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Roleplaying Tips Weekly E-Zine Issue #250/251
12 Steps To An Epic Campaign, Parts 1 & 2
*******************************************************
12 STEPS
TO AN EPIC CAMPAIGN, PART 1
A guest article by Mike Bourke
mbou3355 'at' bigpond.net.au
All campaigns are different. Some are big, and some small.
The biggest of them all can be described as epic. An epic campaign can be summed
up in three terms:
1) Revelations
2) Revolutions
3) Repercussions.
Revelations: An epic campaign reveals unexpected
facts about the campaign environment. Not just small ones, but ones that redefine
the entire campaign, both past and present, casting it into a new context.
Revolutions: An epic campaign permits the characters
to react to the revelation in such a way that massive changes either take place,
or are prevented from taking place.
Repercussions: When you have a revolution, what
comes afterwards is usually as profound as what came before it. There are always
repercussions.
Having defined the ingredients in broad strokes, let's
start looking at how you design such a campaign. There are 6 pieces of such
a campaign, and each of them needs to be designed before the epic can take place.
(With experience, you can get away with only the first and a vague idea about
the rest, and grow the campaign as you go along, but it's always better to have
a road map in advance.)
These six epic components are:
1) Before
2) After
3) Transformations
4) Ground Rules
5) Explanations
6) Cataclysms
There are also six other ingredients that should be built
into a successful epic campaign. These are:
1) Exit Clauses
2) Choices
3) Character Developments
4) Timing
5) Side Issues
6) Unpredictability
This article will look at the first six components, what
they should contain, and how they assemble like a jigsaw puzzle to form a road
map for an epic campaign. Next week's installment will examine that last half
dozen.
1. Before
This is the beginning.
* Define a campaign world with lots of opportunity
for adventure.
* Throw in some NPCs that will fascinate the characters.
* Add places of adventure, such dungeons.
* Add some political affiliations ("the elves
are here, the dwarves are over there").
* Create a broad-based threat of some kind ("...and
over here, an empire of golems has enslaved anything made of
flesh in furtherance of some vast pre-programmed cause no- one understands...").
This is meant to be a combination of
red herring and background plot element.
* Throw in a couple of points of uniqueness for
each race, something that connects them to the campaign environment.
("The elves have become obsessed with racial purity after all the true-bloods
were killed off, 100 years ago; the
Dwarves are hostile and distrustful after the human realms used them as pawns
and then left them hanging in the war
that killed the true-blood elves", and so on.)
Once you have create these core beginning elements, the
fun starts. Next, two questions need answering:
1) How did the campaign world get into this state? Who
discovered these things?
2) How have they elements interacted in the recent past?
Write the history of the campaign world so far!
It's important to think about these things. Look for
consequences, throw in story twists such as backstabs, unlikely alliances, and
unlikely villains, and most importantly, define the style of the coming campaign.
You need to establish that there have been exceptional
characters in the past, how they affected society and history, and what infrastructure
- social, political, and economic - has emerged to deal with such individuals
in the present. That defines how the PCs will fit into the campaign world.
If the world is going to show no mercy to the PCs, there
must be tales of the death of heroic characters of legend.
If the world is going to be extra-nasty, there should be some ironic deaths.
"He assembled the forces who would ultimately win the day, but died
of an infection before the battle could be fought". Most importantly,
if you are going to have an epic flavour to the campaign, you have to have that
epic flavour in the backgrounds. Massed armies, gods, demons, tales of unimaginable
evil and unparalleled heroism.
Once you have all of this written up, you need to hide
some of it, obscure some of it, distort some of it, oversimplify some of it,
and flat out lie in some of it. Do this in a separate copy. This becomes the
player's version of the background.
2. After
So far, all we have is the recipe for a
really good campaign - not a bad start - but it's not yet an EPIC campaign.
So the next requirement, having determined the starting point of the campaign,
is to list everything that's going to change in the course of, and as a result
of, the campaign. In fact, it's not that simple. For everything that you list,
you need two alternatives, one describing the outcome if the party succeeds,
and one if they are...less successful.
It's generally far better if you pick a couple of deep
philosophical, conceptual, or ideological conflicts/contrasts and make those
the themes of the changes. For example:
* Collectivism vs. individualism
* Institutional religious practice vs. the gods
* Pantheistic beliefs vs. monotheism
* Nature vs. technology
* Social evolution vs. repression
Once you have these changes selected, you can examine
each element of the campaign to see what the impact of these contrasting outcomes
will be.
