New Beginnings: Phase X: Beginning

The final stages of creation bring a new campaign to a glorious full bloom
It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series has examined the process of creating a new campaign in detail, and at last, the new campaign is ready for the curtain to lift and the show to begin – right?
Right?
This isn’t the first time it has seemed that way since this series began – there have been at least two other occasions when you reach what seems the end of the development path only to start over, adding layers of depth, complexity, and meaning.
So, what’s left to do?
Four little things. Or five, depending on how you count them. Or maybe that should be six.
- Revise. Again.
- Campaign Prep.
- First Adventure.
- Adventure Prep.
- Begin Again. You heard me.
- Enjoy yourself.
No Plan Survives Contact with Reality: Revise. Again. (Just a little).
No matter how clear you thought your vision was, no matter how clearly you think you have explained it, as soon as players begin interacting with your campaign – which they do, as soon as they start generating characters to inhabit your creations – those ideas and concepts begin evolving, filtered and compounded with the interpretations of other people.
If your concepts are exciting enough, the evolution may begin in the form of conversations as players share their thoughts before play starts, questioning and speculating and investing in your creation. Even without that, though, rest assured that your creation is indeed evolving behind the scenes.
It’s happening in your head too, whether you realize it or not. There will be some parts of what you’ve created that will stay in your mind, and other parts that will get lost in there, because that’s the way our memories work – and we then invent or romanticize whatever is needed to fill the gaps even if there is already something in the campaign plan doing that, which has been forgotten. Inevitably, some of these new ideas will feel more attractive or interesting than those already built into the campaign – and about half the time when that happens, they actually are. The rest of the time, the impression is a false one that derives from having lived with the original idea for so long.
Square Pegs in Round Holes
Inevitably, then, some of these new ideas will sneak into the campaign, where they will fit like a square peg forced into a round hole that’s just a little bit wrong in size. The idea itself may be brilliant but it won’t tie into everything the way that whatever has been replaced did, unless you’re exceptionally lucky. Nor do you have time to go back and fully integrate a new idea into the campaign – the countdown clock has started.
As a result, no matter how good the new idea is, incorporating it inevitably dilutes and even corrupts the campaign at least a little. Set your new ideas aside for a new campaign (more on that subject later) – but do it in a separate file so that if or when cracks appear in your plans, you can look for solutions in these derivative ideas.
And then, of course, there’s failure of communications to take into account. For me, this usually comes down to things that seemed so obvious that I didn’t think to put them in writing, like how one idea relates to another; six months or three years or whatever later, the “obvious” has completely vanished. For others, it might be a failure to explain their idea sufficiently for the players to grasp it – something I’ve also experienced from both sides of the gaming table.
Square peg in a lathe: fixing the problems
Make sure that your players know that you want them to ask you about anything that’s unclear. You will hopefully be able to respond, “That will get dealt with in-game” because it was supposed to be a mystery, but sometimes they will reveal unintended failures to communicate. Patch, Clarify, and Notify. Often, another player will respond, “I got what you meant right away” but you can’t rely on that.
It’s also important to remember to make allowance for spending part of your time on such clarification and discussion with the players when you schedule your first session, i.e. set the deadline for have your first adventure prepped. There will be distractions, and it’s also often useful to take a short break to reinvigorate yourself – you have been doing a lot of work creating the campaign, after all.
BUT (and it’s a big but, that’s why it’s in capitals) sometimes there’s been a gaping hole occupying our mental blind spot(s), which usually gets discovered when someone asks a reasonable question or offers some reasonable conjecture based on what they know and you can’t answer them – not even from your secret GM files. Quite obviously, the worst possible time for this to happen is when you’ve already commenced an adventure based on whatever surrounds that blind spot, and the best possible time is whenever you have the most time available to fix the problem before anyone notices.
“Fixing the problem” means inserting an idea that makes sense in relation to everything else. And making a note of the blind spot so that you never get caught by that one again!
Ah, if only it were that simple. Once the problem is fixed, you have a decision between two choices to make: you can either issue an update to the players, with a mea culpa that proves you’re only human after all – and that the campaign was flawed slightly before they saw word one – or you find a reason for the new idea not to be mentioned in the briefing notes, only in your secret GM files – and schedule a revelation of the truth, probably for very early in the campaign if not in the first adventure. But that then requires a reason or cause for the revelation – one that doesn’t expose other secrets, and which doesn’t obviously fail to expose other secrets, and which will still seem reasonable to have excluded those other secrets when they are revealed. Oh, what a tangled web…
Unless I can get a really good adventure or encounter out of the revelation, one that makes sense in terms of the broader campaign structure, AND satisfies all of the above criteria, it’s usually a lot less wearing to admit the flaw and move on. But either way, you have work to revisit and revise.
