In hearing your setup for a siege campaign, I thought would share how I would do it, not that I dislike your idea (I rather like it) but this is based on my own inspirations, and sticking to the war theme, I have thought long about this. I'll lay out the whats first, then the whys. First, the city itself wouldn't be super significant. It wouldn't be some center of magical power, it wouldn't be the capital of an empire, it would just be a walled city that sits in a strategic pathway and has to fall in order for future, deeper invasions into the nation the city is a part of. I would ensure the PCs have some connection to it, and it will have its own neat quirks that are setting appropriate, but nothing that makes it feel like it isn't your ordinary city. Second, the army invading wouldn't be led by some ruthless king or power hungry man bent on domination, but by a general. Someone to whom warfare and siege is a day job, rather than someone obsessed with blood and death. This army wouldn't be the "Grand Imperial Legion", but what we Europa Universalis players call a siege stack. A split off force from the main army to be used for this particular purpose. Third, my conclusion wouldn't be a bang, but a whimper. Unless the PCs manage to pull something truly crazy off, it will end like most failed sieges did. One night, the attackers just pull up their tent stakes and leave. Now for my apologia, if you will: War as a theme, for all its other limitations, comes with one feature that no other theme can match. The ability to make the mundane all important and poignant. If the enemy army was lead by a Deathlord and his legion of rapey-death-kill Orcs, then the ability to use the theme of war to the best is lost. Its one thing for a PC to kill an evil entity. Its quite another when the creature on the end of your +2 Longsword was a simple farmer a few months ago. Its one thing if the NPC that holds the breach, allowing the PCs to escape is a badass member of the King's Own bodyguard. Its quite another when its the jovial, plump town sheriff who worries each time he handed out a kobald hunt to the players. Its one thing when an epic last stand takes place upon the sweeping battlements of Hyrule castle. Its quite another when its in the town hall, defending their favorite group of NPCs that they have grown to love. War can make take these simple, otherwise unimpressive settings and turn it into the most important thing in the world. And why end with the whimper? Because it reinforces what all that happened was. Just another act of destruction in an endless cycle of destruction. The siege probably won't be remembered in the great history books. Men and women died or lost everything, and it meant so little. If the city was the most important place in the kingdom, it would guarantee fame and remembrance. But now? It will only be remembered by those who fought there. That mundane little town was *their* town, and nobody else can claim it. It will be the PC's story, not another page in a chronicle. That is the intimacy that war allows, and that is how I would take advantage of it. Thank you for reading.
Great outline for a first novel/ start to a grand adventure... now after the end of this siege the large force invading has either crushed this town into oblivion or the pc’s have halted them long enough for aid to come to the rescue and now it’s time for the gorilla tactics of hit and run sabotage of the invasion force to drive them back and get their revenge upon those who killed friends and family in that small no name town...
It’s a great idea and I would love to play it but it really comes down to the type of people you have playing with you. If you have people that want a high fantasy epic. Then this kind of story might ring hollow with them.
When building the world and the major factions in your world, leave some space available for minor factions, interesting places and non-participants. Consider having stretches of land not claimed by any nation, or a remote forest where a particularly reclusive race could exist while being virtually unknown to outsiders. Jot down some ideas, while not setting things in stone, and allow the players to travel to these areas to make discoveries. One thing I did was set up some ancient ruin sites to be scattered about the player's home base. They've been given a hook to find one such place, and could explore to find more if they wanted to. Even I don't know where all of them will be, which adds some excitement and guessing for myself.
I find that most of my campaigns in DND don't often start with a specific theme in mind. Rather, it is an open sandbox type of play, and the theme and type of adventure is often determined by what the PCs decides to do or where they decide to visit. Do they become invested in a town & try to take owner the leadership of that town? Suddenly we have a political intrigue campaign! Do they travel to/want to start in the cursed kingdom of Tristan? Obviously, we then have a survival/horror setting to play with! Or do they just roam around in the relatively peaceful kingdom of Rodan, chasing monster contracts and digging dungeons? Then we suddenly have a very classic DND adventure. Even the theme and type can often change, depending on whether the PCs decide to change locale or alter the way they approach issues.
Your videos are making me have better story inspirations and making me be a better GM as well! All GMs around the world should watch your channel! Excelent work!
I will say though this is actually great. My current campaign does have my players in love with their town, and I've been toying with the idea of a war to screw with this. It just still feels really big to try to do a war scene, I think I may have to look up some more info on this subject before I feel confident enough to make this happen, but you have definitely turned my faint wisp of an idea into a more solidly forming one.
I would personally like to see a case study where you take this process and put things down on paper. I would also very much like to see how you approach dungeon design. Not sure if you've covered that, yet. While I'm a fan of the Five Room Dungeon, sometimes you just need something larger.
Awesome videos! I would love to see a video breaking down campaign building even further and I would also be curious to see a video on how to run a campaign that is very specifically player-lead and/or more open-world or sandbox oriented.
Currently writing an Adeptus Evangelion Version 2.5 campaign which is based on a hacked variation of Dark Heresy first edition which allowed you to roleplay scenarios within the universe of Warhammer 40k! 😁.
Really enjoyed this video! I'm starting a new campaign soon with my ongoing group and wanted to have a more broad strokes style to it. Funny how things like this seem to line up! (There may be less butter knives in this one than the last, if you remember that Twitter conversation)
If you have your setting, and want to take your players characters from level 3-5 to 20, how do you plan out the “acts” and allow the characters to be at the right level for each sub-Boss leading to the final level 20 showdown? I guess I’m looking at building the Arc and making sure the characters hit the marks at the right time.