Don't be afraid to make big changes. Nor do you have
to see immediately just how you are going to get from "before"
to "after". For a truly epic campaign, every element of the campaign
should be affected in some way, and by the time you have the various themes
considered in combination there will be plenty of scope for just about any change
you want.
For example, I have recently run an epic campaign in
which one of the themes was the corruption of belief systems. As a consequence
of that theme, near the end of the campaign, the elves adopted the worship of
Lolth in defiance of their long-standing alliance with the human kingdoms, while
the drow abandoned Lolth, and (after a rather turbulent period of revolution)
have embraced Corellen and allied with the Human Kingdoms. The players could
have prevented this outcome in various ways, but this outcome was always the
lesser of two evils that they were forced to choose between. The next campaign
set in that world will feature a human, an elf, a drow, an ogre, and an orc
- as the "good guys"...
3. Transformations
Once you know the two end points, the next
step is to work out how to get from "here" to "there".
First, the easy ones - is the endpoint the logical outcome of a single change
in the affected group? If so, make a note of that change and start trying to
think of ways to cause it.
The more complicated ones involve a dual or even a triple
transformation - you need to find some intermediate step so that (a) can lead
to (b), which can then lead to (C), which is where you wanted to go all along.
Once again, you then need to work out triggers for those changes.
For example, the "inversion" in elvish
religious beliefs described above started with the apparent death of Lolth.
With the loss of their deity, the drow clerics found that they no longer had
access to miracles of faith. For a while, they were able to conceal this and
suppress dangerous suggestions otherwise (by increasingly violent means), giving
them the chance to learn the art of illusion from the (male) mages in their
houses. That let them simulate the power of Lolth and begin searching for ways
to restore their dark goddess. Of course, all the male mages had to be killed
off, lest the secret be revealed. Slowly, word leaked out, and the loss of Lolth
became common knowledge amongst them. That took the drow from (a) to (b).
Meanwhile, Lolth had regenerated herself, at least partially.
Knowing that she was vulnerable, she had prepared an escape for herself from
the trap that had supposedly killed her. With her drow no longer believing in
her, however, she needed to find another group of worshippers. She found them
in the elves, who (as suggested in step 1) had become obsessed with genetic
purity, subordinating everything else to the achievement of that goal, putting
in place draconian laws that were more in keeping with Nazi Germany - with the
loftiest of objectives, of course.
These practices slowly angered the eleven god Corellan
so much that he washed his hands of them. The elves were ripe for the picking
- taking them from (a) to (b).
With the difficult parts out of the way, it was easy
for Lolth to make the most of the opportunity, while her former worshippers,
no longer subject to her perverse and corrupting influence, slowly began to
grow more civilized. The steps for each group from (b) to (c) were thus relatively
easy.
In the course of six years of play, then, the elves went
from recognisable elves to something more like fascist drow, while the drow
became more like elves with a ruthless streak.
If you assume that each of these changes represents a
scenario, or part of a scenario, then a large part of the campaign is suddenly
defined. In other words, having designed a campaign environment conducive to
epic adventures, you then define a series of such adventures for the purpose
of achieving a desired change in the campaign world. 4. Ground Rules
It's only fair to give the players a chance
to get used to the ground rules of the campaign environment before throwing
them in the deep end. At low level, that means making sure that they gain awareness
and appreciation of the building blocks of the campaign to come. You need a
scenario to introduce these building blocks to them. Some of it can be done
through PCs, some through NPC encounters, and some through adventuring.
For example, in the world above, it was important to
establish the current status of drow and elves early on. Fortunately, two of
the PCs were an elf and a human former slave of the drow who had escaped. It
was enough simply to brief the players of those characters and to let the rest
emerge through roleplay.
Since the escaped slave wouldn't have the inside story
of the loss of Lolth, it was also necessary to have a drow NPC running around,
and to have the party directed at a later point to a former Matriarch of the
drow. This essentially broke the ground rules of that part of the campaign down
into four relatively easily-assimilated bites.
Inserting encounters and adventures of this type into
the campaign structure quickly begins to fill the campaign time line out. In
other words, make sure that the characters have had the chance to find out what
they need to know to make valid choices at the critical points in the campaign.
5. Explanations
It's also necessary to explain any key concepts
and assumptions of the campaign, and better yet, to demonstrate them. You have
to sketch in plot lines that clarify those parts of the background that you
obscured, reveals that which was hidden, exposes any lies, and so on.
In the case of the elves/drow example, for example, it's
necessary to make sure that the party knows something pretty devastating happened
to the gods a century or so prior to the campaign starting, and that the relationship
between the gods and their worshippers - and its implications - be explained
to the party. It's tempting to dump this into one or two big scenarios, with
lots of exposition, but it's far better if you can divide it up into smaller
pieces that are more easily absorbed.