IKEA, not LEGO: Campaign Prep
A standard part of the process of creating an adventure is the just-in-time principle – commencing the prep work not for the adventure to come, but for the adventure in which the results will be required. That comes with a price-tag: it front-loads the campaign with additional prep. Of course, that’s probably the best time for it – you’re still relatively fresh, should definitely be excited and enthusiastic, and there will never be a point at which the campaign as a whole is fresher in your mind than when you have just finished creating it. (In fact, part of the design process involves inserting low-prep adventures into key moments so that you have time to actually finish the necessary game prep – and making allowances for those tasks that will inevitably take longer than you have budgeted for).
This prep can be broken down into two or three layers (layer three will sometimes be unoccupied):
- Prep needed for adventure #1 that will be reused in later adventures;
- Prep needed purely for adventure #1 that you do not expect to reuse in the immediate future;
- Prep needed for adventures #2 and beyond that you have to start working on now for it to be complete when the time comes.
I distinguish the first of these as being “Campaign Prep” as opposed to “Adventure Prep” (which I will deal with separately a little later). Because it is intended for use in multiple adventures, it repays additional time, effort, and attention to detail – even if you have to cut corners a little on categories 2 and 3.
I use a number of criteria to assess where to short-change myself in terms of game prep:
- If a corner has to be cut, the item that should be short-changed in terms of substantiative preparation is the one that is going to be needed last, because that offers the maximum opportunity to make up the shortfall at a later date.
- However, the relative impact of the cuts on the quality of the result, and therefore the amount of time that can be acceptably saved, should also be taken into consideration;
- And so should the relative importance of the prep to the adventure in question and to the overall campaign.
This makes a simple question rather more complicated. Every situation and every campaign and every GM will be different. That’s why prep management is such a popular and recurring subject for sites like Campaign Mastery!
Rather than trying to resolve the problem here and now, I’ll instead point readers to earlier articles that deal with the subject: It’s Not Like Shooting Sushi In A Barrel: A Personalized Productivity Focus For Game Prep and Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity, and finally, the comments section of Adventure Structure: My Standard Formatting.
I consider the difference between these categories so important that I deal with campaign prep and adventure prep completely separately when getting ready to first run a new campaign – so much so that I will even delay or reschedule the start date in order to get campaign prep done, but will (usually) find a way to make do without if the adventure prep isn’t finished. After all, when you get right down to it, a lot of adventure prep is garnish and enhancement – important but not critical.
All of which means that different quality standards should apply to the two. Campaign Prep should be done as well as you know how to do it; adventure prep can be a little sloppier, a little more imperfect – a little more short-cutted. Doing the two separately means that campaign prep is worked on until it is complete – and adventure prep is done as best it can be in whatever time remains. As a rule of thumb, I try to allow twice as much prep time for “campaign” items as I think I will need to produce something of workable minimum standard.
The difference between the two really is akin to the difference between Ikea and Lego. Ikea create furniture that is perfectly engineered to be simple to construct, things that are expected to last; Lego is capable of far more spontaneous expression, and just as carefully engineered to be a building block, incomplete in itself, and eminently replaceable with another Lego brick.
The Difficult First Adventure: Creating Work Habits
Theoretically, you can do campaign prep before actually writing the first adventure, and should not do adventure prep until you have at least outlined that adventure and assessed your needs. In practice, the first adventure (like all first impressions) is so important, and ties in with so much campaign prep, that the two generally need to be worked on concurrently.
Why should the first adventure be so much harder than any other? Because of the sheer amount of material that needs to be established. Nothing is “real” until it appears in-game and everything in the first adventure is appearing in-game for the very first time. I therefore make special efforts with the first adventure, way beyond what I would normally exert on any other adventure (except perhaps the grand finale to the entire campaign). Think of a good first adventure as an investment that returns compound interest with every subsequent day’s play.
