Campaign Building Part 1, The Arc

My last major D&D project was a campaign that spanned about three years. I was fortunate to have a stable group of core players who were exploring a persistent and evolving world. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I anticipated that the story would last for so long. But looking back, I can see some of the things that made it all work.

Because of that experience, I find that when I sit down in the DM’s chair, my goal is to tell a story. It doesn’t matter if it’s for that years long campaign, or a single stand alone quest. I want to tell the story of someone or some group of people in a way where the players feel like they’re intervening into those individuals’ plight. And had they not appeared when they did, they might have heard the town crier report a bleaker story the next day in the town square. It’s a goal that sounds more ambitious than it actually is.

At the onset of that campaign, I definitely wasn’t thinking this way. When I started building the quests, I imagine I started much like most people. I asked the questions: “what are the players going to do? What path do I want them to take? What keys do they need to find to unlock which doors?” And so on. These questions make sense. They are the foundation of most RPG and action computer games to date. In computer games, the settings are established, the locations are set, and the path to get there is usually a largely sequential series of steps or plot points to get from A to B. Even open world games like Skyrim still have this quality. You can start several quests simultaneously and those quest lines will patiently wait for you to complete the next step in sequence before advancing. The story relies on the player’s intervention to advance, and rarely does it behave realistically. My experience with adventure games, when I started my campaign,  was linear, so it made sense that I started to design quests and encounters that were linear.

Very quickly, as the campaign progressed, I started to realize that I could not build quests the way I was used to seeing them presented on my computer screen. I found myself using the previous session to inform what was immediately happening in the next. Of course, they could choose different options beyond what was presented to them, but they usually didn’t. Planning successive quests naturally fell into this kind of tempo where we would play a session and I used their choices and my NPC’s motivations to plan what would happen next in the game world.

This was helpful. but it also created some challenges with my players. My players were starting to give me feedback that they felt the game was linear, railroaded, and they were getting the sense that they weren’t impacting the world they inhabited. They were right in this case, their experience was linear. But I had to point out that part of the issue was that their moral compass and internal leadership was poor and all over the map in the initial sessions. In one of the first quests they ended up killing a night watchman in the middle of the capital’s streets right outside of one of the city’s guardhouses. My question was simple: If they decide to kill what was essentially a police officer in the middle of a street, what did they expect would happen to their options? But it did get me thinking about whether I was presenting an environment that allowed them to impact their world. The answer was roughly, no.

I would build the next quest based on the last, and the story would advance. So in a way, they did have a direct impact on the direction of the story. But the world didn’t feel like it had the larger moving pieces that they could manipulate. I realized that I had to shift my focus off of the player’s actions (which I couldn’t really predict anyway), and focus on developing what was happening in the world around them. I started planning out the larger groups in the story. Once I had given them direction, it was a matter of looking for their next step in the story. I found this exercise invaluable, because now I had factions in the world that had their own direction and motives that could be interfered with. The factions could be helped or hindered, they could reward or retaliate, or they could be left to meddle without the party’s intervention.

1. Build your story arc

For your D&D campaign, write a short paragraph that will describe what is happening in your story. It will obviously be a story element that you want your players to explore and influence and it may or may not be the main conflict of the story.

The Dwarfs’ (Surface dwelling and the dominant race on the island continent) government and religion had become increasingly more corrupt over the centuries. So much so that they had lost the favor of their god Moradin who stopped granting magic to his people. The story starts with the chancellor being assassinated by someone within the political ranks or at the behest of a government official, and a new chancellor was recently appointed. The new chancellor’s hidden agenda is to root out the corruption and restore their favor with Moradin, but  if the wrong people discovered his motives, or he makes the wrong political misstep, he could quickly become the next victim of treachery. The Dwarf race had developed into an introverted racist nation treating all outsiders as second class or worse, and half breeds felt this discrimination the most.

