where your adventure begins. As with the rest of your preparation, you should focus on what matters most and eliminate the rest. This means keeping your beginning as small as it needs to be with only the details required to start things off and give your players enough to let the story unfold at the table.
More than starting in a bar
If your introduction is too generic, it probably won’t help. An overused general beginning doesn’t set your adventure apart and doesn’t fire up the engines of the imaginations at the table. You want enough detail to make the setting unique and raise an eyebrow or two.
Here’s a poor example:
“The party begins at the adventurers’ guild while awaiting new missions.”
That doesn’t give you anything to work off of. It doesn’t spur the imaginations of the players. It won’t make you feel like you have a handle on the adventure.
“The party begins at the adventurers’ guild in Whitefall, where they overhear of the deaths of their friendly rivals at the ruins beneath the Blue Twins mountain.”
Now you have some flavor. You have somewhere to start. If this is your first adventure, you might not have any idea what the ruins beneath the Blue Twins mountain actually is or anything about the background of the rival gang. You might fill in details a little bit more, but you have your initial start, and you know how things might begin.
Give yourself a lead without following through
You don’t, however, want to fill in the rest of the story. The minute you’re typing out a seed and you have the urge to start writing more — stop. That’s the moment when the story can run free. The storyteller in you may want to grab your net and go catch that fleeting winged idea, but don’t. Let it go free and land raw and untamed in the middle of the gaming table. Let the rest of the group start to draw from the details, unleashing their imaginations into the mix and building it out in ways you might never have dreamed of. That’s the sort of adventure everyone will remember in ten years.
The adventure’s elevator pitch
In Dungeon Master Tips, I describe the idea of a campaign elevator pitch as a replacement for world building. This concept of a short, focused, single-sentence description works just as well for individual adventures. How would you summarize your whole adventure in a single sentence? If it takes you more than a sentence, it’s probably too long. Keeping things simple leaves your game lots of room to evolve into something beautiful, unique, and entertaining.
Example: Yellowtop
Throughout this book I have chosen a single example to use with each of these concepts. Let’s begin with the seed:
“In the salt-mining town of Yellowtop, tyrannical mercenaries leave the body of a resistance leader in the street with a dagger in his chest.”
This seed gives all of us enough of a start to have an idea what this adventure is about: revolution.
As you begin preparing for your own adventure, take out your 3x5 note card and write down, in just a few words, the core seed of your story. It doesn’t need to be as well spelled out as the example above but it should have enough details to remind you of the ideas.
Got your seed down on your 3x5 card? Good, now let’s move on to the three potential paths of your adventure.
The Three Paths
Once you have our game’s beginning seed written down on the top of your 3x5 card, write underneath it the three paths your game might take. Sometimes these paths might be linear — the three scenes that will occur as the party navigates a relatively linear dungeon. Other times, they might represent the three main choices the group might make to decide where they’re headed next.
Professional improvisation actor and Dungeons and Dragons freelancer Steve Townshend, refers to this idea as his “three things”. He begins planning his adventure by deciding first where the PCs will end up, then decides where they begin, and then what they might find in the middle.
You might instead choose three adventure locations the PCs might discover, leaving the paths open for your PCs but the locations rich and deep enough to warrant their attention. Focusing on only three loose locations or scenes creates a more sandbox-style adventure in which the PCs have three locations they might explore.
Whatever method you choose, having three paths, locations, or scenes for your game will give you just enough detail to feel comfortable without overwhelming your story or your players. You want just enough to give you and your players enough direction to build the game at the table.
Though focused, your options shouldn’t be too vague. Here are some examples of options that don’t have enough detail:
The party travels to the neighboring town.
The party goes into the nearby ruins.
The party investigates the local thieves’ guild.
Here are some options with enough details to guide you at the table:
The party chases the evil priest Ralthor to the nearby corrupt town of Nyn.
The party travels to the nearby ruins where gnolls have set up their slave camp.
Through either subtlety or direct force, the party enters the thieves’ den below the sewers of Ashton.
Generally speaking, you’ll want these events or locations to tie back to your main adventure seed, either as a potential sequence of events or as a hub of different directions
These examples have enough detail to get the gears rolling without building out too much. They give you the feeling that you can easily improvise based on the directions of your players. They aren’t, however, so structured that your players can’t come up with other potential paths to follow — something you want to reinforce by not building things out too much.
