This entry is part 9 in the series New Beginnings
new beginnings 09

Just as spring brings new sprouts and buds, so the Enfleshing process sprouts the final structural elements of a new Campaign.

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the systematic process of creating a new campaign in detail, from start to finish. The contents (updated with each post) can be found in “part zero” of the series.

Bone, Cartilage, and Flesh: A metaphor

Everything that’s been done so far has been in the nature of generating ideas and content in note form and linking these together to create a structure. Nothing has been included without a good reason for it’s being there, and in many cases, content “boxes” have been created but not filled because those contents were not deemed critical to the campaign.

Before actual campaign construction (as opposed to design) can begin, those empty boxes need to be filled. In metaphoric terms, “flesh” has to be put on that “skeleton”. But even before we can do that, there are a few more boxes to add in order to be sure we’ve got everything covered. These aren’t skeleton, essential to the structure of the campaign, but they are essential to connecting everything together and defining the final shape of the flesh to be added.

The goal is be able to simply unfold the content in its final form and wrap it around all the underlying structure like a blanket; there should be no deep thinking involved, no need to pause or delay at all, it should simply flow. To reach that point, these remaining boxes need to be put in place, and where necessary, linked to ideas. If the flesh is muscle, and the work that remains to be described in today’s article is something in between muscle and skeleton, the closest analogy would be cartilage.

There are five different categories under this one general heading: Archetypes, Races, Adversaries, Key NPCs, and Locations. In most of these subjects, a lot of work has already been done – the task for today is turning the decisions that were made into adventures, encounters, and situations that reveal the substance of the game world. It is always better if the fundamental content makes itself apparent by being significant to a situation rather than seeming tacked on afterwards.

A Tale for each Archetype

When it comes to archetypes, we’ve gone to some trouble to identify one or more aspects of the base concepts that are unique and distinctive to this game world, and – where necessary – we’ve revised them in whole or in part to ensure that they are compatible with the concepts on which the world has been based. We’ve also tried to link them in some way to the campaign themes and various other fundamental principles of the planned campaign.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if all that went to waste?

The PC Assumption

A lot of the work has been done on the basic assumption that each archetype might be chosen as the basis of a PC. Where this proves to be a correct assumption, an adventure built around that archetype becomes a starring role for the PC – either in the role of the character around whom the adventure is based, or can present a situation in which a professional colleague of the PC is central, giving the PC a different chance to shine. The latter presents greater control over the situation for the GM because it doesn’t require the PC to behave in a predictable manner – that can be left to an NPC under the GM’s control. However, it can also be assumed that such an adventure is less necessary when a player is putting the archetype on display on a routine basis.

Where no player chooses to build a PC on that archetype, the only way they – and the aspects of the game world that they embody – will get featured is where an plot is built around an NPC to deliberately display the archetype.

Archetype Tales

The notion, then, is to craft an adventure for each archetype that highlights one or more of the unique aspects or interpretations of the archetype or that has the archetype as central to that adventure. These should be standalone in nature so that if they aren’t out-of-the-ballpark ten-out-of-ten adventure ideas, and a PC is putting the archetype on display anyway, they can be dropped. They are important to the campaign but not an essential part of the structure.

However, it is even more useful when an existing adventure – one that is therefore central to the broader campaign plot – can be used as a vehicle for this information, because it integrates it even more closely, binding the archetype concepts to the campaign.

Archetype Tales 1: The Procedure

The first step, to be performed for each of the archetypes, is to review each of the adventures you already have outlined in the campaign structure, assessing each for its suitability for highlighting the archetype then under examination.

If there is no such adventure, the need is to specify a standalone adventure, and the most important decision to be made is where in the Campaign Plan the adventure can best be located. By definition, the metagame purpose of this adventure is to reveal additional elements of the game world to the players; so the decision is best made on the basis of the central importance of the information to be revealed. That often hinges on the way the information relates to other facts – if the adventure in question can be used to reveal something that will be a key factor in future player decisions, it should be presented early in the campaign; if it’s simply shining a light on some aspects of the world that might otherwise go unnoticed, you have more latitude.

This is where the work in Phase 7 (‘Skeleton’), connecting the archetypes to the Nexii, becomes invaluable, because this specifies exactly how that particular archetype can link to different parts of the campaign plan – early, middle, or late. Once you have decided where the most effective location within the campaign plan is going to be, it’s a simple matter to insert an adventure “slot”.