But even more important than actually completing the creation of the first adventure as a quality product is the establishment of a routine, a pattern, a work habit that will persist throughout the campaign (at least, it is to be hoped). I’ve talked in other articles about the ratio of prep time to play time, and how quickly time can add up if you can just do a little each day, and how each doubling of time spent in prep yields considerably less than a doubling of quality – once you get past a minimum threshold, of course. It’s the point where those returns begin to diminish that I normally define as “the minimum playable standard” (in reality, you can often create something quite playable with far less time invested – but that’s the point of optimum return on prep time invested).
You will never get a better opportunity to actually establish a work habit than before the pressure of actual play begins. I actually double my estimates of how much time I expect to need to reach that minimum standard when I’m talking about the first adventure, and that’s after separating campaign prep from adventure prep.
For example: The first adventure is estimated to be three game sessions of 4 hrs length, in total, for a total playing time of twelve hours. I estimate that the “minimum playable standard” for this particular campaign is approximately 1 hour of prep for every 2 hours of play – a fairly typical ratio – so the demand is for 6 hours of adventure prep. That could be done in a single Sunday – if nothing interrupts you too much – but over six days, an hour a day does the job. Over twelve days, thirty minutes a day is enough. Over 24 days, just 15 minutes a day gets the job done. But this is for the first adventure; so double that schedule: an hour a day for 12 days, or every 2nd day for 24 days, or half an hour every day for those 24 days, or 2 hrs a week for 6 weeks, or whatever fits into your life and is sustainable.
Here’s another way to look at it: If you expect to produce a new adventure every 3 weeks – which is what’s needed if your adventures are all three playing-days in length and you play once a week – then you should give yourself at least 6 weeks to work on the first one, not counting campaign prep or player character creation.
Those last two activities are something that you should be able to perform simultaneously – and that’s also convenient, because it means that you can estimate the minimum time your campaign prep should take, double it (as explained previously), and work backwards from the planned date of the first adventure to specify a “window” for campaign prep – which just happens to be how long you can give the players to read the briefing materials you’ve compiled during campaign creation, generate PCs, ask questions, etc.
LEGO, not IKEA: Adventure Prep, times two or three
Previous articles – heck, whole series – here at Campaign Mastery have focused on the writing of adventures, and how long you should spend doing it. There is a fine line between too little and too much, and it’s very easy to stray to one side or the other. But writing adventures is not the totality of adventure prep; and the remainder is often overlooked or underestimated. Generating NPCs, creating maps, creating treasure lists, finding or creating props and illustrations, and so on and so forth.
My thinking on the question of how much adventure prep should be devoted to writing changes with the wind and season; it’s a question that I’ve visited and revisited several times, usually as an incidental aspect of those discussions on adventure writing. Here’s my current thinking:
First Draft: Preliminary thoughts and existing content
- Outline: describes the overall adventure in a few short sentences, a single paragraph at most. Plot without script or structure, the bare minimum that you would need to be able to wing it and still produce something that more or less fits within the campaign plan. Your campaign plan – as generated during the course of this series – contains this, and more. So I start by extracting the details from the campaign plan and filling in any gaps in what’s there, to the point where if I had to describe the adventure, I could answer the fundamental questions of Who, Why, Where, and any Campaign-level goals that I want the plot to achieve.
- Entry point: How I think the PCs will get involved with the plotline.
- Resolution: How I think the adventure will end if everything goes right for the PCs, the maximum that I want them to be able to achieve, and at least one way that they might get to that point.
That’s the bare minimum that I need in order to run the adventure, and if I have to, it’s enough simply to have all that in my head before play starts. It takes between ten and thirty minutes to achieve, depending on the complexity of the adventure.
Second Draft: Structural Completion
- Central Adventure Structure: Bearing in mind any preset format considerations (which were discussed in the previous part of this series), I break the adventure down into acts – as many as I think necessary. Each act gets accompanied by an outline of what’s supposed to happen, in general terms. As a rule of thumb, each sentence in the overall plot summary becomes an Act, but there will almost certainly be additional ones required to get characters from A to B within the plot.
- Subplots: Are there any subplots that need “screen time”? List them as additional scenes in the Acts where I think they will best fit into the action.
- Screen Time: Does every PC (and “on-screen” ally) have something to do in each Act? If not, create and add encounters or subplots.
This fills in the bare bones of the adventure outline. It can take anywhere from a handful of minutes to a couple of hours.
Third Draft: Essentials Identification
- Scene Breakdown: I then break each Act down into the scenes that I expect to have to take place, based on the second draft. Each scene is described by a single sentence.