Example: The adventure locations of Yellowtop
Following through with the Yellowtop adventure seed, let’s build three areas that might be used in the adventure. On that 3x5 card, let’s write three potential adventure locations and a few key ideas surrounding them:
Graystone Manor: Former noble house, now mercenary headquarters.
The saltmines: Former center for the town’s industry, now closed down when they found a dark power buried deep within. Leads from Yellowtop to Ashland Fortress.
Ashland Fortress: High in the mountains, a ruined keep now inhabited by hobgoblin and ogre mercenaries. Two trebuchets threaten the destruction of the town.
Now this little micro-universe is coming together, but without over-writing the details. We have some adventure locations, we have some ideas of history and threat. We have enough to feel like there’s some adventure to be had, even if it’s not all tied together yet. What do we use to tie these locations to our adventure seed? Non-player characters.
During the third component of adventure preparation, you want to determine the backgrounds and activities of the most important NPCs in your adventure or campaign. The paths and reactions of these NPCs flow like the lifeblood of the story and act as the sinew that binds the scenes and locations to the seed of the adventure. The actions of the NPCs move the rest of the story forward. Although the ancient history of a place might seem interesting, it is relatively static compared to the movements of living NPCs.
Consider a pool table filled with balls. As one ball collides with another it takes a new path, potentially colliding with another. Sometimes they smash hard together; other times they just rub off of one another and veer in a new direction. The actions and interactions of the game’s NPCs collide the same way.
The PCs are the most active balls on this table, smashing and colliding and rebounding all over the place. It is the actions and motivations of the PCs that will fuel the story. Throughout their journey, they interact with all sorts of NPCs, creating new paths and reactions from session to session.
It gets really exciting when an action taken by the PC begins a chain of events outside of their view until it comes careening back towards them from a different angle a few sessions later. Now they might see the results of their actions and tie it back together to the original actions they took. It becomes really interesting when the players are able to piece it back together again, like Sherlock Holmes tracking a criminal’s motive back from the murder scene.
With some of this character-driven philosophy in mind, let’s get pragmatic about using NPCs in your lazy D&D game. Although your PCs will drive the main story, you shouldn’t prepare too much to drive their stories forward. Instead, focus on the NPCs you DO control. Flip over your 3x5 card with the adventure seed and three branches on it and get ready for the NPCs.
Focus on three important ally NPCs
Great stories come from great characters. Keeping in mind that creativity comes from limitation, try to keep the number of these characters low. It’s hard to remember a bunch of new characters, and no one wants to jump directly into book four of the Song of Ice and Fire. Sticking to three primary NPCs helps your group remember who they are and details of their idiosyncrasies.
Example: Yellowtop NPCs
Going back to Yellowtop, let’s identify three key NPCs:
Lord Kanzlif Graystone: Lord of Yellowtop. Paid off by mercenaries. Displaced from his home and secretly hopes for revolution.
Lavasque: Diplomat, alchemist, and “terrorist”. Led attacks and revolutions previously and is now in exile. Currently seeks heroes to displace the local mercenaries.
Davins: Former businessman and salt miner. Seeks to overthrow the mercenaries. Appalled at the murder of the resistance leader.
None of these characters are doing anything yet because the story hasn’t begun. As the adventures go forward, let’s track the actions of these NPCs in addition to the progress of the PCs. Let’s focus on backgrounds and motivations of the NPCs first so we know what they will do when they begin to interact with the PCs.
On the 3x5 card containing the adventure seed, describe these three NPCs so that you have their names and enough of a background to remember who they are. Over the course of a campaign, consider giving each of these NPCs their own card to track their actions over time.
Focus on one to three enemy NPCs
Good stories need good villains. Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips already discusses the process for creating great villains, but I will quickly summarize it with the following points:
Good villains have a reason for being the way they are.
Good villains think what they are doing is right. Great villains actually ARE right.
Good villains aren’t static, they have plots and plans.
Good villains are smart.
Keeping this in mind, let’s focus on the ideal number of villains: one to three. One is the perfect number for a story with one focus. Three villains are enough to have a lot of interesting twists and turns in a longer story. More than three and the story won’t feel focused. Your players won’t really care about any particular one because their focus will be diluted.