Once the relevant adventure has been positioned within the plan, the next step is to make note of exactly what the adventure is going to be about. For this, you may need to consult your ideas file; and, if nothing suitable is found there, go looking for ideas on the net or in relevant sourcebooks. I’ve made my opinions on list products clear in the past (Listing to one side: The problems of List Products), but this is one occasion when the right list can save your bacon – and that’s why Campaign Mastery presents such lists from time to time (most recently in the occasional “Casual Opportunities series.

What you want is a situation in which the distinctiveness of the archetype makes a difference in the situation, either creating it, complicating it, or holding the solution to it. That’s actually a rather broad remit, leaving plenty of scope for the choice of adventure to reflect themes.

A clarification: It isn’t necessary to have an adventure for every unique or modified aspect of an archetype. The presumption is that the other basic concepts will be displayed along with the aspect that has been selected for prominence; and that you will have made that selection after contemplating the significance of the different concepts embodied within the archetype. In other words, you’ve picked a difference that matters – because that’s the easiest thing to build an adventure around – and the rest can be assumed to come along for the ride. They will be noted if they are important enough, and can be ignored if not. It isn’t going to be necessary to explain everything; a lot of it can simply be taken as exemplified within this one example of the archetype.

This in turn means that other aspects of the archetype can be highlighted if and when it is used as the foundation for a relevant NPC. You are going to have a fair number of those, after all, and some of them will probably be representatives of this archetype!

Once the basic premise of the adventure has been filled in, it’s time to give it the same treatment that all the other adventure ideas received in the “Organization” stages of Phase 4, ‘Development’ – listing the unanswered questions of Where, Who, Antagonist, etc, and cross-referencing with other campaign elements as appropriate. And then you can move on to the next Archetype – subject to the Caveat below, of course.

Archetype Tales 2: Revising the Archetypes

There’s one major reason why all this is vital and must be done at this stage of campaign creation: it provides a final “reality check” on the ideas. Something can sound great in theory but be so hard to work with, or be so alien to the way your creative mind works, that it becomes untenable. This is your final chance to catch and reform such campaign-harming “bright ideas” – all those things that sounded good at the time…

If you can’t build an adventure featuring an archetype that displays how that archetype fits into the game world or is unique or simply distinctive, it’s a sure bet that the archetype won’t work as a PC, either. Now is the time to revise it if necessary.

A Tale for each key Race

Having gone into the process in detail for Archetypes, there isn’t all that much more that needs to be said regarding the second of the subjects – races. Each of the major races needs an adventure in which they, and especially anything distinctive or unusual that you’ve added or changed, can feature. If you can make this an adventure that’s already in the campaign plan, so much the better; if not, you need to add one.

However, speaking from experience, every PC emphasizes different aspects of the Race from which they derive; it is by no means certain that having a player choose a race will highlight what you consider to be the important differences. Sometimes the player simply can’t get his head around the ideas that you’ve incorporated – it happens. Unlike the archetype, then, you can’t rely a race being represented by a PC to communicate the uniqueness of that race – and that leaves it up to you.

A Tale for each Significant Adversary

Having grown used to the basic process while dealing with the easy subjects, it’s time to get into something a bit more complicated: the Adversaries that you intend to feature within the campaign.

The first question that needs answering is a criterion for judging whether or not an adversary is “significant”. Each GM needs to find his own answer to this, taking into account the intended length and scale of the campaign. In some cases, it might be that every adversary who features in an adventure is considered significant, in others, the accolade may be reserved for those adversaries who have a role to play in multiple adventures. In still others, foes might be divided into two categories – “mundane” and “supernatural”, or “common” and “political” – with only one of these being deemed “Significant”.

Personally, I usually lean toward the “multi-adventure” profile, plus any who have a significant part to play in altering the direction of the campaign (even if they only make a single appearance). But I have used all of the working definitions offered as examples, and more besides.

For each Significant Adversary, there are nine, or perhaps, ten “boxes” that need to be ticked, ie to have content allocated.

Adversary Tales 1: Introductions, Please

Before a significant adversary makes his first appearance, it’s usually necessary to lay some groundwork. This can be an adventure in itself, or an encounter, or simply a background element to another encounter.

