What I was getting at with last weeks articles about Dungeons and Dragons monsters was the idea of creating an overarching campaign that makes sense that isn’t just a bunch of random monsters thrown together and how you can turn that into a story that you enjoy running and your players enjoy being a part of. Any RPG is going to be a bit of a cooperative storytelling experience. Some games, Star Wars RPG from Fantasy Flight Games and Nefertiti Overdrive are built more for the PC’s taking control of the story at different points whereas Dungeons and Dragons the players actions greatly shape the story, but there is more of a single focus on the DM to be the storyteller. But , no matter what type of RPG you are playing, if you are playing a campaign, you need to create a story that makes sense.

So how do you go about doing that?

I would recommend starting small. Think about what you want the tone and feel of the game to be and create your first session from that. Are you looking for high adventure, make the characters have to chase some goblins into a woods and explore or get your characters onto the high sea. Are you looking to create a mystery? Someone in the town whom everyone loves died in mysterious circumstances or maybe there are people who have gone missing. Are you looking for a dark game? Have the adventuring party stumble across someone who was hung in the old windmill or maybe someone is being burned at the stake for being accused as a witch.

None of those things above are a full campaign, but it gets the story moving and it gives you the feel that you are looking for to set the tone for your game. And for a lot of people, that is where you should stop in planning. There is a great desire to come up with 20 more moments that you want to have in your game when you are prepping the very first session. There is one unfortunate problem with planning like that, your players are going to ruin  your plans. Another issue is that your players are going to help set the mood. It’s important as the DM to set the mood and even prior to the game set the expectation for the mood, but if you have a dark and gritty game and all of a sudden your players aren’t quite in that mood, maybe they are looking for a more practical answer to your mystery than the terrifying one, you might need to adjust on the fly.

Once you have the first session done you’re going to start to see what your players like, and that’s what you build your next session on. Maybe you focused on the Wizard in the first session, now the second one is built for the rogue, and so on, but it all is tied together. You don’t need to  know your big bad guy right away, you just need to know how the story progresses for the next session. If you are taking notes and spending some time planning you can keep yourself from having to retcon something, but the more you build it does make that harder and you will probably end up contradicting yourself.

There are some people who do it another way though and that is building it backwards from your big bad guy (BBG). If you know that you want to have a Lich be your big bad guy, and not just any Lich, the Lich who was the former head of the religion that your Paladin character is from and who that player looked up to but is now bent and saving everyone through helping them into the afterlife before a meteor that he predicted comes to hit the lands and kill them all, you know kind of how it is going to end. It’s going to end with the BBG facing off against the group, probably trying to turn some to their side and then battling them. So work backwards from there, what are the big moments that you want, maybe you want them to actually face off first against one of their henchmen, maybe you want them to think that it’s a cult that is doing this, maybe it’s both, hit your plot points from end to beginning and then start your first session there. But with this method, don’t plan it out too much, and don’t plan on a perfect timeline and pacing because your players are going to miss some clues that you lay down and glom onto and your story will go down a different tangent. You are looking for the few major beats when planning it this way. Think of it more as them reaching point X at the half way point of the game or where things will shift, don’t think out specifics when you do this.

Finally there is the dream way. The dream way is to build out your whole world, towns, cities, NPC’s, planes of existence, and so much more ahead of time. You know everything about everywhere that they are going to go, what people will say to them when they see them, and nothing your players can throw at you will ever stump you. Sounds amazing, also it’s impossible. Do not try this way, you will go crazy creating everything prior to even playing your first session.

So, how would I go about doing this? A little of first and second way. Early on in a game, I story by creating just for that session and figure out what the players are finding as fun. I let the world grow naturally that way. Then after the story has started and we’re getting an idea that there is a BBG somewhere in the world, t hat’s when I build them and start building out moments of importance or story beats I want to hit leading up to the BBG. You’ll need to figure out what works out best for you. Maybe it is planning more, maybe it is faking it, but it’s up to you and your style to determine how it goes.

Next week I’m going to talk about different types of stories and what some hooks are for those.

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