I love your videos... very very helpful in so many ways. It helped me out figuring out the narrative that I want my player's campaign to play in. It's sometime hard to have the proper view on our work as gms... you're quite well helping out
Is there anywhere you talk more about the campaign that leads up to the global war? This is a really interesting concept that I'd love to explore more!
I really enjoyed both of these videos! I'm starting a new campaign soon and I want to get as much good advice as possible before I begin running it, so I would love to see more like this!
I know a lot of making sure your game goes well as the DM is player expectation. That does beg the question. How do you find out what the players want? Are you blunt and ask them the opened ended question what do you want? Do you come up with a few ideas and ask them to choose? Do you attempt to divine what they want from the entrails of a sacrifice? Additionally what do you do when you have passive players that "don't care what they play"? I know my methods but I'd love to see yours on this topic.
Early on in gaming (or with new groups and players) I'm generally a "session zero" typical and start with the "blunt-ish" questioning... It's good to get a fairly firm idea of what kind of intentions the players have. Do they like combat-intensive, puzzle-intensive, comic-intensive, or some other aspect to Stylize the narrative storyline? And then I get them started in figuring out character-basics... Races, classes, magic or not-so-much, do we seem to like or want psyonics... clerical attitudes, etc... That's usually helpful, too... even before you decide what kind of world, terrain, or campaign arch you want to build and run... Once I start actually composing the game play, I will toss a little of everything into it anyway. The fact is Players are rarely completely and authentically honest about "what they want"... SO it's a good idea to take a risk or two from time to time and "poke them with sharp stuff" just to see what happens. Usually, if you do it well in the details and storytelling department, a few basic visual aids and you've got a great adventure or even a full-on campaign with good times all the way around. Campaigns are very similar to "non-linear" type adventures, just a larger scale in practically every aspect. So once you kind of get used to keeping the broad-strokes of choice available (and sort of visible, at least to the GM) the rest can usually take care of itself in Role Play, and you're definitely well advised to take notes even as you "improv" what comes to mind as better than originally designed. :o)
hmm i'm contemplating a campaign based entirely on random encounter. pretty much party looks for the one door in a infinitely complex dungeon that they've been forced into by a very wimsicle watcher of dimensions(secretly made a wager with another multidimensional being on who could create a party to reach the exit of dungeon 1st). each door they find leads to another random region or dungeon.
Steven McKenna hey i had pretty much the exact same idea! I think it has lots of potential in my opinion. Reminds me of roguelikes and other randomly generated dungeons crawls. Nice premise
Not sure if it's worth an entire video, but I'd love to know if you have any tips on ways to keep track of your campaigns. I currently use one spreadsheet app, one mindmap app, one app for quick notes and jotting down things and lastly an entire folder dedicated to important characters and PCs, as well as how they link together. Do you know any other / better ways of confining the information without allowing any of it to slip through the cracks or become lost in the mess that is the information feed?
I'm kind of old-school, so I never bothered much with app's... Still don't really. I'm not against bringing tech' to the table, either... BUT... From my experience, A basic legal pad is good for "keeping track-notes" on the "where you are now" in the campaign, and it's usually (in my experience) best kept in the most frequently used book of source material to mark a place (or even a few... more places pinched together means better retention between book and pad)... I'd keep a map for relevant general spacial sense (usually rolled into a cardboard tube) and a "master notebook" where pretty much all relevant notes for the adventure(s) at hand are readily available. With a GM-screen for quick references along for certain "privacy" related matters you can run practically any campaign with any setting and any system you like for as long as you like. Now, that all said... In the privacy of personal quarters (apartment, home, barracks, wherever) I do like to maintain "compendiums" of creations that might be researched or re-used later. These are loose-leaf notebooks full of proper pages (or where I can add them) for chapters and ranks and files about EVERYTHING, monsters, peculiar life forms, traps, mechanics, weapons, legends, lore, folk-tales, strange political discords, and all that can be retained in the master's compendiums and you should probably eventually have several of your own as you "brew up" various adventures over the years to come... This way, when you know for certain that you've had a really GREAT inter-political campaign around a Lord being assassinated, you can go right to that chapter, jot a few notes, and notice what seemed to work at the time... Change a few names, places, even classes or what have you, and a whole new adventure is ready to start taking form... Remember a certain trap that got you sworn at for weeks between chuckles, but that was years ago??? With good compendiums... chapter, and verse... there it is, and you've jotted down the notes, grabbed (or even built new ones) some visual aids that worked well for it... and you're ready to spring it on the "newer younger blood" who haven't seen that trick yet... Nowadays, rather than waste a bunch of time writing everything down, I can see someone maybe just going to a Databasing app' (almost anything available would work) to separate monsters from demon-lords from traps, and even the categories of traps from destructive to nuisances... etc... SO you might consider that... But really, just a sourcebook and legal pad is probably "enough" to get buy if you're truly on a budget... maybe a spiral (five subject to be honest) notebook where you can fold up certain pages for outward marks... It's not meant to turn into a full time librarian job unless that's how far you want to push it. :o)
I would like to run a cold war-type of campaign. Sure it could escalate into an actual war, but I'm going to set the stage first. So that means I'd essentially be running an intrigue type campaign with lot's of espionage, secrets, sabotage, social subterfuge, assassination plots etc. And I have no idea how to tackle that!
