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wittyy-name · 5 years

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Hey, Wittyy, do you have any tips on planning a dnd campaign? Especially as a first timer. Advice? Lifehacks? Warnings? (to clarify first timer, i know a lot about dnd and even read some worldbuilding guides but I'm not sure if they're working for me, maybe you have a little different, unique approach to planning process?)

This ended up being a very long post about me rambling about my experience world building my first campaign, so I’m just gonna slap it under a cut lol

Idk how much advice I can give?? I’m running my first long term campaign and kinda just flying by the seat of my pants at this point. World building is a PAIN and it can be hella frustrating, but it’s also kinda rewarding?? And I have experience with it from writing stories that definitely helped.

I built a world from scratch, which is a first for our dnd group. We’ve done a campaign in Skyrim, and we’re also doing a campaign in the Witcher universe. Mine is the first where the players can’t just google world info, which I like a lot.

My campaign started with an idea of having a party of bards. And I wanted them to have a REASON to stay together. Not just the typical dnd “we’re together bc why not”. I wanted them to KNOW each other but still have secrets to hide?? So it wasn’t just strangers?? So THAT was my starting point. And I asked myself, how do I make that happen? So I had the idea that they all have to start bard level 1. They were in a band for a year together, but then they broke up. They haven’t seen each other in five years. ALL of them have gone through hell and back ((bc what’s dnd without tragic backstories??)). They’re level 4 now, and they got to multiclass into whatever they wanted to. So they’re forced back together through circumstance, and they’re stuck in this party of people they used to know but are now so different.

My goal for my group was simple: I wanted a story where every player feels like the main character. I wanted them to have their own secrets and quests and things to figure out and pursue. I wanted each and every person to feel like they’re leading the group. Everyone to feel important. So I had several brainstorming talks with each of my players. I figured out what they wanted to play, and ideas they had, and then we expanded on them and build up their characters together (bc it’s easier when you have a dm to build with you). Another goal I had was to give everyone a personal rp challenge. Which is unique to the player. It’s mean to help them build up some of their weaknesses and gently guide them out of their comfort zones.

So now I have six players with crazy unique and complicated backstories. They all have secrets and weird quirks. They all have goals to pursue and things to keep from the others. And most of them have aspects of their backstories that THEY dont’ even know. Missing memories, secret bloodlines, unknown curses. This is really important to ME. Since these are secrets even from the players, they get to learn surprising new things about their characters as the campaign goes on. Even THEY don’t know everything about themselves, and that’s exciting to them. It means more work for me as a dm, but it’s worth it for them.

This was an important factor for me in planning my campaign because my group plays online. With online dnd, it’s harder to keep engaged. When you’re not in person and you can’t feed off the energy, it can be easy to lose focus. I noticed that from previous campaigns, and I tried to come up with ways to help it. What I came up with was this: the best way to keep online players engaged is to make them invested in their characters. Simple, yeah? By having complex characters that they put so much into, they love those characters, and thus love playing them. By giving them an rp challenge specifically suited to them, it forces them to pay attention, to constantly be in the mind of their character so they can consider how that character would act and react at any given time. By giving them individual goals to pursue, they’re constantly trying to figure shit out. By keeping aspects of their characters unknown, it gives them a feeling of excited anticipation. All these things help keep them engaged and locked into their character’s minds, which makes the whole experience a lot of fun.

As for the WORLD, I kinda just... figured out an aesthetic that I thought was cool and tried to run with it?? I don’t remember how I got to this idea, but I thought the feywild was cool, so I said “what if something cataclysmic happened and the material plane and feywild are now mixed together and people have adapted to living with a constant fey presence?? And then one night I was almost asleep when I thought of SKY SHIPS and FLOATING ISLANDS. So I said “what if a lot of the material plane races raised sky cities to get away from the fey threat on the surface??” And so I had my aesthetic for the world, I just needed specifics.

I thought “well, if there were old kingdoms before the Cataclysm, how would they have been affected when the planes merged??” So coming up with an old political climate, and how things have changed since. How the surface and the sky cities function now. Where do all the races fit into this map? Into this world? The feywild and Material Plane are only two of the three mirror planes, how does this affect the Shadowfell? Okay, the shadowfell is starting to leak through the thin veil and we have pockets of shadow portals that are becoming worse and worse as the centuries go by.

I had the area where the Cataclysm happened, but what happened there? This was admittedly the hardest part, and I got a huge writers block here, but I figured it out. What society lived there. The magic they used. How shit went wrong and they merged the planes.

What gods exist in this world? Well, I picked a single pantheon in the dnd handbook and said “these are the gods” bc I didn’t want to incorporate ALL of them. But the idea of this pantheon was that there was no afterlife, which started play into ideas I had for the lost city that started the cataclysm. And it kinda all started to come together.

The whole time I was building the world and history, I kept my character’s backstories in mind. I wanted all of them to be important SOME HOW. All of their importance differs. But I wanted them all to be tied to big world big picture things SOMEHOW. So they could all feel chosen, in a way.

But the best part?? This is an open world campaign. There are things in the world that are happening, and they’ll happen with or without the party’s interference. But their interference can cause domino affects in world events. I didn’t want to set my party on ONE QUESTLINE. I wanted them to CHOOSE. So I slapped them down in a town, got them used to their characters, and now they’re out of the “starter zone” so to speak. They can choose where to go. What ideas to pursue. They all have driven backstories, so it’s interesting to see who kinda pushes theirs to the front of the agenda. And there is no Good and Evil. I wanted a whole world of gray area. So the party’s opinions of world events will probably change depending on who’s backstory they follow first. Who they meet first can shape how they think and what side they get on. Which is super exciting. The whole campaign is malleable and the party has free rein. In fact, they can choose to never interact with world events and just do small time fuckery quests. It’s all up to them. But shit will be happening and the world changing. And it’s exciting to see where they get to go.It’s a very character and roleplay driven campaign, which is what we all wanted. And seeing them so invested in characters is so nice. Seeing them love my world is great. And knowing what I have in store for them is exciting.

I know this isn’t so much TIPs as me just rambling about my experience, but maybe it’ll help??The best actual advice for building the world... come up with an aesthetic you want and the goal for your campaign. Those are your keystones. Now ask yourself why? How? Where? Who? You want a king to be insane? OKay, why? You want there to be a world that’s mostly water with ship travel? Okay, what’s the history? How have the people adapted to this world? How are cities constructed and what social constructs come about in a mostly ship/water based world?

I can give you some specific examples from my campaign about how I designed social constructs for different societies if you want, but I feel like I’ve rambled enough for one post lol. Good luck!

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