What do I mean by “groundwork”? Here are three examples:

  1. The Beholder: If I’m going to use a Beholder as an Antagonist in a D&D or Pathfinder adventure, I will want an encounter or scene that establishes that Beholders exist and that they are very bad news. I don’t need a living Beholder for this; a dead one, or a rumor of one, or a tapestry that features the defeat of one, or any of several alternatives will do. Basically, I want an excuse to tell the players anything that their characters know about Beholders (in case they don’t know it already), and just as importantly, to make sure to define what it is that their characters don’t know. I will also make sure to have at least one “fact” that is different from published canon, purely to warn the players that the details of the monster may have been changed, as a specific warning that encounters from other games (or having memorized the rulebooks) will be (at best) an unreliable guide to the strategy that they should adopt when encountering one. And since I don’t believe in idle threats, I will actually change something significant about them – like giving them a phasing ability that lets them pass through walls and material obstacles, and ignore (at least partially) any damage that occurs in a round after they have acted.
  2. The Last Dragon: If the adversary is intended to be the last Dragon to have survived into “modern” times, I will want to highlight the fact that the Dragons are all dead, and how they are believed to have died. Again, I’m looking for an excuse to give background information and misinformation to the Players before it becomes important. Including that information in the adventure in which the adversary is revealed is far too clumsy if presented after the revelation, and far too obvious if it precedes the revelation – and (at the moment of revelation), the players have more urgent things on their minds! The only solutions are to present the information when it no longer matters (which is rather pointless) or before it becomes important.
  3. The Crime Czar: Finally, let’s say that the antagonist is going to be a crime boss of some sort. Before the first Lieutenant shows his nose, the players should become aware that there is a significant level of crime and that the authorities are not getting very far in curbing it. This then gives the Lieutenant some context when he makes his initial appearance, and that in turn gives context and significance to the Adversary when he finally makes a direct appearance.

In a nutshell, then, this “box” is about how a significant adversary will be “introduced” into the PCs lives – and the player’s consciousness.

Adversary Tales 2: The Initial Confrontation

There are writers and directors who suggest that the initial confrontation between a hero (PCs) and villain (antagonist) is the most important scene they will share. The villain either makes an impression, or everything subsequent falls flat. In the case of a minor villain – i.e. one without Significance – that doesn’t matter too much; but for a Significant Adversary it’s close enough to be a serious consideration.

I’m a firm believer that while spontaneity is good, a little bit of prep goes a long way. At the very least, a note or two is warranted on how to ensure that the antagonist’s first entrance (or his unmasking, if he’s been hanging around in disguise for a while prior) is suitably dramatic and impressive.

Adversary Tales 3: Adversarial Destinies

Karma. A campaign may not have it as an overt theme, but it’s something that every GM should strive to bring about – at least in terms of the important Adversaries getting just what they deserve in the end. So what fate is befitting? What is appropriate? What will be viscerally satisfying to the players? They may or may not get to deliver the coup-de-grace; that depends on how successful they are. But the adversary should fail, and fall, eventually – their karmic destiny should be inevitable (if impossible to predict) even before the final confrontation begins. Again, this is not likely to happen by accident – so do at least some preliminary planning in advance.

Adversary Tales 4: Reaction to Setbacks

How the adversary reacts to setbacks is going to form a significant element of their in-game persona, all going well from the player’s point-of-view. It has to be consistent with the rest of the adversary’s personality, but in most cases it will involve a significant divergence from the way that personality has been expressed previously in the encounter.

Some will be hotly furious, lashing out with unthinking violence. Others may be coldly furious, making the architects of their reverses targets for some utterly ruthless action – while some will take it out on their underlings. Others may decide to try to bargain. A few may have trouble even recognizing that they’ve been thwarted, or may obsess over finding a way to achieve that goal at any cost. Some will simply rant and rave, while others may plunge into deep depression – for a while. A few might retreat into isolation to brood until coming up with a new and better plan – or simply an appropriate vengeance.

Make the decision, and ensure that this choice is consistent with the behavior of that adversary in subsequent encounters. It might be that the PCs don’t get to witness the reaction; but it should shape how the antagonist behaves, and at some future point, word may leak out and reach the PCs ears.

Adversary Tales 5: Reaction to Failure

The reaction to setbacks has only superficial resemblance to how the antagonist will react when their plans actually fail. The reactions will either be more extreme or less, but this will be no less critical – if only because it will usually get displayed in front of an appreciative PC audience! A great deal depends on the flexibility and confidence of the antagonist, as compared to the scale of the failure, and who he holds responsible. The best time to think about this is before you need to know it, so that when and if the time comes, you don’t have to think about it – just roleplay what you have already specified.

Adversary Tales 6: Master Plans

Every adversary needs a master plan of some sort. Even your combat monster has some sort of master plan – it’s just vague and built around the size of his biceps. The master plan bridges from what the adversary can do right now to what the adversary wants to achieve, at least in their own mind; it’s what they are doing now, and what they intend to do next. No master plan takes specific account of PC actions, at best there is an allowance for “obstructions” and a plan to deal with them if and when that becomes necessary.