Curious how you might set up either a vigilante campaign (retaking a city) or an all thief campaign so that there is a personal investment for the players.
An all thief campaign should be easy enough. Think thieves guild or maybe a big heist, or a series of big heists as they become world famous cat burglars. You can either go Oblivion thieves guild style quests, mission impossible type quests (which this gives me a great idea for my campaign, actually), or something else entirely. Backstory that your players come up with can always become a part of an overarching narrative, for instance. Say one of the thieves has been caught and is being hunted, by the one thief hanging out with all of the other thieves they are now all being hunted by proxy. Perhaps they are out to clear their name, an honorable thief group that has been framed for a rather dishonorable theft. It really is just all up to your imagination
Excellent video yet again, great insight (Int check) on the topic. Such daunting tasks can prove a bit too much for newer players, gods know I’m going through the same phase. Say, I’m starting a realistic fanasy survival themed campaign, emphasising on the fragility and frailness of mortals and how illness and basic needs such as hunger and thirst, can take down even the strongest of people, no matter their level. I’ll be using themes of the fragility of mortal minds ans how easily they are brainwashed or how badly their souls can be broken. What kind of adventures would you use to incorporate these themes? I do have my master plot, (basically alien sentient crystals that corrupt and manipulate mortal minds) my examples of frailty (a once great corrupted king) and the missguided but righteous good that fight it (wood elves and men of the king). Any help would be kick ass, thanks!
Perhaps you should take a look at the polar explores. They have been up to challenges in that category. Getting stuck in a snowstorm take its toll on the provision, then what to do? It is not unusual to butcher a husky dog to get food, there are after all less provision to haul. But... how fast can you allow to let your huskies go down? What about the huskies, do you introduce cannibalism for them, by feeding them their mates? And if an expedition member go down, do you carry that member with you knowing death will most likely come before reaching back to the base, or do you shorten the suffering by committing murder? And when dead, do you resort to cannibalism? Or: we eat the huskies and the huskies eat our dead? --- Other real life events to look at, is situations where bad harvest causes the population to resort to butcher their work animals to get food thus making future farming become even more difficult. The cows in India became designated 'holy' to prevent people from butchering their work cows. --- Yet another real life event that can be worth to look into is situations where bad harvests make people eat plague bearing animals, thus the population in the desperate attempt to survive actually make it worse as they get infected. That is the reason to why most meat we eat today is not from predatory animals, again the reason to why some religions specify certain animals not to be eaten, like dogs and pigs. (Pigs are not directly predators but they do eat meat and do resort to cannibalism in hunger situations!) --- I think you should consider if you are going for 'realism' or 'alien sentient crystals', at least in my mind those two do not fit well together. And decide on a scale: A polar expedition can do it in small scale, more do you not need to create such setting! If you wish something of larger scale, then go for that the world have suffered from bad harvest several years in a row due to climate change. The desperation for food make people do less rational things, can be source for wars, wars to take food from others!
Lars Dahl awesome ”feed”back (pardon the pun). This is exactly what I’d like to aim, though, perhaps only that severe while in dangeous and hostile climates. I’d still like to maintain a story or a master plot in the background. Since, you know, eating ration is only so interesting. It is actually, when you are thousands of feet underground and you have enough food for one week, for example. I hear what you’re saying about the ”alien crystals” thing. It is a tad silly, I guess, though, how would one incorporate a big bad in this campaign style. Is one even needed? Perhaps the main plot couod be the unsteady political situation and a looming war in the distance, the big bad the rivalling enemy kingdom. Then, how would you form adventures without them getting too repetitive? Finding new sources of food and water? Locaiting and mapping new settleable land, (which will be the cause of more conflict). I definitely want to keep it as real, grim and low fantsy as possible, and I’m afraid that I’m going to botch the veresemilitude of that kind of world.
Have you ever read anything from "Dark Sun"? It's a relevant D&D source, too... The version I was most often stuck in... doesn't sound too far from "right up your alley" in themes... We were constantly in trouble hunting for food and water. Even when it wasn't part of the main adventure, it was part of the sub-plot. Some Caravaneers were known to use desert-wolves to track violent clans... They'd slip into the battle-fields after conflicts to go after the blood of the fallen for making wine! That's how desperate it got for water in our "usual" sessions... Granted, you're not talking an "outdoors" extreme climate situation, but underground you also have volcanic actions, and hot-seeps can vaporize waterways pretty quickly, presenting steam-blasts as well as taking away the water. And anywhere you can have elves and dwarves, you can also have the "mul" (pronounced "mool" similar to "book") which is half-dwarven, completely hairless, and infertile... (usually a child of rape according to the Dark Sun campaign) AND you did say you were looking at the frailty of the soul for corruption as well... so here's some added "twisted behavior" to flesh out the idea... just depending on how recklessly inhumane you like it. :o)
Hi I'm new to the channel and I'm trying to make my first ever campaign. (I've only played one tabletop rpg. Arkham Horror the card game but haven't finished it.) I want to do my own campaign about life in a trailer park.It's a black comedy satire that will delve into scifi horror and fantasy depending on the campaign but it all stays within the trailer park mostly. It's a small scale ascension story that changes with each new scenario and gets more insane as the campaign unfolds. I'm lost on how to begin. These videos have been helpful so far but I need more instructions on how to begin this campaign. I've tried to get this game made into a film but where I live it was hard to rangle up willing actors and actresses. I tried to go the animated route but that didn't pan out either. Then I discovered tabletop Rpgs and thought I'd give it a go. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Hey I need some help I have a group that are know to literally blow up half a continent and love to both fight and have tough puzzles to figure out, I have experience in wargaming so I know how to make interesting combat... but I stuck at puzzles
My issue is trying to decide how quickly to push events along. I have a master plot planned out but we are only able to play once a month, so I don't want to draw things out. I have two brand new players in my group and I'm not sure if they signed up for a campaign that takes multiple years to complete. Hell, I don't know if I would sign on for that necessarily.
