Classic campaign: Prepping Your Next Fantasy Campaign.

I have entire binders full of partially finished campaigns, ideas for campaigns, and notes for organizing it all. Truth be told, I come up with way more full-on campaign ideas than I do for single adventures or standalone encounters. My brain is wired to look at entire series of TV shows instead of just one episode. But it’s all got to come from somewhere.

Admittedly, most campaign ideas get fleshed out as TV episodes. Of course, that’s before the players get to them. No plan ever completely survives contact with the players. We Game Masters all know this. It still doesn’t keep me from making notes and loosely planning episode titles and what I would want to see happen in them. Some of the encounter notes can still be salvageable later on if necessary. Improvisation is sometimes the name of the game.

Disclaimer: Statements expressed in this article are strictly my opinion. If you disagree or have a different opinion, that’s okay. I’m not an expert on everything. I’m not always right. I’m just writing from my experience as I know it. Your mileage may vary.

I have kind of an old school approach going to my home campaigns.

I like to do the old school organic start to most campaigns. Many times, especially lately, I like to just have a starting location, usually a village, and a few surrounding points of interest. I don’t even have a world map or a specific map in mind beyond a few minor towns or villages. It makes more sense to me realistically that the group wouldn’t necessarily be that worldly wise unless they had some educational background.

There are still many people in our modern day and age that have never traveled much beyond the town or village they grew up in. Before the time of Randonautica or GPS, there was always something to explore. I grew up in a small town in Iowa. I was constantly looking for trails and timber areas I hadn’t been in yet. It’s not like there was much on TV and the video games of the age were rather limited.

With that small town mentality in mind, I at least start the characters in a village. Usually the characters are residents of the village or nearby farms. Some characters might be passing through for whatever reason. It’s not like the characters have to be from the starting village. Yes, some of them do know of other towns and villages, especially in Dragonbane where we have Mariners, Merchants, and Scholars. (Ooh, that might be a good sourcebook idea. Noted.)

If it’s just for my home game I can make sort of a Hex Crawl/Worldbuilding exercise out of the campaign. If it’s for some kind of publication I’ll eventually squeeze the thing into a pre-published campaign setting or cough up a map. Life is so much easier not having to cough up entire nations, politics, and religion all in one go before starting on adventures. I also like looking at the campaign from the bottom down like the characters would.

“What’s over that mountain range?”

“Heck if I know. No one’s ever gone that way as far as I know. It’s supposed to be dangerous.”

“When do we leave and who we takin with us?”

Your campaign might be from a setting that’s already published. You can just as easily by pre-made adventures and string them together into a campaign. Alternatively, you can build your own from scratch. I’m here to try to help a bit with that last one.

I’ll be covering more on campaign building as November draws near. There are going to be a lot of new Dungeon/Game Masters coming into the hobby soon. I can’t get them all to come over to Dragonbane, despite it being a much better game in my opinion. But I can help them with their new player/new DM/GM quest. Some of us learned the hard way so some of us can learn the easy way.

Thank you for being here today with me. I appreciate you. Please embrace the things that bring you the most joy.