- Flags: I make a note of how the PCs might change the course of the Adventure (Flags), and insert additional scenes and variant scenes into the scene breakdown to reflect this. Some of these simply deal with consequences and ramifications, some deal with getting the plot back on track, and some are simply placeholders. My philosophy is fairly straightforward: so long as I know the NPCs and their goals, plan, and capabilities, I can perpetually adapt an adventure to reflect changing circumstances on the fly, so it doesn’t matter too much what the PCs do or how they get from plot point A to plot point C – even skipping over plot point B entirely, if they are clever enough. So most of my flags and breakdowns are done from the antagonists’ perspective, and detail how they will try to get their plans back on track, what vulnerabilities they become aware of, and how they will attempt to exploit any situations that might arise fortuitously (or how they will minimize the damage and respond if they encounter an unexpected setback).
- Breakdowns: in any plot, there are things that have to happen between beginning and end. This is often about ensuring that the PCs have the resources and information they need to understand what is happening to whatever extent I deem it reasonable that they would, and to be able to do something about it. “Breakdowns” are things that can derail the campaign if they don’t happen – once an antagonist has done whatever he needs to do to advance the campaign-level plot, I generally don’t care what happens to him, for example – he has served his purpose. In some cases, I may need to ensure that the antagonist escapes, or at the very least, survives as an antagonist – or that I have a plan to wheel in a replacement to finish the job if he doesn’t. Breakdowns are potential major plot problems and a basic solution.
- Plot Sequence: I take that list of scenes and subplots and flags and breakdowns and put them into a logical sequence within each act. This usually simply means dropping the insertions into place.
- Location summary: I list the key locations in which activity is expected to take place. As a general rule of thumb, it’s one location per scene, but sometimes there are more. Some of these will already be specified. Each should get a thumbnail description – usually no more than two or three words.
- Individuals summary: I list the key NPCs who are going to appear within the adventure in the order of the first scene in which they appear. Each should get a thumbnail description – sometimes this is a personality attribute, sometimes its physical, and sometimes it’s what I need the NPC to be able to do.
- Things summary: I make a list of any objects that play a central role in a scene. This might be a bomb, a briefcase, a statue, a jewel, a weapon, a safe.., anything that I think the players might want me to describe. I include any “special effects” that I think necessary. Each gets a thumbnail description of three words or so. These should also be in the order that they appear in the draft adventure.
- Important speeches: I make a list of any important passages of speech that need to be prepared in advance. This will often include villain gloating, but may be an NPC briefing on just about anything. I will summarize both what the gist of the statement will be and how it will be delivered.
This stage fleshes out the structure of the adventure and identifies the adventure prep required, as you’ll see in a moment. This set of steps can take an hour or two, or more if there’s an unusually large number or it’s an unusually large/complicated adventure.
Actual Adventure Prep (Take 1)
- Everything on the lists of locations, individuals, things, and speeches, needs one or more of five things. The 15th step in adventure prep is to decide which of these each requires. The five are: (a) A description; (b) An image; (c) A prop; (d)A battlemap representation; or, (e) A text.
- Once I know what’s required, I prioritize in order of importance. For details of how I plan the fulfillment of my prep list, refer to an article I mentioned earlier: Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity.
- Images: visuals are great because even if you don’t find exactly what you want, you can use what you do find to inspire a description that does fit your needs. Use the thumbnail descriptions to tell you what to search for and how to select the best choices from the options available, then hit Google Image Search or equivalent. A great example: We needed a 1930s Romanian Lawyer for the Pulp Campaign. We searched for Romanian Lawyer. One of the images that came up was Larry Hagman in the role of J.R. Ewing from the original series of Dallas, complete with cowboy hat. I combined that visual with the personality of the Russian Cosmonaut from Armageddon and a few other sources to create a lawyer who was an Americanophile and wannabe-Cowboy in the Wild West. The players may not remember his name, but they’ll still remember everything else about him!
- Props: unless it’s paper-based, ie the text on a scroll or a fake newspaper or something along those lines, these will usually take too long to create, so I’ll use a description and/or a visual instead.
- A Battlemap representation: Most things smaller than human size can be indicated with a small dice or something along those lines. I often get creative but spend minimal time on these – refer to my article 52+ Miniature Miracles: Taking Battlemaps the extra mile for lots of ideas on achieving high bang-for-buck from this type of game prep.