It's been said many times, that lots of really great campaigns die a silent death or just quietly fade away... This is one of the great many reasons why that's true. Pacing is complicated, but my best advice (for what it's worth) is to test the players regularly, discuss the sessions in "post-game debriefing" and learn as you go to "read" the Players as you go. It's kind of tough in the beginning, but not as hard as trying to "play the player instead of the cards" in Poker (for instance)... When the table erupts in emotion on your intended cues, YOU OWN THEM! So that's a kind of measuring stick sample. It doesn't matter if you manage to make them explode in laughter and spew soda out their noses whenever you like, or you figure out exactly which NPC to "abuse" to evoke tears and swearing, or you find the perfectly intense build up to a singularly inconsequential noise or visual that produces anguish and screams and foul language in every direction ... (of course, if you can manage it ALL, you've graduated to pro-GM) Obviously when people are falling asleep at the table, you might want to pick things up a bit... and so on. Otherwise, just remember, it's more about the immersion of Role Playing than about garnering XP or even completing adventures (kits or homebrews)... Great GM's don't give that a second thought, and know inherently that a LOT of work can go completely unnoticed and it's okay, so long as everyone involved has FUN and creates a GREAT story. :o)
I plan on taking my first steps into the world of GMing soon, and seeing as to how most of the people i will be playing with are people i regularly play video games quite competitively with, it raises some concerns. The most prominent fear i have is the chance that the group will attempt to metagame regularly, though I'm unsure of how to deal with metagaming when it inevitably happens. How should I deal with metagaming without excessively punishing the players for employing outside knowledge, while still not promoting by letting it pass?
I believe there is a video on this channel that deals with metagaming and why is it bad or good. Pretty sure you'll find some good wisdom there. From my perspective, metagaming cand be "ok" as long as the PC can give a proper answer to "why you character is like that / doing this / trying that thing" and so on. For exemple, if you a very well designed fighter optimized for combat, ask the player why his character is so focus on this. It might bring some amazing story about the background of this character, maybe he couldnt face an opponent before and it costs the life of his family, so now he is so scared to loose the next battle that all his energy is put into the destruction of any opponent ? I am sure that you can use metagaming from your player as a way to boost their roleplaying capacity. As usual, ask why and how. Metagaming is also using the rules as best as possible, so feel free to change them. If a PC face a troll and randomly start to use fire against it without his character knowing its weakness, change this weakness to cold, or electricity, or anything. This way your PC can feel that you control your world and that to keep metagaming they'll need to explore it more, asks questions to NPC, try things and so on... Like why this particular troll was not weak to fire ? maybe a wizard has been up to no good ! and this gives great adventures and stories. Hope that helps. cheers
I want a campaign that lasts 200+ game years... generations of player characters needed to complete it. LOTR + The Hobbit is a 60+ year campaign, (3 major sub-campaigns, with several side-quests, with 2 main "games" of over a year of "game time" each) with a "historical" reference to over 3000 years of build up to the final battle. I want to run the campaign of: "Frodo Failed" (But Sauron didn't get the ring... yet) The One Ring isn't destroyed alternate universe of Middle Earth, starting say... 50 years later.
I started working on a Superhero RPG computer game a few days ago, so I'm watching to help work out the plot for the game. I don't need to worry about pleasing a specific audience; the audience will be whoever likes the game. I do, however, need a good plot. I'm planning on going with a "Justice" theme, though I may have a few morally grey (or even evil) options thrown in to make the game more diverse. Also, the PC won't be the public hero, which, I think, gives it a more interesting tone than "I'm a major super hero, protecting the city." They will secretly be hired by the Hero's boss to help them, generally with secret PR stuff.
In hearing your setup for a siege campaign, I thought would share how I would do it, not that I dislike your idea (I rather like it) but this is based on my own inspirations, and sticking to the war theme, I have thought long about this. I'll lay out the whats first, then the whys.
First, the city itself wouldn't be super significant. It wouldn't be some center of magical power, it wouldn't be the capital of an empire, it would just be a walled city that sits in a strategic pathway and has to fall in order for future, deeper invasions into the nation the city is a part of. I would ensure the PCs have some connection to it, and it will have its own neat quirks that are setting appropriate, but nothing that makes it feel like it isn't your ordinary city.
Second, the army invading wouldn't be led by some ruthless king or power hungry man bent on domination, but by a general. Someone to whom warfare and siege is a day job, rather than someone obsessed with blood and death. This army wouldn't be the "Grand Imperial Legion", but what we Europa Universalis players call a siege stack. A split off force from the main army to be used for this particular purpose.
Third, my conclusion wouldn't be a bang, but a whimper. Unless the PCs manage to pull something truly crazy off, it will end like most failed sieges did. One night, the attackers just pull up their tent stakes and leave.
