I actually opened Volo’s Guide to make an encounter I’m rather proud of. So it regards the Slithering Tracker which is a really cool, low level monster made from pure revenge (and water… lots of water) so definitely read up on it. Anyway, on to the details of the encounter. The party hear reports of a certain member of the community (say a Baker, a Blacksmith, something like that) hasn’t left his home in weeks and his friends are beginning to become worried. Upon investigating his home, they find the person’s extremely dehydrated corpse lying in the middle of the building surrounded by letters to a local nobleman (moneylender or politician or something) and a short sword driven through his chest. It appears to be suicide. Questioning locals (or even the noble themselves) will uncover that the person had a daughter who contracted a deadly illness and could not afford for the priests to cure her; he there for contacted the noble to lend him some money but, for one reason or another, his plea was declined and his daughter eventually died. Now this encounter can end there and then if they decide to visit the noble. They’ll notice a water leak coming from the roof in the noble’s house which, after a while, will reveal itself as a Slithering Tracker (the spirit of the person who lost their daughter) and immediately attack the Noble. HOWEVER, if they do not decide to visit the noble, have them hear of said noble’s death from sources in the village and be stalked by strange leaks and puddles that follow them as they travel around the location they’re in. A notable trait the Slithering Tracker has is after its primary target is killed (the noble in this case), it still feels no emotion but extreme rage with a thirst for vengeance, which eventually drives it insane and cause it to kill random people around it indiscriminately. Have more and more people in the area turn up dead until you find it right to be the party’s turn. Have them be stalked by puddles and water leaks and the like until finally the tracker reveals itself. It’s a fairly low level encounter (I’d suggest anywhere from level 2-4) but could definitely set a grim horror/mystery tone for the rest of your campaign.
My favorite way I've ever ran a game was an anthological campaign, where players made a different character sheet for each level up to 20, and each session I would be like "we're playing this Nth level session" and they would choose the character sheet for whatever level it was. We aren't huge into the role playing aspect, and this just let us not be tied down to more complex characters that allowed us to run encounters with little setup for shorter sessions that would be customized to the players that could show up
Working backwards is how I always like to build my worlds. I think of the nations first, the kings, queens, and rulers that occupy them, and their greatest feats. The wars that shook the very core of the world, and work downwards from there. If I know Emperor Philarion Pendleton suffered near fatal injuries in a battle to the south of the kingdom when he was once but a soldier, and not yet the emperor, it helps me set up a long-standing rivalry between his empire and the kingdom to the south, and gives some depth to him before he is ever met. Then, why was the battle fought? who won? why did the win? in this case, the Southern Kingdom won, as their entire territory is blockaded by mountains save for a lone pass into Mountainwatch, a military garrison. They had a natural chokepoint and homefield advantage. what about Mountainwatch, what is it like? what about the districts? perhaps a district called the Grey Quarter because the smiths live there, and the metal shavings and dust turn the streets grey. I think working from the biggest things to the smallest things is much better than the opposite. It's hard to make all the cities in a kingdom before knowing the history of the kingdom and the king who rules it. If you come up with a history of the kingdom, and who the king is, the religions, ethics, morals, laws, and society of the kingdom, making the cities is much easier. Adding lore is much easier too, when the largest events in the world are already made, you can keep everything fitting with lore. The greatest events can work their way down to the smallest things. If you know a town has constantly been near a field where wars constantly take place, the players might not even stop in the town, just traveling through it on their journey, but the knowledge of constant wars can allow you to say "As the town shrinks behind you, a lone cemetery sits on the outskirts, thousands of graves fill the land, much more than the town itself would need. As you reach the end of it, a small sign is hung from a fenced section, reading 'Graves of the Unknown'. As the cemetery too, begins to fade behind you, a somber feeling fills the group". It's like a pyramid, the people the party will meet and the shops they go to are the tip of it, the kings, kingdoms, wars, and history are the base of the pyramid, the structure of everything. You can't build a pyramid from the top down, and you can't build a story the same way either. I'd almost wager that it's not "working backwards" as much as it is "Working from the ground up".
THAT IS THE BEST IDEA I HAVE EVER HEARD THANKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
I "stole" an idea from a campaign we played many years ago for my homebrew. In the end i took one plot and wrote a hole campaign with this in a very dark and morbid setting.