- That leaves only descriptions and fixed blocks of text. Since these two rarely coincide, I do them both at the same time – at least to a minimum standard (bullet-point synopsis, in the former case, without the bullet points to make modification & compilation easier. But I generally don’t start on these until after I’ve handled everything else. Descriptions should be a three-to-five line paragraph maximum. Fixed blocks of text can be whatever length is necessary – but work HARD at compressing them, using the techniques offered in my series on The Secrets Of Stylish Narrative.
- I will use no more than half of the prep time remaining after reaching step 15 (above) for this, with the expectation of coming back to it later, after a reassessment of the time available. This is important in assessing the prioritization.
It can take anywhere from seconds to minutes to do each item of this game prep. It’s easy to consume multiple hours of prep-time on it, in aggregate.
Fourth Draft: Other Narrative & Content
- I’ll then turn my attention to the adventure itself, once again. Into each scene I will insert any required narrative & other content. This includes numbering and referencing the results of the game prep listed above, which I will use as inspiration. In particular, I will avoid wasting time describing something if I have a visual to offer. This also includes notes to convey information or instructions privately to players. I will make at least one compression/cleanup pass – which will mean nothing to anyone who hasn’t read my series on Stylish Narrative, referenced above.
- I’ll then create any NPCs needed, to whatever level of detail is required.
Campaign Mastery has run lots of articles on how to do this, and they are all worth reading, in my opinion. I use all the techniques described on a regular basis. Here’s an incomplete list, in no particular order:
- The Characterisation Puzzle [5-part series]
- Inversions Attract: Another Quick NPC Generator
- By the seat of your pants: the 3 minute (or less) NPC
- Look beyond the box: a looser concept for NPCs
- Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep
- The Ubercharacter Wimp: Plotting within your PCs limitations
- and, finally, Ten Million Stories: Breathing life into an urban population.
- I make sure that at the start of every scene I note who’s supposed to be where, what they are doing, and what (if anything) is supposed to be happening simultaneously with that scene.
The balance of time
That deals with the essentials up to at least a minimum acceptable standard. All that remains is to allocate your remaining time wisely and use it to enhance, polish, and decorate:
- Finally, I’ll do a reassessment of the time remaining, adding to the prep time list additional refinement of the most important narrative passages and replacement of any earlier prep results that weren’t completely satisfactory, then apply the prep time that remains at this point to prioritize what’s left to do.
The End is the beginning: Start again.
The time to start gathering ideas and notes for your next campaign is as soon as you have finished creating this one. As I said earlier, don’t try and shoehorn your ideas into holes in your existing design until you confirm that there really is a hole there – something that with this development structure, shouldn’t happen; most of the time, you will find that there is already a solution in place that had slipped your mind, and that there isn’t actually a hole to fill.
But you can never have too many good ideas, and you can be pretty much guaranteed to forget any that you don’t write down somewhere. So start a new ideas file or two.
Why two? One for ideas that you think are or might be compatible with the new campaign – you can never tell when you’ll need a drop-in adventure, character, encounter, situation, location, or Macguffin! And one, obviously, for ideas that you are reasonably sure won’t fit the new campaign, and are saving for consideration when the time comes to create the next.
Because here’s the thing about this entire process: the more you can do in advance, the less work you will have to do when the time comes. It’s easier to create a great campaign if you have 100 good ideas to pick from for content; and that in turn is a lot easier if you’ve compiled 500 ideas against future need.
That’s why, whenever an idea was rejected in creating the plot skeleton for the new campaign, it was put back into the ideas file – so that it would be there for possible future use.
The Secrets To Success
There are several secrets to success built into this entire approach, in addition to those described above, and they are worth spelling out, now that we’re at the end of the process:
- Organization. The objective of designing a great new campaign is approached in a very organized way that is also very flexible in creative terms.
- Structure. There’s a rational structure to both the process and the products that result, and both are designed with actual usage in mind at all times – so all you have to do is tick each box as you come to it, and leave the totality big picture to form of its own accord.
- Deconstruction of tasks into achievable smaller goals. This is a big element of the process. In particular, it focuses on preparing what you’re going to need before you need it, and – if a major task can’t be completed in one step – doing (and using) those elements that you can complete before revisiting the rest.
- Top-Down overall design. This is something that I learned about when studying Computer Programming. It essentially means getting a fundamental outline, identifying each required detailed element within that outline, and filling in those details one at a time with something that fulfills the needs of that fundamental outline.