Now for my apologia, if you will:
War as a theme, for all its other limitations, comes with one feature that no other theme can match. The ability to make the mundane all important and poignant. If the enemy army was lead by a Deathlord and his legion of rapey-death-kill Orcs, then the ability to use the theme of war to the best is lost. Its one thing for a PC to kill an evil entity.
Its quite another when the creature on the end of your +2 Longsword was a simple farmer a few months ago.
Its one thing if the NPC that holds the breach, allowing the PCs to escape is a badass member of the King's Own bodyguard. Its quite another when its the jovial, plump town sheriff who worries each time he handed out a kobald hunt to the players.
Its one thing when an epic last stand takes place upon the sweeping battlements of Hyrule castle. Its quite another when its in the town hall, defending their favorite group of NPCs that they have grown to love.
War can make take these simple, otherwise unimpressive settings and turn it into the most important thing in the world.
And why end with the whimper? Because it reinforces what all that happened was. Just another act of destruction in an endless cycle of destruction. The siege probably won't be remembered in the great history books. Men and women died or lost everything, and it meant so little. If the city was the most important place in the kingdom, it would guarantee fame and remembrance. But now? It will only be remembered by those who fought there. That mundane little town was *their* town, and nobody else can claim it. It will be the PC's story, not another page in a chronicle.
That is the intimacy that war allows, and that is how I would take advantage of it. Thank you for reading.
that was beautiful. Great insight.
be my GM.
Great outline for a first novel/ start to a grand adventure... now after the end of this siege the large force invading has either crushed this town into oblivion or the pc’s have halted them long enough for aid to come to the rescue and now it’s time for the gorilla tactics of hit and run sabotage of the invasion force to drive them back and get their revenge upon those who killed friends and family in that small no name town...
It’s a great idea and I would love to play it but it really comes down to the type of people you have playing with you. If you have people that want a high fantasy epic. Then this kind of story might ring hollow with them.
This guy seems like the David Attenborough of D&D
When building the world and the major factions in your world, leave some space available for minor factions, interesting places and non-participants. Consider having stretches of land not claimed by any nation, or a remote forest where a particularly reclusive race could exist while being virtually unknown to outsiders. Jot down some ideas, while not setting things in stone, and allow the players to travel to these areas to make discoveries.
One thing I did was set up some ancient ruin sites to be scattered about the player's home base. They've been given a hook to find one such place, and could explore to find more if they wanted to. Even I don't know where all of them will be, which adds some excitement and guessing for myself.
I find that most of my campaigns in DND don't often start with a specific theme in mind.
Rather, it is an open sandbox type of play, and the theme and type of adventure is often determined by what the PCs decides to do or where they decide to visit.
Do they become invested in a town & try to take owner the leadership of that town? Suddenly we have a political intrigue campaign!
Do they travel to/want to start in the cursed kingdom of Tristan? Obviously, we then have a survival/horror setting to play with!
Or do they just roam around in the relatively peaceful kingdom of Rodan, chasing monster contracts and digging dungeons?
Then we suddenly have a very classic DND adventure.
Even the theme and type can often change, depending on whether the PCs decide to change locale or alter the way they approach issues.
Your videos are making me have better story inspirations and making me be a better GM as well! All GMs around the world should watch your channel! Excelent work!
I have to say that the "15 Irritating Things Fellow Players Do"-video really got me. Subscribed :)
I'd like you to break down even more than you have on how to make a campaign.
Yes, I also think a further breakdown would be VERY beneficial.
Thanks for the tips! I’ve got a bday party in a week and I’m taking on the challenge of revamping my old RPG world into a DND world.ThankYou💜
absolutely love your show. I would love to see your completely overplanned, tweaked out, detailed plan of a year long campaign!
Would you do a video on running/creating an urban campaign?
What a nice series of videos. Thank you, you're helping me to do a great campaign. Greetings from Spain.
I would like to see you do a few of these campaign designing videos, wherein you choose different themes and and whatnot.
I will say though this is actually great. My current campaign does have my players in love with their town, and I've been toying with the idea of a war to screw with this. It just still feels really big to try to do a war scene, I think I may have to look up some more info on this subject before I feel confident enough to make this happen, but you have definitely turned my faint wisp of an idea into a more solidly forming one.
I would personally like to see a case study where you take this process and put things down on paper. I would also very much like to see how you approach dungeon design. Not sure if you've covered that, yet. While I'm a fan of the Five Room Dungeon, sometimes you just need something larger.
If you could, I'd be interested in seeing a video about an Ascension campaign, which I am working on for Shadowrun...
I'm working on making my first campaign and I am very appreciative of your videos. Thank you!
Awesome videos! I would love to see a video breaking down campaign building even further and I would also be curious to see a video on how to run a campaign that is very specifically player-lead and/or more open-world or sandbox oriented.
Currently writing an Adeptus Evangelion Version 2.5 campaign which is based on a hacked variation of Dark Heresy first edition which allowed you to roleplay scenarios within the universe of Warhammer 40k! 😁.
all of your videos are insightful and helpful. Other channels talk generally about things, the detail is what i enjoy from you
Really enjoyed this video! I'm starting a new campaign soon with my ongoing group and wanted to have a more broad strokes style to it. Funny how things like this seem to line up! (There may be less butter knives in this one than the last, if you remember that Twitter conversation)
I would like to see a video specifically on best ways to record this info for organization purposes
Excelent video! Thanks a lot
If you have your setting, and want to take your players characters from level 3-5 to 20, how do you plan out the “acts” and allow the characters to be at the right level for each sub-Boss leading to the final level 20 showdown?
