This week’s Toolkit comes at the request of Dave Clark (@bedirthan) who challenged me to write about making a one sheet campaign, and in the process talk about my pet project, Reach.
Reach – What is it?
Since I keep occasionally hinting towards Reach’s existence and what is it about, it might serve to explain it in a little more detail. Over the last couple of years I’ve gotten a little tired of the standard high fantasy RPG setting and wanted to stretch my creative legs. Rather than just making another tired old fantasy world using the same medieval tropes and politics that we’ve all seen over and over again, I wanted to push the boat out a little by asking “what if there was a fantasy world that looked like a D&D setting, but operated by the tropes of different movies, like Westerns or Wuxia?”.
After considering this for a while, I decided to make Reach, a dark fantasy setting that uses the themes and tropes of Western movies. Rather than being lore-heavy, Reach is also being designed to make it easier for a new GM to create a campaign format and tweak the setting to their own needs and wants, using the same sort of design philosophy I’m talking about today.
The setting is still in its infancy at the moment, since I write it when I can magic the time to spend doing stuff with it, but its slowly growing into something I really like. When my last D&D 5e campaign ended, I thought I’d suggest it as the next potential setting. Last week my game group got together and hammered out our own one-sheet based on what we wanted; pretty much following the plan I set forth below.
Designing a Campaign
Here’s a confession, I’m far from being a perfect GM — in fact, I’m not sure such a thing exists — but I think my strength as a GM comes from learning from my mistakes. If something in a game doesn’t click, either for me or the players, I’ll make damn sure it doesn’t happen again. Most of the Toolkit articles I’ve written thus far have come from situations at my own table where I’ve noticed a weakness in my GMing style and made inroads to correct it. In my earliest GMing days, before I really got involved in the RPG community — both online and locally — I didn’t have a mentor or advice columns to scour through in order to craft a better game, so I bumbled along on my own, learning as I went.
What took me the longest time to acknowledge was the idea that a game really needs to be formed with a covenant between players and GM, rather than each side of the table working separately, the GM making up a campaign and the players creating their characters and then trying to figure out how to make the two facets of the game work together once everyone’s at the table. One thing that really pushed the idea of doing things differently was playing the Fate Core system, which was one of the first systems I’d seen to address creating a campaign as a group.
Looking back, working separately seems an odd way to make a game, but if you don’t know any better it’s hard to see any other way to go about it. That said, if you’ve got a style of GMing that runs contrary to what I’m saying, far be it for me to tell you how to run your game, go with what works for you. If you are struggling to reconcile the characters your players make with the game you want to run, read on.
The Foundation Stage
Last week we finally reached the point of the year where everyone was back from holiday, visiting relatives or going to festivals, ready to get going for our next 5e campaign. Rather than going off on our own to make a campaign and characters, I assembled the group for a session zero so we could work out how we wanted to proceed this time, what we’d have to work with, and what we had to cover. In your own session zero, this is the point where you need to decide, or at least discuss, a few key components to your campaign.
Who’s GMing? Is this going to be a solo affair, a round robin deal, or some variation thereof? If you enjoy GMing and no-one else wants to give it try, more power to you, but remember that GMs can burn out, especially if they don’t give themselves a break. There’s nothing worse than a campaign dying on its feet because you became too tired to plan adequately or to even face the gaming table. Also, some people might want to run an adventure or two, but might be unwilling or not ready to tackle a full-blown campaign.
How long is this game going to run? Is it a one-shot adventure that will be over in a session or two? Is going to last for a few months, a year or as long as it needs to before the players decide it’s time to try something new? Remember, less is often more, people’s attention spans are limited, so it’s often better to run a shorter game — particularly with a gaming group you might be less familiar with — than try and aim for a ten-year epic straight off the bat.
Is there a concept you or the players want to explore? Are you thinking about a campaign centred on the adventures of five Wuxia heroes on the quest for glory, or the plights of a group of frontier adventurers? Maybe you want to explore a magical world ruled by dragons? Is there a published setting you or any of the players have in mind that you’d like to play, or will you make one together? Be prepared for some give-and-take here, but by the end you should have a concept you can all agree on, or at least build on.
What’s the scope and scale of the game? Will it take place over an entire world or galaxy, or be focused on a smaller area in greater detail, like a city or a single county? What kind of locations should the players expect to encounter, or where do they want to go? If the players want to be able to explore places no humanoid has ever set foot before, there’s no point in pitching an urban campaign that will never branch out beyond the city they start in. Vice versa, if the players want to play around in a big city, there’s little point in detailing the environs beyond. You can always expand the scope of a game later, but by keeping the focus as narrow as possible to begin with, you can invest greater detail in the area you have.
What is the focus of the game? Is there an overarching main quest that will propel the story along? Maybe there’s a central theme uniting different adventures, or an episodic series of adventures linked only by the characters’ participation? Give a rough idea about what kind of focus you were thinking about, since this gives the players a reasonable set of expectations about what the game will involve, or to raise points about what kind of game interests them. A group of kick-in-the-door power gamers might not be so enthused about a campaign built around political power-plays in Cormyr, but you might be able to tweak the focus to a civil war style of game if that appeals to them, or you might have to scrap the idea if no-one’s interested. Better to scrap an idea before you write the entire campaign and waste several sessions before realising no-one is fussed about playing another session of it.