Before I conclude this subsection, I should point readers to a quartet of my articles from a couple of years ago that are still popular:

Adversary Tales 7: Flaws

Every villain needs a flaw or two. A blind spot, or an obsession, or whatever. These can be justified in his mind as part of his personal style, but this is often lying to himself to justify something he would ditch in a heartbeat if he were as coldly ruthless at self-analysis as he is at everything else.

Take Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the James Bond franchise as an example. He has three notable flaws: His love of Turkish Angora cats; his fondness for grandiose plans; and his boastfulness when in a position of self-perceived dominance. Of these, the last and first are the most serious; the last because the self-perception is often flawed, and the first because no matter how much he changes his appearance and identity, the cats and the manner in which he handles them are an easy means of identification. No doubt he has resolved a dozen times not to boast too soon, not to count his eggs before they hatch; but he just can’t help himself, a weakness that he would never tolerate in a subordinate. And as for the cats….

Adversary Tales 8: Flaw Impacts

It’s one thing to have a flaw. To be truly useful to the GM, he should work out several ways in which that flaw might impact on the adversary’s activities. Flashes of hot anger? A subordinate might get scared and be willing to make a deal. Tends to get obsessed with removing obstacles? Hires an assassin to stalk the PCs. Punishes perceived personal slights or disrespect? Hatches a scheme to humiliate someone even at the risk of damaging his operation.

Why do this in advance?

If things always went to plan – your plan, not the adversary’s – it wouldn’t be necessary, you could interpret the flaws and their impact on in-game events in advance. Enter the PCs, who rarely follow the GM’s plan of action, and that will constantly force you to improvise the reactions and subsequent actions of the adversary in response. That, in turn, is a lot easier if you have at least some basics worked out in advance – and that’s what this box is all about.

Adversary Tales 9: The Ultimate Objective

It’s great having the villain’s immediate plans worked out, up to the point where you expect the PCs to stop those plans dead – but you should always have the ultimate objective spelt out. This gives you the adversary’s motivation, and offers a guideline to the changes he will make in his plans as opportunities open and close.

Until recently, I would not have included this; I would have felt it was enough to have The Master Plan, in fact I did. But, when my co-GM and I were working on the next Pulp Adventure, “Prison Of Jade”, something just wasn’t right. We knew what the villain was doing, we knew what he would achieve if not stopped, but in the “Why” column – the Ultimate Objective – we had a political goal in the “world domination” category, and it simply didn’t fit his modus operandi and the history and reputation that we had created for him; it was far too prosaic. Between us, we came up with two or three alternatives, and then blended two of those together (with a little research) to identify an alternative that ticked all the right boxes – and ultimately made the villain a far more interesting character. I can’t go into details now; that will have to wait until after the adventure gets played – but he became the villain he was reputed to be, and someone worthy of the insidious Master Plan we had already devised.

As soon as I realized that the problem with the villain as he was lay in a failure to identify an appropriate ultimate objective (as opposed to a merely realistic one), I realized that this box needed to be included in this checklist.

Adversary Tales 10: A Preliminary Encounter?

That’s quite a lot of information, and it’s all the things that the GM really needs to have sorted before play. But is there so much information that it’s worth contemplating a preliminary encounter with the antagonist that at least hints at some of this material, or establishes it? Again, this is a decision for each GM to make for themselves – but if one is needed, this is the time to insert it. So, for each antagonist, ask yourself the question – and follow it up with a second, before committing yourself: Would a preliminary encounter steal any element of surprise that you are counting on? If the answer to this second question is “no,” it doesn’t matter what your answer is to the first – a “yes,” to the first question simply indicates that the GM is going to have to work that much harder in constructing the currently-planned first encounter with the villain.

Again, the example that presents itself is Blofeld. It’s one thing for the PCs to get told about his cat fetish – it’s quite another for them to have already encountered a villain who exhibits that trait, without appreciating the significance at the time. But it means that the second time a villain with that habit is encountered, even if he doesn’t look anything like he did the first time around, the players should recognize the trademark!

A Tale for each key NPC

Every campaign contains a few NPCs of special significance. Allies at key moments, or guides and mentors, or simply people who seek to use the PCs to their own advantage (or who do so), for example. Authority figures who will work against the PCs best interests in pursuing circumstances that benefit themselves or their cause. Even something as simple as a recurring barman and his lovely daughter can qualify!