- Stepwise Refinement. Get the basics in place for everything, then refine and polish each element. The basics give strength, making the overall result robust enough to survive actual play; the refinement and polishing makes everything pretty.
- Top-Down integration of bottom-up components. Instead of simply throwing a lot of ideas at the wall and trying to make sense of the results, this gathers up detailed content and fits it into the structure only if it fits the picture – as though you had a box with five different jigsaw puzzles in place but only wanted to solve one of them, this approach incorporates a process to select the appropriate jigsaw pieces and set aside the rest.
- Iteration. Simple processes, repeatedly applied, yield dramatic results that are completely out of reach to those who simply start at one end and keep writing and planning until they get to the other. This keeps individual tasks easily achievable without sacrificing the end result.
- Time Management. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of very careful time management built into the process. That’s because at every point in the process, the focus is on what matters most to the end result, without getting distracted by side-issues. One of the big secrets of iteration is that, in the long run, it actually takes less time to complete the process than doing it by direct methods. Sometimes, a LOT less.
- Error Correction. Not only is the process itself “error unfriendly”, by virtue of the top-down approach, it actively seeks out and corrects errors, misjudgments, and flawed assumptions as it goes – before these become critical. It’s not impossible to stuff things up using this process, but it’s a whole lot less likely to happen – and it’s far more likely that any errors will get trapped and resolved before they matter.
- Practicality. There’s an underlying practicality to the process, because it focuses on achieving “deliverables” and “milestones”, on ensuring that the necessary resources for each stage in the process are on hand when they are needed. Small tasks are easily completed if you have the tools, skills, and resources necessary; a lot of small tasks makes a major project something that’s practical to achieve.
These are all proven design principles and techniques. Applied correctly, they can construct software, or a bridge, or a car – or a great campaign. But, even more than that, this is a machine for making such campaigns, one after another after another. And that’s one of the big secrets to success as a GM. Wheels within wheels within wheels – all assembled one wheel at a time.
Enjoy The Fruits Of Your Labors
If you’ve followed this process from beginning to end in creating your campaign, you have worked hard to create a campaign that you can enjoy running, and that your players can enjoy playing. You’re as entitled to vicarious enjoyment of their successes as anyone; you’re also entitled to enjoy putting challenges in their path. Have FUN with what you have created; one of the primary objectives in this whole process has had the hidden subtext of giving you the liberty to relax and enjoy your game. There is always a thrill and a feeling of success when a plan comes together, and this process is all about taking a bunch of wildly unrelated ideas and forging them into something that’s fantastically entertaining. No-one has done more to earn the right to enjoy the campaign than you have. Don’t waste that opportunity; use it to inspire and motivate you.
Which brings me to the end of this epic series of articles. I forecast at the beginning that it was going to be a wild, wild ride, and it’s been all that and more! So I thought it worth taking a moment in this postscript to point out that the entire series was constructed using the same principles that is espouses, and stands as a practical demonstration of that process. I started with a simple breakdown – a list of the major topics to be covered. Each of these became a separate post in the series, and was then broken down into smaller units, which became the major headings as shown in the initial contents list. In some cases, it was obvious that these major headings needed to be further subdivided, and some of those subdivisions were obvious – but most were not.
When the time came to write each part, I was guided by what had already been done – the available resources – and the initial outline, essentially a bullet-point list of the topics to be covered under that umbrella. I was also able to look ahead to future parts of the series, thanks to that initial structure, anticipate the resources that would be needed, and ensure that the creation of those resources was built into the process. Additional sections could be added, sections subdivided into subheadings and even sub-subheadings as the path to explanation became clear. Knowing how it all fitted into the bigger picture also gave me the luxury of being able to pause and examine interesting side-paths along the way.
I had no way of knowing exactly what the end result, this final part, would look like, back when I started; but I had faith in the processes that were going to get me here, having ensured a coherent steady development along the way. But I had fun getting here, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the twists and turns along the way. Just what you want in a finished campaign – for each part, each adventure, to have a purpose within the whole, while possessing the flexibility to let players do as they wish within any given part – and the room to step outside that structure when an interesting option presents itself. Use it with my blessings!