I took the song "the poet and his muse" and made a lvl 3-10 dnd campaign of it my players are gonna possibly level to level 5 after the next session (milestone)
I wanted to add this, if you are making a whole new world, don’t make all kingdoms and places at once. Just do one at a time, and you can slowly build up your information for the next place. You can be inspired from anything, like he said, and think of it like a story but with less detail. I just started but a friend gave me these tips and it has helped by a lot.
i personally just create pre-existing orders, religions, cults, tribes, villages with functionnal society and codes before even making stories, i write what are the needs of these establishment and in what way all these things co-exist and clash, take away some things that make em functional either in a good/bad way and throw the players in i make it so some things has goals, some things has hidden goals with multiple dice checks so that the players finds out what's going on if they feel like it so that they can genuinelly unlock some very new stuff and resolves problems that WILL arise if nothing is done about it just with that you have hours of content + you can throw in nice homebrew things like an alchemist pot (it's a pot where you throw some objects with a hidden recipe list and it creates occasionally new weapons/armor/objects if the recipes are respected)
oh yeah and i also make it so that what they've influenced makes the world grow in a way or in another if the fiends hidden lord have been vainquished i'll make it so certains fiends are now accepted in the society 1 hundred years later, making them a playable race if the fey have been helped or ignored they grow as a population making new items available that has effects etc + a lot of feys lives in harmony with other races at the borders of the material plane etc etc i make it so that they have new feats available to them right after the first campaign too! depending on what they've unlocked for their new characters (way of the monk : fiend/fey/celestial feats making them deal passive fire:cold/vamp/holy damage with other stuff, new fighter techniques, new spells, new deities with homebrew passive/active effects) and i make them face stronger foes after!
i know this is late but chat GPT can help alot, also are you related to the girl on tik tok talking about how cats make biscuits and how her cat has a biscuit.
I have seen the things that “Little Fish Men” do, I know things that “Little Fish Men” mean. And I pray that none of your characters ever encounter the Little. Fish. Men.
ok so, for me the magic comes from the stars, moon, sun, ocean and earth but someone is stealing stars, gonna destroy one of the three moons and such to make magic unaccessible to mortals i thought of making the end boss a god but idk what kind or who
Maybe a darkness related one? Like, a god whose main goal is to turn everything into, well, nothing, and therefore begins by turning the world into darkness and also taking away the strongest weapon of sentient beings while doing so
Could you make a video about how to get your players in line? My group gets worse and worse with interrupting me and each other, not letting any other player do anything because they start talking about what they wanna do before we have finished. I don't wanna play teacher and always shush them. I have enough of that in my job because I AM a teacher. Are there any subtle ways to get their attention and focus back to what's on hand? Have you experienced this before?
@@SpontaneouCombustion yeah of course I could always say "shush, stop talking, be quiet, ..." but I don't want that because I'd feel like a teacher. I want to get their attention back to the story in a more... friendly way.
Me who actually has created an entire solar system (with 11 planets and only 4 are inhabitable and 3 already are) planned out for a lengthy campaign: "Soooo... How unoriginal are we talking?"
As a DM with Writer’s Cube, quality advise once again
Oh man, you RULE. I appreciate your advice so much. My players should send you holiday cards at this point.
This is amazing advice, I got to a point where I just got stuck on the hooks but this is great since I got a few monsters to use.
That's always how I write. I seriously can never start writing from the beginning, my mind just goes blank unless I have a cool finale
Nice, simple and effective tips as always. Big ups
Best tip I ever got from an old DM. Steal whatever you want. Lol
That first tip is pretty much exactly how I came up with my first campaign
Also the last tip. I remade the Blood and Wine DLC from The Witcher 3 and it went incredibly well and by the end felt almost completely original.
Them lil fishnet are also know as the god makers they are really cool
I actually opened Volo’s Guide to make an encounter I’m rather proud of. So it regards the Slithering Tracker which is a really cool, low level monster made from pure revenge (and water… lots of water) so definitely read up on it. Anyway, on to the details of the encounter.