As with Adversaries, the first step is to decide just what you mean by the term “Key NPC” in the context of this particular campaign. Once you know that, work through your list of adventures (which may already have expanded as a result of the work on Archetypes, Races, and Adversaries that has been done already) and generate a list of NPCs that meet this criteria.

Once again, I have nine key things to be noted about each of these NPCs. This is not a full character-generation process; it’s simply getting preliminary designs down on paper. However, by defining these NPCs as “Key characters” within the campaign, you are also indicating that they are too important for blind character generation to be anything but a starting point; the NPC, as generated later, has to fit the definitions and characteristics that are defined within this section, and not the other way around.

NPC Tales 1: Plot Relevance

Why does this NPC matter? What is their relevance to the plot, their purpose? You’ve determined that they are going to be a Key character in the campaign – why? Everything else in the NPC’s design needs to be subordinated to this purpose as a primary requirement.

NPC Tales 2: Position & Place

What is their in-game position? Where? What is their social rank? Which social circles do they move in, and in which circles are they comfortable? And where, physically, is that job performed?

NPC Tales 3: Personality

What sort of personality should the NPC have in order to fulfill that purpose? You don’t need a full profile, but some highlights and keywords are important. Usefully, this also lets you make them individuals rather than cardboard cut-outs based on plot function; not all your advisors or mentors to the PCs should be wise and generally helpful! Some should be reluctant, or scheming, or…

Important Opinions

An related question that should be asked – what are the opinions that the character holds – especially any that are relevant to their plot purpose, general occupation, or are controversial either in real-world terms or in game-world terms. Again, just because an NPC is there to help the PCs doesn’t mean they have to be an altar boy!

NPC Tales 4: Agenda

What agenda, if any, are they pursuing? Everyone should have an agenda, though you might need to stretch the definition a little bit. Ideally, this will be a motivation that can cut both ways relative to the PCs. For example, a character’s agenda might be to live up to an idealized vision of the political state that he serves; that would make him reluctant to compromise his principles in the slightest, and hostile to those who try to point out flaws in his world-view. It might make him tend to react harshly to those who don’t share and support his idealized vision. While this character would probably be a useful ally and asset to the PCs, he could become an enemy and outspoken critic very easily – because he is pursuing his own agenda and isn’t merely a tool to facilitate what the PCs want to do.

NPC Tales 5: Introduction

What, if anything, should the PCs know about the character before they first meet him? What could they find out, if they bothered to do so? Does the character have a public reputation that they don’t deserve – or one that they do deserve? And is that reputation good or bad from the PCs point of view?

NPC Tales 6: The First Meeting

When and where will the PCs first meet the NPC? Is it more useful to have a separate encounter just to introduce the two to each other? Note that this doesn’t have to be a face-to-face encounter – the PCs could simply see the character doing his job, while the public reacts. This, and similar ideas, are great ways to get the “Introduction” material into the player’s hands before the NPC becomes plot-significant; but it always risks the players jumping the gun, which is why it’s important to have everything you need to run the character in place before such an in-game appearance.

NPC Tales 7: Reasons to care

A lesson from television production, this: the protagonists, and the audience, need a reason to care about what happens to the NPC. This doesn’t apply to every character, but it certainly applies to the important ones! The RPG analogues are the PCs, who need an in-game reason to care, and the players who need a metagame reason.

Note that caring doesn’t mean that the relationships have to be positive – villains that are hated satisfy the criterion just as handily! But you need some sort of emotional reaction, even if you have to entice it or induce it.

It can be something simple – I once used an unsavory NPC who kept a live feed of baby birds in their nest playing on his TV every time he was in his office, giving him the opportunity to take glee in “all the wrong things” – the way the worms wriggled as the birds were fed them, still living; the way the mothers pushed them out of the nest when the time was right; the way they constantly fought with each other for food and attention, which reminded him of his childhood… He had something to mention every time he appeared in-game, and the longer it persisted, the creepier it got, especially the way his eyes would light up when speaking of them. He was also an officious oaf who was there to help the PCs when they really needed it – but who made them jump through hoops before considering one of their requests. There were times when he was their greatest ally, a hidden ace-in-the-hole, and times when he was the biggest road-block they had to overcome, because he had leverage over just about everyone in the form of favors owed to him. But they definitely cared about him – the players and their characters hated having to go to him, because he made them uncomfortable, but both knew they needed him. There were definitely times when the PCs wanted to throttle him, and times when he was their closest ally! In his final scene, he revealed an absolute loyalty to the political administration who employed him, and that he sublimated and transferred his darker instincts into the birds’ nest images – and getting himself killed for his loyalty, putting the PCs into the awkward position of hunting down his killer while not being sure they weren’t glad he was dead! If they were uncaring, the adventure would have fallen flat, and been mechanical follow-the-numbers; instead, there was the sort of passionate ambivalence that only “real people” – or “realistic people” can engender.