Give a fish, and you feed someone for a day. Teach them to fish, and they will never go hungry. At least, that’s the theory…
- New Beginnings: Introduction
- New Beginnings: Phase 1: Inspiration
- New Beginnings: Phase 2: Baggage Dump
- New Beginnings: Phase 3: Reinvigoration
- New Beginnings: Phase 4: Development
- New Beginnings: Phase 5: Surroundings & Environment
- New Beginnings: Phase 6: Mindset & Underpinnings
- New Beginnings: Phase 7: Skeleton
- New Beginnings: Phase 8: Enfleshing
- New Beginnings: Phase 9: Completion
- New Beginnings: Phase X: Beginning
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June 1st, 2015 at 12:04 pm
[…] New Beginnings: Phase X: Beginning Lessons from Memorializing D&D characters Baseline of Narrative Systems Violent Resolution – Armor Up When Your Players Are Smarter Than You Status Interruptus: Types Of Pause Avoiding the Shiny My Job as a GM […]
June 2nd, 2015 at 7:39 am
Wow that’s a lot of prep. I probably read half of the articles in this series, and I’m not sure if I should laugh or be ashamed, because I’ve never prepped 1% of the stuff mentioned here for any of the campaigns/adventures I’ve run as a GM ever since the early eighties.
So I have to ask (absolutely no disrespect intended) is this how most GMs roll? Prepping like it’s the song of ice and fire? Or is this sort of a corner area of the hobby which I’ve really never come to explore? The place where prepping is done for it’s own sake, and the GM doing it is into it and enjoying it like a good book? One you’re writing yourself, incidentally?
Thomas Drevon recently posted..RPG news roundup
June 2nd, 2015 at 10:38 am
Hi Thomas,
No offence taken! :)
This is the approach that I use and it works for me – but I’m known to be an extremist in this area (and even I skip some of these steps some of the time)!
Think of it as a menu in a fancy restaurant and you’re in charge of constructing a multicourse feast that will satisfy your guests. You can choose just three or four courses, skimming or skipping entirely everything else, or you can design a full 11-course banquet.
That said, I doubt if more than 1% of GMs out there go this far. I design campaigns that last for a decade or more of play, most GMs are content with something a fraction of that size – and then create another campaign. So, when you suggest that processes on the scale and detail that I have provided is “a corner area of the hobby which [you’ve] never really come to explore,” I think you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head.
Available time is always a factor; this approach takes 2-3 months of concentrated spare time if done as one solid lump, and that’s with experience and practice in carrying out each step. If you spread that effort over a year or two, in parallel with running the campaign that’s coming to an end, it’s not as heavy a burden, but still too much for some – especially if most of their campaigns don’t last that long! Others feel trapped and confined by the literary weight of the end-product, and prefer a lot more flexibility in their design; my experience is that half the time, that yields a good campaign and half the time, a trainwreck or less-than-satisfying outcome. Trying to avoid every avenue that leads to the latter is what leads to campaign development on such an epic scale.
So, despite the inbuilt assumption that readers would at least consider doing so, I don’t expect most GMs to adopt everything that I have recommended in this series. But, after similar articles in the past, I have heard from many GMs who hadn’t even thought of some of the items in my campaign creation process, and who have happily integrated them into their own design techniques. So it’s always useful to present the full menu for others to consider.
I could have chosen to turn each aspect of the development process into a separate article, which would have enabled GMs to pick and choose from among the available options more easily; but the processes that I have developed are designed to integrate into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and that big-picture element of the totality would have been lost in a cherry-picking. Instead, I treated each part as a chapter in a book on the subject of campaign design, one from which readers are free to cherry-pick the elements that interest them and that they feel would best enhance their own design processes. It’s my hope that anyone reading the whole series would find at least one idea that they had not come across before that would make their games more robust and their execution of design more satisfying to both themselves and their players.
So, in conclusion, I don’t think either laughter or shame is an appropriate response. Intellectual curiosity is probably closer to the mark!
December 10th, 2015 at 5:07 pm
I haven’t yet read this series but I’m looking forward to it! That being said the reason I haven’t read it yet is I don’t have reliable access to the net which makes reading things online a pain. So I was hoping you might consider making a pdf of this series, it would be really handy, easier to read(and use)offline or on the go. As is or revised, soon or in maybe a year or two or forever away, whatever is fine, I just hope you give it some consideration.
December 10th, 2015 at 9:32 pm
You can generate a PDF of each article using the “print friendly” button at the bottom of each one, Zuzana. But it’s always been my plan (time permitting) to compile e-books of selected content, updating it, and adding some new content as well, so it will happen one day.