The party hear reports of a certain member of the community (say a Baker, a Blacksmith, something like that) hasn’t left his home in weeks and his friends are beginning to become worried. Upon investigating his home, they find the person’s extremely dehydrated corpse lying in the middle of the building surrounded by letters to a local nobleman (moneylender or politician or something) and a short sword driven through his chest. It appears to be suicide. Questioning locals (or even the noble themselves) will uncover that the person had a daughter who contracted a deadly illness and could not afford for the priests to cure her; he there for contacted the noble to lend him some money but, for one reason or another, his plea was declined and his daughter eventually died. Now this encounter can end there and then if they decide to visit the noble. They’ll notice a water leak coming from the roof in the noble’s house which, after a while, will reveal itself as a Slithering Tracker (the spirit of the person who lost their daughter) and immediately attack the Noble. HOWEVER, if they do not decide to visit the noble, have them hear of said noble’s death from sources in the village and be stalked by strange leaks and puddles that follow them as they travel around the location they’re in. A notable trait the Slithering Tracker has is after its primary target is killed (the noble in this case), it still feels no emotion but extreme rage with a thirst for vengeance, which eventually drives it insane and cause it to kill random people around it indiscriminately. Have more and more people in the area turn up dead until you find it right to be the party’s turn. Have them be stalked by puddles and water leaks and the like until finally the tracker reveals itself.
It’s a fairly low level encounter (I’d suggest anywhere from level 2-4) but could definitely set a grim horror/mystery tone for the rest of your campaign.
I really needed some help with writers block, thank you!
Fantastic advice, especially the first one. Writing adventures backwards is actually my usual method, and I even plot my novels the same way.
My favorite way I've ever ran a game was an anthological campaign, where players made a different character sheet for each level up to 20, and each session I would be like "we're playing this Nth level session" and they would choose the character sheet for whatever level it was. We aren't huge into the role playing aspect, and this just let us not be tied down to more complex characters that allowed us to run encounters with little setup for shorter sessions that would be customized to the players that could show up
Working backwards is how I always like to build my worlds. I think of the nations first, the kings, queens, and rulers that occupy them, and their greatest feats. The wars that shook the very core of the world, and work downwards from there. If I know Emperor Philarion Pendleton suffered near fatal injuries in a battle to the south of the kingdom when he was once but a soldier, and not yet the emperor, it helps me set up a long-standing rivalry between his empire and the kingdom to the south, and gives some depth to him before he is ever met. Then, why was the battle fought? who won? why did the win? in this case, the Southern Kingdom won, as their entire territory is blockaded by mountains save for a lone pass into Mountainwatch, a military garrison. They had a natural chokepoint and homefield advantage. what about Mountainwatch, what is it like? what about the districts? perhaps a district called the Grey Quarter because the smiths live there, and the metal shavings and dust turn the streets grey.
I think working from the biggest things to the smallest things is much better than the opposite. It's hard to make all the cities in a kingdom before knowing the history of the kingdom and the king who rules it. If you come up with a history of the kingdom, and who the king is, the religions, ethics, morals, laws, and society of the kingdom, making the cities is much easier. Adding lore is much easier too, when the largest events in the world are already made, you can keep everything fitting with lore. The greatest events can work their way down to the smallest things. If you know a town has constantly been near a field where wars constantly take place, the players might not even stop in the town, just traveling through it on their journey, but the knowledge of constant wars can allow you to say "As the town shrinks behind you, a lone cemetery sits on the outskirts, thousands of graves fill the land, much more than the town itself would need. As you reach the end of it, a small sign is hung from a fenced section, reading 'Graves of the Unknown'. As the cemetery too, begins to fade behind you, a somber feeling fills the group".
It's like a pyramid, the people the party will meet and the shops they go to are the tip of it, the kings, kingdoms, wars, and history are the base of the pyramid, the structure of everything. You can't build a pyramid from the top down, and you can't build a story the same way either. I'd almost wager that it's not "working backwards" as much as it is "Working from the ground up".
THAT IS THE BEST IDEA I HAVE EVER HEARD THANKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
I "stole" an idea from a campaign we played many years ago for my homebrew. In the end i took one plot and wrote a hole campaign with this in a very dark and morbid setting.
I mean, I'm pretty sure keyleth started as an avatar based character and evolved from there, do the same, take an idea and build off it
You sir, are a fucking gold mine.