I guess I’m looking at building the Arc and making sure the characters hit the marks at the right time.
I'm trying to do a hunger game type thing what does the villan want.
I love your videos... very very helpful in so many ways. It helped me out figuring out the narrative that I want my player's campaign to play in. It's sometime hard to have the proper view on our work as gms... you're quite well helping out
Is there anywhere you talk more about the campaign that leads up to the global war?
This is a really interesting concept that I'd love to explore more!
I really enjoyed both of these videos! I'm starting a new campaign soon and I want to get as much good advice as possible before I begin running it, so I would love to see more like this!
I know a lot of making sure your game goes well as the DM is player expectation. That does beg the question. How do you find out what the players want? Are you blunt and ask them the opened ended question what do you want? Do you come up with a few ideas and ask them to choose? Do you attempt to divine what they want from the entrails of a sacrifice? Additionally what do you do when you have passive players that "don't care what they play"? I know my methods but I'd love to see yours on this topic.
Early on in gaming (or with new groups and players) I'm generally a "session zero" typical and start with the "blunt-ish" questioning... It's good to get a fairly firm idea of what kind of intentions the players have. Do they like combat-intensive, puzzle-intensive, comic-intensive, or some other aspect to Stylize the narrative storyline? And then I get them started in figuring out character-basics... Races, classes, magic or not-so-much, do we seem to like or want psyonics... clerical attitudes, etc... That's usually helpful, too... even before you decide what kind of world, terrain, or campaign arch you want to build and run...
Once I start actually composing the game play, I will toss a little of everything into it anyway. The fact is Players are rarely completely and authentically honest about "what they want"... SO it's a good idea to take a risk or two from time to time and "poke them with sharp stuff" just to see what happens. Usually, if you do it well in the details and storytelling department, a few basic visual aids and you've got a great adventure or even a full-on campaign with good times all the way around.
Campaigns are very similar to "non-linear" type adventures, just a larger scale in practically every aspect. So once you kind of get used to keeping the broad-strokes of choice available (and sort of visible, at least to the GM) the rest can usually take care of itself in Role Play, and you're definitely well advised to take notes even as you "improv" what comes to mind as better than originally designed. :o)
this is a very helpful video
These videos are so good!
hmm i'm contemplating a campaign based entirely on random encounter. pretty much party looks for the one door in a infinitely complex dungeon that they've been forced into by a very wimsicle watcher of dimensions(secretly made a wager with another multidimensional being on who could create a party to reach the exit of dungeon 1st). each door they find leads to another random region or dungeon.
Steven McKenna hey i had pretty much the exact same idea! I think it has lots of potential in my opinion. Reminds me of roguelikes and other randomly generated dungeons crawls. Nice premise
I want to do a one-off, where the players rescue fortune-telling flumph. (Page 135 of the Monster Manuel)
Not sure if it's worth an entire video, but I'd love to know if you have any tips on ways to keep track of your campaigns. I currently use one spreadsheet app, one mindmap app, one app for quick notes and jotting down things and lastly an entire folder dedicated to important characters and PCs, as well as how they link together. Do you know any other / better ways of confining the information without allowing any of it to slip through the cracks or become lost in the mess that is the information feed?
I'm kind of old-school, so I never bothered much with app's... Still don't really. I'm not against bringing tech' to the table, either... BUT... From my experience, A basic legal pad is good for "keeping track-notes" on the "where you are now" in the campaign, and it's usually (in my experience) best kept in the most frequently used book of source material to mark a place (or even a few... more places pinched together means better retention between book and pad)... I'd keep a map for relevant general spacial sense (usually rolled into a cardboard tube) and a "master notebook" where pretty much all relevant notes for the adventure(s) at hand are readily available. With a GM-screen for quick references along for certain "privacy" related matters you can run practically any campaign with any setting and any system you like for as long as you like.
Now, that all said... In the privacy of personal quarters (apartment, home, barracks, wherever) I do like to maintain "compendiums" of creations that might be researched or re-used later. These are loose-leaf notebooks full of proper pages (or where I can add them) for chapters and ranks and files about EVERYTHING, monsters, peculiar life forms, traps, mechanics, weapons, legends, lore, folk-tales, strange political discords, and all that can be retained in the master's compendiums and you should probably eventually have several of your own as you "brew up" various adventures over the years to come... This way, when you know for certain that you've had a really GREAT inter-political campaign around a Lord being assassinated, you can go right to that chapter, jot a few notes, and notice what seemed to work at the time... Change a few names, places, even classes or what have you, and a whole new adventure is ready to start taking form...
Remember a certain trap that got you sworn at for weeks between chuckles, but that was years ago??? With good compendiums... chapter, and verse... there it is, and you've jotted down the notes, grabbed (or even built new ones) some visual aids that worked well for it... and you're ready to spring it on the "newer younger blood" who haven't seen that trick yet...
Nowadays, rather than waste a bunch of time writing everything down, I can see someone maybe just going to a Databasing app' (almost anything available would work) to separate monsters from demon-lords from traps, and even the categories of traps from destructive to nuisances... etc... SO you might consider that... But really, just a sourcebook and legal pad is probably "enough" to get buy if you're truly on a budget... maybe a spiral (five subject to be honest) notebook where you can fold up certain pages for outward marks... It's not meant to turn into a full time librarian job unless that's how far you want to push it. :o)
What is the name of the music that plays at the end?
Great advices.