Example: Yellowtop villains
Let’s take a look at the Yellowtop villains:
Theorn Whitescar: Noble mercenary with pencil-thin mustache. Brutal and dictatorial. Resides in Graystone manor with a host of bodyguards.
Captain Blackhand: Leader of the Ashland goblinoid mercenaries. Looks forward to unleashing the trebuchets on the village.
Father Moorland: A priest of a dark god, Father Moorland looks like the type of fat priest who travels with the mercenaries. Adores children, particularly as sacrifices. Lures in victims with kindness.
Again, before the story has begun, the villains may not yet have acted. You want enough background to know what direction they will head to once the story does begin. Flip over that 3x5 card again, and describe these three villains on the back. If they end up lasting more than one or two sessions, they will deserve their own 3x5 card to keep track of their actions.
Improvise secondary NPCs
Just because you focus on four to six primary NPCs (both allies and villains), that doesn’t mean the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Secondary NPCs are equally important in making a world feel real. These guys won’t have four-thousand-word biographies (of course, neither should your primary NPCs). In fact, they probably don’t need much more than a name and a primary occupation. The rest can come about organically.
The secondary NPCs serve two main functions: they breathe life into the rest of the world and they serve as the pool from which primary NPCs emerge. Because you do not always know who will be primary NPCs and who will be secondary, you need to be ready to promote a secondary into a primary. In later sections, this book will cover some tools to help you build rich secondary NPCs with no preparation.
Rotate NPCs in and out
As the game moves on, as the balls collide and roll off in different directions, it’s quite possible that a primary NPC may fall out of the view of the group. They had their time in the spotlight, but now it’s time for someone else. At this point, you can promote a secondary NPC to a primary. The good news is that you largely don’t need to worry about who to choose — the players will often choose for you. Maybe they like the French accent of that innkeeper. Maybe they promote the huge well-spoken bandit lord as the chief of their new business venture. Whatever happens, stay flexible in promoting one NPC and demoting another.
The same is true for villains. Maybe the PCs killed the primary villain in a glorious battle or pushed him into a cauldron of molten rock. Now the second-in-command, who was always the smarter one, finally takes the position for which she was born and becomes a new and even more dangerous villain. She would never be caught in a situation where a cauldron of molten rock posed a threat.
Good NPCs build a network of potential story ideas, but the best story ideas will come from your players and their PCs. Let’s look at how you can tie all these threads together into a fantastic story.
Tying PCs to the Story
So far we’ve focused on building out all you need for a single adventure, or maybe a series of gaming sessions focused around a single idea. Larger campaigns require a little more planning, however. Most important, they require that dungeon masters build and tie the story around the backgrounds and arcs of the PCs. Players will care less about these ties for short-run games, but for longer campaigns, it’s important to always keep the PCs at the center of the stories.
In his Dungeon Master Experience article What’s My Motivation, Chris Perkins describes the lessons learned in tying character backgrounds into your existing story with the following three points:
Build on what the player gives you.
Be willing to take your campaign in new directions.
Suggest ideas that have future adventure possibilities.
The way of the lazy
dungeon master helps considerably with two of these three points. First, as you have only a vague outline prepared in the first place, building on what the player gives you becomes much easier. The whole story might end up focusing on the characters. The second point also becomes much easier. If you have no focused campaign in the first place beyond a campaign elevator pitch, you will have little difficulty in modifying the campaign to fit a character’s background and motivations. It’s a lot easier to correct your course when no course is laid out in the first place.
D&D organized play veteran and published Wizards of the Coast freelancer, Teos Abadia, spends an hour per session considering how PCs can fit into his story. Many other veteran dungeon masters agree. Building the story from the backgrounds and motivations of your PCs will greatly enhance your players’ enjoyment of your game. They will feel far greater connection to the story when it’s directly tied to their own PCs. Appendix C contains a series of questionnaires with veteran DMs, many of whom point at these PC story threads as a highly valuable element to their game preparation.
As you plan your campaign, consider keeping a single 3x5 card for each of the PCs, with a few key words on their backgrounds, motivations, and potential ties to the ongoing organic story. Reference these cards as you consider where each week’s adventure goes. You might not need to spend an hour tying these PC threads into the story, as Teos does, but any time spent here draws your players much closer to the story as it evolves. More importantly, reviewing these cards before each session helps you spontaneously tie them in when the moment presents itself at the game.