Remember: not all allies need to be on the PCs side, not all friends are allies, and not all enemies have to be hated; but there needs to be a reason to care about them, or they won’t be valued.

NPC Tales 8: Intended Evolution

Over the course of his appearances within the game, how is the character intended to change? People don’t stay static, they evolve over time. A character can be viewed as having a central personality core, a layer of substance around it, and a layer of superficiality and circumstances around that; each of these changes at different rates. The outer layer is most quickly transformed, the layer of substance evolves only slowly, and generally in response to dramatic life events, and the innermost layer is most consistent – but it can be eroded and transformed by the accumulation of lesser changes, or altered dramatically by the most extreme of situations.

One of the key NPCs in the Zenith-3 campaign is a Kzin, one of their first superheros. The PCs saved his race from a civil war that would have ruined them for someone else’s benefit, and he feels a debt of honor that needs to be repaid; at the same time, he was raised to despise Humans for the humiliations that the race has inflicted on his people in the past. Over time, the debt will slowly be repaid; at the same time, he is getting to know the PCs “from the inside”, resolving the internal conflict into which his circumstances have placed him. Will he become an enemy? Will he overcome the childhood conditioning that drives him? Will he become his own worst enemy – as often happens when people are placed in such personal conflicts over a long period of time? The players – and the PCs – don’t know. Right now, he is a reluctant but absolutely loyal and reliable ally, and all they know for certain is that something in that statement will change eventually – and probably without notice!

NPC Tales 9: Deserved Destiny

When you add up the totality of who the NPC is, and what role he is intended to play within the campaign, what fate does the character deserve – and is there a way that you can see that he gets it by the end of the campaign?

Take the bird-lover described earlier: what be deserved was to have his virtues extolled and to become remembered as a loyal servant of the state. Before that could happen, the players had to work through their own ambivalence in order to avenge him; once they had done so, they were able to reform his public image in a fitting tribute and public memorial. “He gave his life in the service of the State, the State needs to repay that with appropriate commemoration at a State Funeral.”

A Tale for each key Location

Locations seem to get short shrift in many RPGs. They are viewed as nothing more than a disposable backdrop to the tactical problem of the hour, the NPC of the minute, the drama of the day. This neglects a useful source of color and vitality.

Of course, not every location deserves anything more. An inn can exist purely as a place for the players to sleep; a village purely as a place for such an inn to be located. Sometimes, a mountain is just an obstacle that needs to be crossed.

But there are some locations which serve as settings for considerable play or significant confrontations that will shape the campaign, and these key locations need greater substance and importance. If the players are likely to be in a position to explore, or to interact at length with the locals, or if an adventure is intended to take place there, the location needs to be brought to life.

There are 15 facts that should be noted about each such location. Most of them require nothing more than single-line answers, though a few may be a little more substantial. The order is important, to some extent, as you will see as we proceed:

Location Tales 1: History

We start with the History of the place – in one sentence if possible, one brief paragraph at most. This is not intended to be a complete record, instead it should be the sort of thumbnail history that you might read in a guidebook or travel brochure, or that someone might offer in passing in a hotel or inn.

Note that it’s impossible to generate these location histories without at least some notion of the broader history of the game world, which is why this has had to wait until now.

Four examples:

  • “Built twenty-five years ago to study deep space, when the economy crashed in 2025 the space station was bought by Richard Branson and now serves as an exotic resort for his Virgin Galactic tours.”
  • “Was once a thriving, growing metropolis, but never really recovered after being razed during the Goblin invasion 40 years ago.”
  • “Began as a customs and immigration office to prevent the destitute survivors of the Civil War in nearby Unredonia from streaming across the border. Unable to go back and not allowed to go forward, they stayed at the border crossing and slowly a shanty town built up. As Unredonia recovered and trade resumed, it became the important and cosmopolitan trading center that it is today.”
  • “Decrying the decay in morality of modern society during the reign of Black Elfzer, the population instituted a puritanical regime of local laws that forcibly returned to the morality and social customs of 100 years earlier. By repressing every modern convenience, service, and utility, they have remained a frozen snapshot of village life from a past age, now 250 years out of time; a “purity” maintained by virtue of the most draconian laws in the Nation. For 150 years, they have had no tolerance for outsiders and permitted strangers no ‘liberties’.”
Location Tales 2: Geography

What’s the dominant geographic feature of the location? List no more than three, with minimal description (one line each).