You’ll notice I  have kept the descriptions broad and quick, and I’ve done so because I don’t want to have too many specifics that will commit me to anything in particular. The assassination was a good opener for the quest. It threw the group into the chaotic and messy political landscape right away and forced them to get up to speed on the political climate as they played rather than start with a long exposition. This particular arc gives me the ability to spawn political and manipulative villains for the heroes to hunt down and exterminate, but it doesn’t take them to epic play levels, nor does it offer them a real threat to take down. Enter the next arc:

The segregation from Moradin began several centuries ago when the Dwarf nation decided they were going to claim the island continent they shared with the Humans, for themselves. What followed that decision was a brutal “Cleansing War” instigated by the Dwarfs, that resulted in the wholesale destruction of the vast majority of the Human settlements across the land. One Human wizard fought back with a hidden resistance group and his retaliation became more and more brutal in kind. Eventually he would undergo the process of becoming a powerful lich, and he carries a bitter grudge for the Dwarfs to current day. In our story, he is returning to win that centuries past war for the Humans, and see to the eradication of every last Dwarf.

With this added arc, I now have a corrupt faction with an admirable leader in peril, worthy of the hero’s help; and I have a bitter villain worth destroying.

2. Dismantle the plot 

A story arc is a good guide for our episodic content. But notice that what an arc is intended for. It defines only the premise that the details of our story will follow, which will allow our players to become a part of that story instead of being a bubble separate from the story. My players wanted to be able to influence the world, so once I understood this, I took my arc and dismantled it into the agencies that drove the world’s general narrative:

• The Dwarf government became the focus of my story and the players had a few choices regarding what outcome they would support. I made the government a fusion of their politics and religion. With their fall from Moradin, the clergy was corrupt, and the chancellor and his close political party would be the ones striving for positive change. 
• I added a misnamed “Resistance” that would be headed up by a Human with good intentions, but due to the general prejudice of the Dwarf people, his groups activities would have to be covert. They gather and plant information to influence getting the right people into power and ousting the corrupt. 
• An affluent family was added with the goal of destroying the Dwarf regime politically. They would stir up crime and try to make the current rulers look incompetent. Some family members would hold places of low to moderate power, which is as high as they could achieve considering the animosity the Dwarfs bear toward Humans. Other members of the family involve themselves directly with crime and stir up trouble.
• The villain in my story is the embodiment of the Dwarfs negative karma for the terrible deeds they did to the Humans those centuries ago. He will bring the war back to the Dwarfs for their destruction but not have any restraint that the Dwarfs of old might have had. He is also a physical representation of corruption being a lich. He has done two things over the centuries. First was to plant his agents into a small variety of places in the Dwarf kingdom. Second was to remain hidden and build his power. At the start of the campaign, he has accomplished both of those tasks exceptionally well and is a about ready to begin meddling in the affairs of Dwarfs.
• The theme of the campaign is that evil threatens and harms everyone. Even when that evil is directed at the corrupt and foul, it will eventually destroy everyone.

 You can see that these points extract and expand a little on each party mentioned. These points still need a little fleshing out before they would help me in the running of a campaign. The next step would be to define the current objective of each group and a few key characters for each who will work towards those objectives. When the heroes dive into the mix, I can start using this information to drive the universe forward. I can start asking:

1. How did the heroes’ actions alter the path of the factions? 
2.  Did the heroes impress or anger anyone? 
3. Does the faction even realize what’s going on? 
4. How do these factions respond, if at all?
5. Do the factions want to hire or manipulate the heroes? 

Now you may not need to ask these questions for every faction, and your attention to the questions can be light. After all, the players may not have even encountered some of them yet. These questions will help you narrow down who needs to be payed attention to. The point is to identify the movement and progress of the groups that matter, so you as the DM can run a world that both moves in spite of the heroes actions, and responds or reacts to the heroes actions. If you’re going to try this approach, then remember that you aren’t telling the heroes story, that’s what your players are doing. You’re telling the story of the world’s inhabitants and are expecting the heroes to somehow contribute to that story.

Next time,  I’ll talk about the villain and his methods. In the meantime, happy gaming.