Campaign Design Project - 2022 (Part 1)

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

In 1975, D&D only a year old and making the rounds in the wargaming community, Gary Gygax was doing his best to explain his view of how roleplaying and running a campaign should work to the uninitiated. In a series of issues of Europa fanzine (part 2 of his article still survives), Gygax laid out a "challenge" in an article wonderfully titled:

"HOW TO SET UP YOUR DUNGEONS & DRAGONS CAMPAIGN – AND BE STUCK REFEREEING IT SEVEN DAYS PER WEEK UNTIL THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING!"

Obviously a bit of hyperbole, but the thrust can be summed up in this section from the article:

The referee of the campaign must structure the game so as to have something to play. He must decide upon these things:

1. The overall setting of the campaign
2. The countryside of the immediate area;
3. The location of the dungeon where most adventures will take place;
4. The layout and composition of the nearest large town; and
5. Eventually the entire world - and possibly other worlds, times, dimensions, and so forth must be structured, mapped and added.

This might seem to be too large a task, but it isn't really IF you and your players are enjoying the game (and it is odds-on you will!). Furthermore, not all five things need not to be done BEFORE play commences. In fact, most of the fine referees I know of work continually on their campaign, adding, changing, and expanding various parts continually. A thorough discussion of each of the five areas of campaign play is necessary before considering how to go about involving players in the affair.

- Gary Gygax, Europa 6-8

I highly recommend reading the rest of the article, but have been numerous articles on the topic of campaign creation, and this particular one was distilled in Roy Otus' Gygax 75 Challenge booklet, a free printable pdf on itch.io.

The booklet converts the above 5 steps into 5 weeks of campaign development, with suggestions and best practices for a GM to create a playable space for their players in an open world campaign. While labeled as a "challenge", with the level of pressure many GMs place on themselves, the REAL challenge might be slowing your pace down to stay with the book's 5-week schedule, rather than trying to keep up. As we've discussed before, don't take on too much, it's okay to take your time, avoid burnout. 

Once you're on a proper pace, this booklet can easily be paired with other similar creative tools (that we'll discuss in later posts) to assist a GM in the creative process, allowing an easier flow to world and game prep. As written, this process will create a campaign centered on a pair of locales:  a hub town and a mega-dungeon, as was the style at the time. 

For those unfamiliar with the mega-dungeon, it is a version of the mythic underground, a unique cthonic ecosystem of thematically linked floors, rooms, and tiers of dungeons for the adventurers to scour of monsters and loot for treasure, before retreating to safety when their resources run thin, or if events turn against them. Then, after resting and at the start of the next session, continue again, journeying deeper into the maddening depths. For those coming from 5e, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, aka The Ruins of Undermountain is a classic example of a mega-dungeon. My personal favorite example, is Jennel Jaquays' Dark Tower, the first mega-dungeon, and written by a queer author.

But, if you're looking for something different out of your game, this process can also be used, to create a more modern overland journey style campaign with a goal or series of challenges, by repeating the process with smaller points of interest to create an extended journey, adding new locales to explore on the way to a final goal. Just avoid writing yourself into a corner or forcing the player's to obey your command. Avoiding absolutes and singular routes whenever possible.

So let’s take a swing at this ourselves. Taking the list of objectives provided by Gygax and Otus, October is now Unofficial Campaign Design Month or UnCaDeMo. One article at a time, we’ll work through each of these steps to create a campaign. At your leisure, read both the original article, and Roy Otus' version, those articles will help explain the steps we take, but you can also follow along without them.

Week 1 - Concept

During this first week we are developing the core concept of the campaign and setting. The "pitch" we give to players so they can get a basic grasp of the game, decide if they are even interested in playing. Starting with some form of scratch paper, like a note book or a blank computer document is ideal for getting this all out. I'm planning to use a mix of digital and practical tools throughout this process.

As October is the spooky month, I initially was looking at doing a darker fantasy. I wanted to do a coastal setting where trading from the outside world had slowly trickled to nothing, leaving this city and its people isolated. I've been sitting on a copy of Goodman Games' Original Adventures Reincarnated: X1 Isle of Dread, and been looking for an interesting way to drop it into a campaign. Treat it as the setting's mega-dungeon, rather than as the campaign unto itself. This fit with the coastal setting, particularly if the style of ships used by these people were Thalassic or Mediterranean. 

With that I was starting to narrow in on the image of my campaign. Isle of Dread is famously inspired by monster adventure movies, dinosaurs, King Kong, etc. With sailing in the Mediterranean of 500 BC to 500 AD era setting, we get classic sailing adventure stories: The Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad. And more importantly, we get a very specific visual inspiration: Ray Harryhausen. Stop-motion monsters.

I grew up watching Harryhausen's charming, poorly composited, stop motion monsters fight Americans pretending to be Greek or Arabic. They flailed blindly at opponents they could pretend to see but I loved it. The settings, the journeys, the monsters. Once I knew the keystone of my setting, I started racking my mind for adventures to drop into place, histories to use, how to design the hexes and - I looked at the Challenge again. 

Week 1 - Concept. Concept ONLY. Don't overwork yourself. Pacing. Let ideas simmer. So I jotted down what I had, including a basic elevator pitch for my prospective players. 

After the pitch, we move on to gathering inspiration. This is less something we share with the players, and more to assist us with later steps. Obviously Harryhausen provides a treasure trove of inspiration, but so too do the stories his movies are lifted from, or those adjacent to them. Greek myths, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, we could even pull in stories from Egypt, North Africa or Iberia as the campaign progresses; always leave room for more. Within the Mare-Nostrum there was an entire world I could use.

Otus' version of the challenge also includes "extra credit" for each step. For Week 1, creating a mood board stands out as a useful tool. This allows us to search the web using google or pinterest for art that we can share as part of our pitch and drive our creativity later on. I hope I don't have to mention the uneasy legality of scrubbing the net for inspirational art, but don't use any of art procured this way in published works, or take credit for it as your own.

Collect your evocative art on a word document or in a digital photo album. Pick pieces that yell "this is what I mean!" to your players, or yells to you "Oh, this is even better!" when needing inspiration. Be willing to let your setting bend to new ideas when you come upon them. Remember that until your players run ito it, nothing is set in stone.

So that is how we spend Week 1 creating a Campaign. For next week, "Surrounding Area", we'll begin mapping the first few hexes of around our adventurer's home town. Basically finger painting time. For the more high-minded, we'll also discuss hex-crawls and the pros and cons of different scales.

(Note - This originally was posted on my wordpress blog paired with images meant to compliment the text, those were lost in transition to blogspot. My apologies, I hope the context remains understandable.)

Further Reading:

• Europa 6-8 -  Internet Archive is once again a treasure for old articles and creative works. In addition to the entire fanzine, and Gygax's article, spend some time on IA just looking for interesting material.
• Ray Otus - In addition to the well done booklet for the 75 challenge, Otus has a number of other zines and micro games on Itch.io, plus a selection of modules that can work great for inserting into any campaign, despite being designed specifically for Dungeon World.
• Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan - For those unfamiliar with the stop-motion master, the streaming service Tubi has a fun documentary on Harryhausen available for free. Check it out. See if it inspires you, and consider checking out some of the films he's worked on. (Note - Tubi No Longer offers this documentary, I instead recommend seeking out "Jason and the Argonauts" or "7th Voyage of Sinbad")