Location Tales 3: Language

What’s the dominant language of the location, and what are the odds that anyone speaks any other language?

Location Tales 4: Society

In a line or two, if you haven’t incorporated it into the history, describe the society.

Location Tales 5: Most Noteworthy Features

Every location is distinctive in some fashion. These are often part History or part Geography. In my home town, it was the place where the highway crossed the railroad tracks by making a pair of 90-degree turns that led onto the main shopping street; in my Mother’s adopted home, many of the streets are paved all the way to the curb (instead of having dirt-and-gravel shoulders to the curb); in another town I know, the streets are phenomenally wide because they park in the middle of the road at 90 degrees to the flow of traffic in each direction, with shade provided by large trees along that median area. Sydney has its Opera House, Harbor, and Harbor Bridge. There’s no need to be any more substantial than these examples.

In particular, are there any Wonders (natural or artificial) nearby?

Location Tales 6: Other Claims To Fame

Every location also has a claim to fame of some sort. These can be festivals or street fairs or annual shows or parades or some commonality that many of the local areas share – “the town of apples”, “home of the world’s biggest pumpkin”, and so on. My hometown has just become the home of the largest solar panel farm in all of Australia – 102 Megawatts from 1.3 million solar panels.

Few embrace these claims as thoroughly as Salem, Massachusetts, scene of the infamous Witch Trials; there is a museum; street signs have a witch motif, and so do many of the local businesses. For a gamer, this is an incredibly useful model to emulate, because the thematic connection reinforces the uniqueness of the location every time it gets mentioned – and this approach lets it be mentioned a lot.

Location Tales 7: Strangers

How do the locals treat Strangers? Although this subject can usually do with some amplification, because it’s directly relevant to how the PCs will be received, it’s often difficult to state more than a line or two while being meaningful.

Location Tales 8: Folklore

There’s sure to be some local folklore or superstition. Sometimes this has a sound basis in fact, at other times, not. In my home town, it was that the worst flooding would always occur during drought years, and that the petrol prices were inflated to subsidize cheaper prices in the city.

Location Tales 9: Getting There

How do you get to the location – and what are the most significant obstacles along the way?

Location Tales 10: Staying There

When you get there, where can you stay? There seems to be a default assumption in D&D games that every town has an inn – but it isn’t necessarily so. Maybe you have to negotiate with a local for barn space, and the bar is just for drinking – with insufficient demand for the maintenance of accommodation services.

Location Tales 11: Shopping There

What’s the shopping like? Are there any surprises? In Nyngan, for example, fruit and vegetables cost rather more than most would expect; it’s a farming district that is mostly wheat and sheep and some cattle. Just about everything else has to be trucked in, and as a result, costs a great deal more than would normally be expected. There is a greater reliance on frozen and canned foods and less on fresh, for the same reason, or at least that was the case when I lived there!

Location Tales 12: Visuals

You’ve got three choices within this category: one is to decide that there is no value in searching for a visual to display; another is to actually perform an image search and to list the chosen images (which should be downloaded and saved, because they might not be there when you need them!); and the third is simply to list the keywords that you think will lead you to an image when the time is right, because the image you want might not be on the net yet!

My preference is to list the keywords and do a fast image search – but not to spend a lot of effort at this point in time.

I think it’s worth a quick search, because an image can inspire descriptions and ideas when the time comes to expand on this bare-bones outline; but don’t panic if I don’t find a good one.

Location Tales 13: Uniqueness

In a nutshell, what is it that is going to make this location unique in terms of the plot? This isn’t “why the location is in the plot”, it’s how the various aspects of uniqueness are going to be expressed to make the location distinctive within the plot. This is how you ensure that the location doesn’t feel tacked on – by integrating the location with the plot.

Location Tales 14: An opportunity for exploration?

Is it worth scheduling a prior visit to the location for the PCs – one with the leisure for exploring the region? In some cases, the answer will be yes, in others the answer may be no. But now is the time to insert a minor adventure with no metagame purpose but to take the PCs somewhere that will become more important later, if you decide that’s warranted.

I especially like to do so if the location is going to be radically changed when the PCs arrive there for the “real” adventure, because it gives you the opportunity to have them invest, emotionally, in the place and the people. Make it matter before they get there “for real”, and they will care when the time comes.