With those four aspects thought about, you’ve got the basic framework for your campaign down on paper, so you can start pinning down some details. For giggles, here are a few ideas for pitches you could present to your group, and then tweak together.
(And here’s a google sheet)
The Structural Stage
Once you’ve the basic foundations of what you want to achieve with your game, it’s time to start addressing some specific needs for your game, namely, what do you and your players want to see in the game?
Expand on the core concept. What’s involved in it, what kind of themes could reinforce it, what kind of adventures would emphasise it. For instance, if you’re running a campaign set in a port town and its environs, it’s likely you’ll be looking at themes of civilisation fighting with the elements, the treachery of the high seas, and the impact of trade and wealth in a region. In such a setting you’ll probably see adventures containing pirates, sea monsters, sailing expeditions, naval battles, maybe even trade disputes between merchants.
Are there any scenarios you or your players want to try, locales (either general types or specific locations) they want to explore, NPCs they want to encounter, or any goals they particularly want to accomplish? Going back to our port town idea, maybe one of the players wants to attend a high society party, whilst another wants to go searching for buried treasure, maybe they all want to have some kind of encounter with a legendary pirate. You can use these specifics to create some interesting adventure ideas that tie in with your foundation.
Now is usually a good time to set up some expectations about the level of technology and magic in the setting, since that will determine how some of these elements might be bound together. Discuss with your players what level of technology or pervasiveness of magic items they’d be comfortable with, reinforcing that anything that they can acquire, so can their enemies. If there’s any particular technology that came up when discussing themes or scenarios you can reconcile it with what your players want overall. For instance, in Reach several players wanted trains – mostly so they could rob them – but the majority of players wanted a medieval level of technology and high fantasy level of magic, so we had to resolve the contradiction, eventually deciding that trains and other devices could be magically powered, but rare and expensive.
What kind of roles, classes or archetypes are the players considering for their characters, and how can you make those roles fit in with the overall concept. For instance, in the port town example, perhaps one of your players wants to make a paladin character, how could you make that mesh with pirates and trade disputes? Perhaps the paladin could be a renowned captain that led their crew through their faith in the gods. You can expand on little titbits of character lore such as that to create ties between characters and the setting, like I discussed last week. For instance, the renowned paladin captain could be part of a religious order that has taken to the high seas to escape persecution, or to preach their message of divine favour.
Are there any variant or additional rules you or the players feel might benefit the game, because they fit with the concept and the themes you’re exploring? I find it best to ask myself and my players if an additional rule is truly necessary, since it inevitably adds an extra level of complication, and also because a variant or additional rule should complement the purpose of a game, otherwise the entire rule is counterproductive. In our port town example, players might want to be able to invest in or build their own commercial enterprise, buy and upgrade ships, and so on.
The Detailing Stage
So you’ve got your foundations – what the game is – and your structure – what the game should include – done, the next stage is adding the details that will bring the game to life, the issues that will provide challenge and conflict, and the bonds that tie the player characters into the setting.
If you’re running a campaign around a central or a main quest, consider how that could tie in with the goals and troubles surrounding the characters, in other words, what can you use to motivate the player characters to try and resolve the quest. If a one-shot adventure campaign is based around a party being tasked to destroy an enemy installation, you should have some understanding of why they would want to: is it because they’ve a personal stake against this enemy, or because they’re loyal to the officer giving the orders?
In an ongoing character-focussed campaign, consider how the characters interact with the setting, and what details you can extract from their character concept to flesh out the setting and the campaign. For Reach, this meant looking at the bonds, flaws and backstory and finding small details to expand, such as the wizard’s five former apprentices that he looks in on from time to time. That’s five possible adventure hooks right there, and each one could tell us something different about the world they’re playing in.
To take a leaf out of Fate Core’s book, consider creating a list of issues, either with direct suggestions from the players, or by picking out potential conflicts from the backstories and lore you have on the setting. This will help you – and other potential GMs running this campaign – to be able to create a sense of focus rather than having the players aimlessly milling about. For Reach, the central issue was the fight for survival against an unforgiving new world, with other issues, such as my warlock’s plan for revenge against a bandit gang, providing a secondary focus.
And here’s one I made earlier, it’s not complete as I’m still waiting on a few players to make some final decisions and a little tweaking, but once I’ve done, everything I need to know for the campaign will be on a single sheet of paper.
Reach OneSheet
Admittedly this was a lot to cover in a couple of thousand words, so if you’d like to see a follow-up or some further detail on some of the points, feel free to reach and contact me, either here in the comments, the contact form for the Mad Adventurers Society, or through Twitter at @jay_jaydraper. If you like The Toolkit and want to help the Mad Adventurers Society to put out more quality content, consider visiting our Patreon page.