I would like to run a cold war-type of campaign. Sure it could escalate into an actual war, but I'm going to set the stage first. So that means I'd essentially be running an intrigue type campaign with lot's of espionage, secrets, sabotage, social subterfuge, assassination plots etc. And I have no idea how to tackle that!
Curious how you might set up either a vigilante campaign (retaking a city) or an all thief campaign so that there is a personal investment for the players.
An all thief campaign should be easy enough. Think thieves guild or maybe a big heist, or a series of big heists as they become world famous cat burglars. You can either go Oblivion thieves guild style quests, mission impossible type quests (which this gives me a great idea for my campaign, actually), or something else entirely. Backstory that your players come up with can always become a part of an overarching narrative, for instance. Say one of the thieves has been caught and is being hunted, by the one thief hanging out with all of the other thieves they are now all being hunted by proxy. Perhaps they are out to clear their name, an honorable thief group that has been framed for a rather dishonorable theft. It really is just all up to your imagination
You're amazing. Just saying.
Excellent video yet again, great insight (Int check) on the topic. Such daunting tasks can prove a bit too much for newer players, gods know I’m going through the same phase. Say, I’m starting a realistic fanasy survival themed campaign, emphasising on the fragility and frailness of mortals and how illness and basic needs such as hunger and thirst, can take down even the strongest of people, no matter their level. I’ll be using themes of the fragility of mortal minds ans how easily they are brainwashed or how badly their souls can be broken. What kind of adventures would you use to incorporate these themes? I do have my master plot, (basically alien sentient crystals that corrupt and manipulate mortal minds) my examples of frailty (a once great corrupted king) and the missguided but righteous good that fight it (wood elves and men of the king). Any help would be kick ass, thanks!
Perhaps you should take a look at the polar explores.
They have been up to challenges in that category.
Getting stuck in a snowstorm take its toll on the provision, then what to do?
It is not unusual to butcher a husky dog to get food, there are after all less provision to haul.
But... how fast can you allow to let your huskies go down? What about the huskies, do you introduce cannibalism for them, by feeding them their mates?
And if an expedition member go down, do you carry that member with you knowing death will most likely come before reaching back to the base, or do you shorten the suffering by committing murder?
And when dead, do you resort to cannibalism? Or: we eat the huskies and the huskies eat our dead?
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Other real life events to look at, is situations where bad harvest causes the population to resort to butcher their work animals to get food thus making future farming become even more difficult.
The cows in India became designated 'holy' to prevent people from butchering their work cows.
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Yet another real life event that can be worth to look into is situations where bad harvests make people eat plague bearing animals, thus the population in the desperate attempt to survive actually make it worse as they get infected.
That is the reason to why most meat we eat today is not from predatory animals, again the reason to why some religions specify certain animals not to be eaten, like dogs and pigs. (Pigs are not directly predators but they do eat meat and do resort to cannibalism in hunger situations!)
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I think you should consider if you are going for 'realism' or 'alien sentient crystals', at least in my mind those two do not fit well together.
And decide on a scale: A polar expedition can do it in small scale, more do you not need to create such setting!
If you wish something of larger scale, then go for that the world have suffered from bad harvest several years in a row due to climate change. The desperation for food make people do less rational things, can be source for wars, wars to take food from others!
Lars Dahl awesome ”feed”back (pardon the pun). This is exactly what I’d like to aim, though, perhaps only that severe while in dangeous and hostile climates. I’d still like to maintain a story or a master plot in the background. Since, you know, eating ration is only so interesting. It is actually, when you are thousands of feet underground and you have enough food for one week, for example.
I hear what you’re saying about the ”alien crystals” thing. It is a tad silly, I guess, though, how would one incorporate a big bad in this campaign style. Is one even needed? Perhaps the main plot couod be the unsteady political situation and a looming war in the distance, the big bad the rivalling enemy kingdom. Then, how would you form adventures without them getting too repetitive? Finding new sources of food and water? Locaiting and mapping new settleable land, (which will be the cause of more conflict). I definitely want to keep it as real, grim and low fantsy as possible, and I’m afraid that I’m going to botch the veresemilitude of that kind of world.
Have you ever read anything from "Dark Sun"? It's a relevant D&D source, too...
The version I was most often stuck in... doesn't sound too far from "right up your alley" in themes... We were constantly in trouble hunting for food and water. Even when it wasn't part of the main adventure, it was part of the sub-plot. Some Caravaneers were known to use desert-wolves to track violent clans... They'd slip into the battle-fields after conflicts to go after the blood of the fallen for making wine! That's how desperate it got for water in our "usual" sessions...
Granted, you're not talking an "outdoors" extreme climate situation, but underground you also have volcanic actions, and hot-seeps can vaporize waterways pretty quickly, presenting steam-blasts as well as taking away the water.
And anywhere you can have elves and dwarves, you can also have the "mul" (pronounced "mool" similar to "book") which is half-dwarven, completely hairless, and infertile... (usually a child of rape according to the Dark Sun campaign) AND you did say you were looking at the frailty of the soul for corruption as well... so here's some added "twisted behavior" to flesh out the idea... just depending on how recklessly inhumane you like it. :o)
whats the best approach for a smaller adventure for like 2-4 months (the hiatus from my current campain)
Thatś a helpful video
2:19 "This video is not going to be particularly long..." he says in a video that's almost half an hour long
Yeah, all this free content, geez, the arrogance of this blowbag!
I wouldn't say 30 mins is long.