Location Tales 15: Name

Finally, the name. This is left to last because you may want the name to reflect one of the uniquenesses that you’ve assigned; you certainly don’t want it to conflict with the tone that you have established through the history and the claims to fame. If the place is to be rustic, it needs a rustic name.

So important is the right name that I’ve done a whole series on the subject. I particularly want to draw the reader’s attention to Grokking The Message: Naming Places & Campaigns, for reasons of obvious relevance.

Connect Ideas to empty content boxes

At this point, you’re done adding adventures to the plotline – but in almost every case, there will be details that have been left blank in those adventures. The preceding content generation exercises in this article will have filled some of these details in, but not all. So the next step is to open up your ideas file and fill in all the blanks. You want to know the basic structure of each adventure, where it is to happen, what is to happen, who is to be involved, and how it all connects to the big picture before the time comes to actually construct any of the adventures.

This is a road map of where you expect the campaign to go; it isn’t intended to bind anyone to anything. That’s why the substantial elements are to be delivered on a just-in-time basis, and why part of each adventure is what you have to start developing, when, in order for it to be ready when its’ going to be needed.

Final Decisions

But there are still some empty boxes, deferred until this moment that need to be filled first.

What to Keep/Dump Revisit

Back in the information dump phase, there were a number of 50/50 decisions that were put off. It’s time to revisit all of those undecided questions and make a decision, one way or another, on what legacy carry-forwards you are going to include in the campaign. All the choices that these were waiting on have now been made – the last ones in the course of this article.

Many of these questions, which were filed in the “too hard” basket at the time, should now have self-evident solutions. I usually discover that the more of them that I can now answer, the easier the others are – so I start with a very quick run-through making those self-evident choices and then returning for the final, more difficult issues.

For example, let’s say that you have a decision deferred regarding an interpretation of the Elvish relationship with nature. In the past, you had given Elves an ability to communicate with trees as though they had a sort of gestalt intelligence, once “awakened” by the Elves. Because of this environment, the animal inhabitants of an Elvish Forest also became somewhat more aware and sentient than their external counterparts, leading to a template that was applied to “Elf-touched Creatures”. The combination, and the willingness of the trees to shape themselves in ways that accommodated Elvish desires, produced a unique look-and-feel to the Elvish homeland. All these subsequent decisions should have been held in abeyance, pending the decision mentioned at the start of the Paragraph. At this point in time, you know a lot more about Elves and how they will interact with the proposed campaign, so you should be able to decide whether or not they are already distinctive without the need for this interpretation, or whether the ideas that you’ve already integrated into the campaign would be enhanced by this collection of Elven “facts” – so the decisions will flow like dominoes from that initial starting point.

Or perhaps it was a decision about whether or not to retain the Hit Location house rule that you had used quite satisfactorily in the previous campaign. By now, you have a much clearer idea of whether or not this level of specificity enhances or detracts from the overall look-and-feel of the proposed new campaign, of what other house rules are going to be required, and of whether or not that leaves enough capacity for detail for this to be retained – it might be that the decision has been made that a more abstract handling of game mechanics will better suit the new campaign, or there might be a different interpretation of Hit Points that is incompatible with a hit location mechanic. The decisions that have been made leave it far easier to complete the decisions that are still outstanding.

These decisions, will, of course, further expand on the various notes files you have.

Anything I’ve overlooked!

Compliments from others notwithstanding, I can’t think of everything! For example, if I have decided as part of the preceding revisit that some locations are blessed while others are cursed, with corresponding modifiers to various activities, you should go through all the key locations and decide the blessed/cursed status of each; you should go through the various key NPCs and antagonists and determine whether they derive from a blessed or cursed location, and what impact that’s had on them; and whether they currently live in a blessed/cursed region, and what effect that has.

Dot the I’s and cross the T’s. The goal is to make every campaign different, and that means that general advice can only go so far.

The Initial Sandbox

The final step within this phase of campaign creation is to assess the initial “sandbox” – do you have everything you need to develop it properly? Is there anything that you’ve overlooked? How are you actually going to begin the campaign? And Where?

And so, at last, you are ready to actually create the campaign. What you have so far is like a child’s coloring book, in which you have chosen what colors are to go into each space – but which you haven’t yet filled in. The hard work is over, now it’s time for the hard work to begin… and that statement will make a lot more sense, and be a lot more fun, than it seems at the moment after you’ve read the next part in this series. The end is beginning to show up on the horizon…



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