When designing the campaign, it's perfectly acceptable
to tell the players something that is "commonly believed" (but
completely false), to tell them that the educated believe something else (that
completely misinterprets the truth), and to present a scenario that exposes
the flaws in these world-views. That then leads to another scenario where the
discrepancies are explained - and the second doesn't have to immediately follow
the first (or vice versa).
Some of these scenario elements can be incorporated into
the "Ground Rules" scenarios, others can be saved for the Transformation
scenarios, and some will have to be left to stand alone. The only rule of thumb
is that the characters deserve to understand the reasons things happen the way
they do. If you don't offer explanations, there will come a time when they give
up trying to understand the world, and stop interacting with it, and the campaign
will start dying.
6. Cataclysms
There's no such thing as an epic adventure
without cataclysms, disasters, calamities, setbacks, reversals, and other grim
situations. These can be triggers for some of the scenarios, outcomes of some
of the scenarios, and other epic conclusions. As a rule of thumb, I like to
have one every year to year-and-a-half of adventuring. These are the major staging
points of the campaign, the end of one volume and the start of the next (to
take an analogy from the world of fantasy novels).
In the drow/elves campaign world, for example, there
were 5 "cataclysm" scenarios.
* The first one ended with the revelation that
only 9 gods had survived the events of the background.
* The second told of a desperate race to get elvish
relief for a city besieged by orcs in a winter campaign.
* The third dealt with the rescue of the elven
Prince who had been captured by drow, and ended with the players redefining
the balance of magic, religious power, and human vs. non-human civilization,
while choosing a tenth god to complete the pantheon.
* The fourth revealed what the enemies of the
gods had been up to over the last century and ended with Lolth claiming the
elves.
* The fifth was the
epic conclusion to the whole campaign - a civil war that turned the whole political
and social background of the known world on its head and established why the
PCs would be retiring at the end of it and what they would be doing hereafter,
while giving the final pieces of explanation for mysteries that were revealed
in the very first scenario.
12 STEPS TO AN EPIC CAMPAIGN,
PART 1
A guest article by Mike Bourke
mbou3355 'at' bigpond.net.au
1) Exit Clauses
2) Choices
3) Character Developments
4) Timing
5) Side Issues
6) Unpredictability
1. Exit Clauses
By now, much of the campaign should be planned,
at least in outline form. You should have some idea of:
1) How the PCs will learn the essential concepts and
background.
2) What each character will bring to the campaign.
3) What you will need to use NPCs to highlight.
It should also be clear that the campaign will run for
several years!
Any referee who thinks that his PC lineup will remain
stable for that length of time is deluding himself. Players will leave and new
players arrive. Characters will die or disappear. And any of this can happen
at any time. It's a rare campaign that doesn't have some roster shake-up within
6 sessions of play!
The referee needs to be ready for all of this by opening
a file on each of them. Anytime a PC learns something that the others don't
know (but that is essential to the campaign), it should be noted in their records.
Anytime one gains possession of a Plot Device (usually a magic item, but it
could be a map, a book that can't be translated, a scroll with some exotic spell
on it...), the referee needs to make a note of it. Anytime there is a task that
the character is intended to eventually perform, or a role that they need to
play in order for the campaign to reach its epic conclusion, the referee needs
to write it down in their file and then tick off these tasks as they are achieved.
With this file, should the character be killed or should
the player leave - for whatever reason - the referee knows what he needs in
order to replace the character. It gives a basis for rejecting a proposed new
character, or for introducing a new NPC, or whatever else may be needed to follow
the road map.
What's more, for each character, the referee should have
a plan for writing that character out, should it become necessary because the
player has left the group. That plan can be as simple as "NPC until
they do X," or it can be as complicated as adding a whole new scenario
to the plan so that the other PCs get to learn the secrets that the old character
took with him. At all costs, avoid placing the campaign in a position where
an NPC has to make a vital decision upon which the campaign will turn!
Of course, any time this sort of thing takes place, it
also presents the referee with an opportunity. Instead of trying to force-fit
characters into predefined roles, try to integrate the characters with your
plans, adding whatever uniqueness they present to the overall plan. Reevaluate
what you have established and what you have planned, and discard your assumptions.
Try to arrange things so that the campaign grows organically from the PCs and
their choices and behaviour. Plot trains are never welcome!
2. Choices
Choice is all important in roleplaying.
It's the character's choices that ultimately drive where the campaign will go
and where it won't. Make sure that the players can see the logical consequences
of their choices taking place in the world around them. Remember though, that
the NPCs will make choices too based on the best information that they have,
as coloured by their personalities and world-view.