@@VallelYuln It kind of is...
Hi I'm new to the channel and I'm trying to make my first ever campaign. (I've only played one tabletop rpg. Arkham Horror the card game but haven't finished it.) I want to do my own campaign about life in a trailer park.It's a black comedy satire that will delve into scifi horror and fantasy depending on the campaign but it all stays within the trailer park mostly. It's a small scale ascension story that changes with each new scenario and gets more insane as the campaign unfolds. I'm lost on how to begin. These videos have been helpful so far but I need more instructions on how to begin this campaign. I've tried to get this game made into a film but where I live it was hard to rangle up willing actors and actresses. I tried to go the animated route but that didn't pan out either. Then I discovered tabletop Rpgs and thought I'd give it a go. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
If it were me, have it all spiral from something mundane. It is a comedy after all.
Forgive my ignorance but what are some examples of mundane? @@wyattbranham4919
Hey I need some help I have a group that are know to literally blow up half a continent and love to both fight and have tough puzzles to figure out, I have experience in wargaming so I know how to make interesting combat... but I stuck at puzzles
My issue is trying to decide how quickly to push events along. I have a master plot planned out but we are only able to play once a month, so I don't want to draw things out. I have two brand new players in my group and I'm not sure if they signed up for a campaign that takes multiple years to complete. Hell, I don't know if I would sign on for that necessarily.
It's been said many times, that lots of really great campaigns die a silent death or just quietly fade away... This is one of the great many reasons why that's true.
Pacing is complicated, but my best advice (for what it's worth) is to test the players regularly, discuss the sessions in "post-game debriefing" and learn as you go to "read" the Players as you go. It's kind of tough in the beginning, but not as hard as trying to "play the player instead of the cards" in Poker (for instance)... When the table erupts in emotion on your intended cues, YOU OWN THEM! So that's a kind of measuring stick sample. It doesn't matter if you manage to make them explode in laughter and spew soda out their noses whenever you like, or you figure out exactly which NPC to "abuse" to evoke tears and swearing, or you find the perfectly intense build up to a singularly inconsequential noise or visual that produces anguish and screams and foul language in every direction ... (of course, if you can manage it ALL, you've graduated to pro-GM) Obviously when people are falling asleep at the table, you might want to pick things up a bit... and so on.
Otherwise, just remember, it's more about the immersion of Role Playing than about garnering XP or even completing adventures (kits or homebrews)... Great GM's don't give that a second thought, and know inherently that a LOT of work can go completely unnoticed and it's okay, so long as everyone involved has FUN and creates a GREAT story. :o)
I plan on taking my first steps into the world of GMing soon, and seeing as to how most of the people i will be playing with are people i regularly play video games quite competitively with, it raises some concerns. The most prominent fear i have is the chance that the group will attempt to metagame regularly, though I'm unsure of how to deal with metagaming when it inevitably happens. How should I deal with metagaming without excessively punishing the players for employing outside knowledge, while still not promoting by letting it pass?
I believe there is a video on this channel that deals with metagaming and why is it bad or good. Pretty sure you'll find some good wisdom there.
From my perspective, metagaming cand be "ok" as long as the PC can give a proper answer to "why you character is like that / doing this / trying that thing" and so on.
For exemple, if you a very well designed fighter optimized for combat, ask the player why his character is so focus on this. It might bring some amazing story about the background of this character, maybe he couldnt face an opponent before and it costs the life of his family, so now he is so scared to loose the next battle that all his energy is put into the destruction of any opponent ?
I am sure that you can use metagaming from your player as a way to boost their roleplaying capacity. As usual, ask why and how.
Metagaming is also using the rules as best as possible, so feel free to change them. If a PC face a troll and randomly start to use fire against it without his character knowing its weakness, change this weakness to cold, or electricity, or anything. This way your PC can feel that you control your world and that to keep metagaming they'll need to explore it more, asks questions to NPC, try things and so on... Like why this particular troll was not weak to fire ? maybe a wizard has been up to no good !
and this gives great adventures and stories.
Hope that helps. cheers
I thought you said retribution was a type
I want a campaign that lasts 200+ game years... generations of player characters needed to complete it.
LOTR + The Hobbit is a 60+ year campaign, (3 major sub-campaigns, with several side-quests, with 2 main "games" of over a year of "game time" each) with a "historical" reference to over 3000 years of build up to the final battle.
I want to run the campaign of: "Frodo Failed" (But Sauron didn't get the ring... yet) The One Ring isn't destroyed alternate universe of Middle Earth, starting say... 50 years later.
I started working on a Superhero RPG computer game a few days ago, so I'm watching to help work out the plot for the game. I don't need to worry about pleasing a specific audience; the audience will be whoever likes the game. I do, however, need a good plot.
I'm planning on going with a "Justice" theme, though I may have a few morally grey (or even evil) options thrown in to make the game more diverse.
Also, the PC won't be the public hero, which, I think, gives it a more interesting tone than "I'm a major super hero, protecting the city." They will secretly be hired by the Hero's boss to help them, generally with secret PR stuff.
Protip: Put it on 1.25 speed
haha aa thanks
NEIN EIN MEIN
War is cool, but insurrection is so much more interesting.
Ay is it possible that I am the first again?
Kudos
Man, you said "Nazis" and that probably demonetized and deranked this video.
May I suggest you stop bringing up WW2 and nazis as examples? It’s been 3 times over these two videos and frankly I’m getting a little concerned.
Why? WW2 was fascinating