Can confirm that all three of these work like a charm.
I took the song "the poet and his muse" and made a lvl 3-10 dnd campaign of it my players are gonna possibly level to level 5 after the next session (milestone)
Instructions unclear me and my friends re-enacted our favorite episode of Seinfeld
I wanted to add this, if you are making a whole new world, don’t make all kingdoms and places at once. Just do one at a time, and you can slowly build up your information for the next place. You can be inspired from anything, like he said, and think of it like a story but with less detail. I just started but a friend gave me these tips and it has helped by a lot.
Good Tips Sir 😃😃😃 This will be Helpful
i personally just create pre-existing orders, religions, cults, tribes, villages with functionnal society and codes before even making stories, i write what are the needs of these establishment and in what way all these things co-exist and clash, take away some things that make em functional either in a good/bad way and throw the players in
i make it so some things has goals, some things has hidden goals with multiple dice checks so that the players finds out what's going on if they feel like it so that they can genuinelly unlock some very new stuff and resolves problems that WILL arise if nothing is done about it
just with that you have hours of content + you can throw in nice homebrew things like an alchemist pot (it's a pot where you throw some objects with a hidden recipe list and it creates occasionally new weapons/armor/objects if the recipes are respected)
oh yeah and i also make it so that what they've influenced makes the world grow in a way or in another
if the fiends hidden lord have been vainquished i'll make it so certains fiends are now accepted in the society 1 hundred years later, making them a playable race
if the fey have been helped or ignored they grow as a population making new items available that has effects etc + a lot of feys lives in harmony with other races at the borders of the material plane etc etc
i make it so that they have new feats available to them right after the first campaign too! depending on what they've unlocked for their new characters (way of the monk : fiend/fey/celestial feats making them deal passive fire:cold/vamp/holy damage with other stuff, new fighter techniques, new spells, new deities with homebrew passive/active effects) and i make them face stronger foes after!
My sister loved dnd and im supposed to be a dm with her friends and ik what to do now 😊
i know this is late but chat GPT can help alot, also are you related to the girl on tik tok talking about how cats make biscuits and how her cat has a biscuit.
This helped me figure out my final battle.
I straight up ripped off Goblin Slayer for my first session as a DM and it was great.
I stole the concept of SMT, the moon cycle of Nocturne, and came up with a "King is missing" plot. I think it'll work well enougn
FucknI love this.
That's brilliant
I already do all of this... What do *I* do when I get writers block?
I have seen the things that “Little Fish Men” do, I know things that “Little Fish Men” mean. And I pray that none of your characters ever encounter the Little. Fish. Men.
ok so, for me the magic comes from the stars, moon, sun, ocean and earth but someone is stealing stars, gonna destroy one of the three moons and such to make magic unaccessible to mortals
i thought of making the end boss a god but idk what kind or who
Maybe a darkness related one? Like, a god whose main goal is to turn everything into, well, nothing, and therefore begins by turning the world into darkness and also taking away the strongest weapon of sentient beings while doing so
I did Watergate
I always qrite backwords inhave the setpoints qhere they go and the end but ne er the in between it just comes qith me over time
Could you make a video about how to get your players in line?
My group gets worse and worse with interrupting me and each other, not letting any other player do anything because they start talking about what they wanna do before we have finished.
I don't wanna play teacher and always shush them. I have enough of that in my job because I AM a teacher. Are there any subtle ways to get their attention and focus back to what's on hand? Have you experienced this before?
Have a talk with all of them together to establish ground rules
Which rules are you using?
@Vanillemor What? Just tell them to stop talking over eachother.
@@SpontaneouCombustion yeah of course I could always say "shush, stop talking, be quiet, ..." but I don't want that because I'd feel like a teacher. I want to get their attention back to the story in a more... friendly way.
@@vanillemor5009 If you aren't willing to have a meeting to discuss the troubles you're having with the group then you won't fix anything, good luck.
Me who actually has created an entire solar system (with 11 planets and only 4 are inhabitable and 3 already are) planned out for a lengthy campaign: "Soooo... How unoriginal are we talking?"
hey I'm not just a little fish man :(
I swear it's like you have a 6th sense to drop a video about something I desperately need 💀💀
Ok ngl a campaign based on miitopia would be epic