It's not going too far to say that the entire concept
of an epic campaign is built around the concept of choice. Will Frodo take up
the one ring or will he sneak out of Rivendell late on the night before the
council? Will Zumash simply take the treasure, or will he despoil the idol as
well? Players will forgive just about anything the referee does, if it's a logical
consequence of a PC's decision? (The same is not true of an NPC's decision!
Players give referees just so much room to manouver before they feel their characters
are being picked on.)
It's easy to make the obvious choices - good and evil,
riches or glory, that sort of thing. The major choices in an epic campaign should
be much harder. A choice between two evils. A choice between what's good for
some but bad for others. A choice between the short term and the long term.
The important choices should always be hard ones.
It's important to prepare the characters for the choices
that are before them. The most obvious way is to have advocates for each alternative
speak their mind. A less obvious one is to use analogy and metaphor and legend.
An even more subtle variation is to have the characters actually encounter situations
that are metaphors for the different choices.
Referees should always bear in mind the prejudices and
limitations of their players when setting up these choices. A lot of players
find it very hard to shuck off 20th century notions of romance, justice, and
civil rights. When these are taken into account, a hard choice can become no
choice at all!
Remember, when faced with a hard and equal choice, the
smallest difference can swing the balance one way or another, and that leaves
even the best players vulnerable to cultural carryovers. It can be very entertaining
and educational (to the referee at least) to use these prejudices against the
players, but doing so is a risky move. They can decide that they simply can't
get comfortable with the campaign and drop out.
I try to take the possible 21st century prejudices of
the players into account when presenting them with a choice so that the choices
are evenly balanced if the character thinks with his player's predispositions.
Then I award extra XP for roleplaying if the character makes the choice that
is opposed by modern standards of conduct, thought, and morality.
At the same time, though, it must be remembered that
the principle purpose of the game is not to faithfully recreate in a game setting
the horrors of a past age of barbarism. It is for a group of modern-day people
to have fun, and a very small amount of this sort of thing goes a very long
way. If the players wanted a history lesson, they would be doing something else!
(The same holds true for morality, philosophy, ethics, law, economics...just
about anything, in fact. If you have to explain it, think carefully about using
it.)
Before the players are forced to make a choice, the referee
has to choose to put them in a position where their choice will matter - and
your choices are no less difficult than the ones you are asking of the player
characters. 3. Character Developments
If you outlaw it, your players will insist
on having it. I'm talking about feats, classes, races, spells, etc. They will
want to know why and will find endless nice things to say about it. And the
more valid the reasons you offer (from your point of view), the more debate
you invite.
The worst reason (that is, the one that will provoke
the most backchat) is "game balance". The counter-argument
most commonly thrown back at you is that it's not unbalancing if both PCs and
referees have access to it, and furthermore it's not unbalanced anyway.
The next worst reason is that you want it that way because
it fits the campaign that you want to run. This will be reinterpreted to mean
"I don't want it so you can't have it." For example, I disliked
the traditional use of clerics as hit-point drip bottles, so I set things up
in such a way that healing spells simply compressed time enough for the injury
to heal as it would have naturally - it just happened a lot faster. That meant
that bones had to be set first (or they would heal crooked), that healing caused
an incapacitating wave of pain, taking the character being healed out of combat
for a round, that wounds left scars, and so on. It's all fairly reasonable -
I could have taken it further and had characters roll against starving to death
if too much time was compressed for them, for example. But the howls of protest
from the players were unbelievable, and they literally moved heaven and earth
(well, heaven anyway) to change the situation.
The best reason is one that involves campaign background,
particularly if there is a pathway to achieving or obtaining whatever "it"
is. For example, one player wanted to be a BladeDancer - an alternate class
from Dragon magazine or somesuch. The basic concept of the class fit the campaign
world reasonably well. The only problem was that the party had already been
through a situation in which the BladeDancer class would have been the logical
solution, and thus it had been established that there weren't no such animal.
The solution: decide that there had been such a class
a long time ago, but that they died out - and promise the character the opportunity
to resurrect the profession. For that PC, it would be a prestige class; thereafter,
if they played their cards right, it would be available to all members of their
race. This changed a lose-lose situation into a win-win.
And that brings me to the subject at hand - character
development in an epic campaign. Because it runs for so long, it's a fair bet
that characters will have lots of levels of development. It's a certainty that
before the campaign concludes, at least one player will want to take a character
class that simply doesn't fit the campaign world. If you, as referee, don't
prepare for this situation, you are sure to be put in the situation of having
a very aggrieved player insisting, "but I wouldn't have taken those
two levels of X," or "I would have done Y instead."
There are three things that you, as referee, need to
do to be prepared for this so as to avoid hurt feelings and unexpected collisions.
1) Require players to state what their next class level
is going to be at the time they complete the current one. That generally gives
you time to review in advance what they want. Better yet, get them to give a
rough development plan for the next half-dozen or so levels so that you can
seed the campaign with subplots and encounters that let them fill the requirements.
2) Be prepared to compromise. If the player really wants
something, do your best to make it possible for them to get it - eventually.
Get them to help you. Is the problem with the mechanics of the class - some
special ability that it has, for example? Then explain the problem and offer
them the class with something else substituted. Get them to explain why they
want that particular item, or spell, or class. Is it a problem with the textual
description of the class not fitting the background? If so, rewrite it.
3) Horse trade. If the character's taking of class X
will interfere with the next scenario, but you're perfectly willing for them
to have it afterwards, tell them that. Offer to waive any game mechanic prohibitions
that would prevent them taking it then (and come up with an in-play excuse for
that to happen). Offer them a magic item that the character will find useful.
If you have to, come up with a deus ex machina that lets them convert the level/item/spell
they do take into the one they want when it will no longer disrupt everything.
Your campaign plan should make allowances for, and provide
the requirements for, the development of the characters
along the lines the players desire. It's hard to do that without knowing what
it is that they want.
4. Timing
Timing is very important in an epic campaign.
There should be a discernible rhythm; when all is calm, events should plod along
with ample time and flexibility for exploration and discovery. As events approach
a climax, the pace should quicken.
But that's only the most obvious aspect of timing. In
a campaign with so much character development, it can be very hard to judge
how quickly the characters will advance - and, if you're not careful, you can
end up with party of 13th level characters romping through a fourth level scenario.
As characters advance, they gain in abilities - especially the spellcasters
and clerics - and these can throw your plans into a cocked hoop. Let me amend
that: these will throw your plans into a cocked hoop!
It took a long time to devise a way to deal with this
problem (and I've yet to actually put it into practice, so be warned!). The
idea is to take each of those scenario steps and work out three subversions
of each. The first one is "as written." The second one assumes that
the characters are four levels higher than you expected and consists of a couple
of quick notes on how to ramp up the scenario difficulty level to cope. The
third does the same for two levels more plus any carried-over extra levels from
previous scenarios.
For example, let's say that scenario #1 should take the
characters to fourth level, scenario #2 should get them to sixth level, and
scenario #3 to tenth level.
Scenario 1a would anticipate the characters coming out
of it at 8th level. That means the second half will probably be affected. Scenario
2a would assume that the characters started at 8th level and came out at 6+4=10th
level. Scenario 3a would assume that the characters started at 10th level and
will come out at 14th.
Scenario 1b would anticipate the characters coming out
at 6th level. That means that the spellcasters will have 3rd level spells for
roughly the last third of the scenario. Scenario 2b would assume that the characters
started at 8th level (from 2a) and come out at 8+2+2=12th level (not 6th!).
Scenario 3b would assume that the characters started at 12th level (from 2b)
and emerge at 12+4+2=18th level (the +4 is the 4 levels they are expected to
get, the +2 is the two extra that comes from a 'b' assumption).
After scenario 1, look at what levels the characters
have achieved and start off from scenario 2 at that level. I will lay odds that
you'll end up using the 'b' plan!
The third aspect of timing is to give the characters
an opportunity to perceive the consequences of the choices they made as part
of the climax to the previous scenario. In other words, follow each major scenario
with a mini-scenario that does nothing but expend time. Give rumours, innuendo,
and reactions time to percolate through the community.
These mini-scenarios should be self-contained and hold
little or nothing in the way of long-term significance. At best, they should
lay the groundwork for a future major scenario. This not only gives everyone
involved a chance to catch their breaths, it gives the players a chance to feel
that their players have achieved something, and gives them the chance to enjoy
the fruits of victory (or suffer the agonies of defeat, as the case may be).
Of course, these mini-scenarios should also be factored into the planned character
development of the PCs - they WILL get XP from them!
Timing is very important to an epic campaign!
5. Side Issues
If everything in a campaign is relevant to the main plot, the campaign begins
to constrict. The players will begin to demand free time for their characters.
It means nothing to make the time free and then just skip over it - you have
to play the free time. Give the characters a chance to get into mischief every
now and then.
The best way to make sure that something happens of interest
is with what I call microscenarios. These are even smaller
than mini-scenarios. They probably won't generate much in the way of XP. Often,
they are a single encounter, plus the consequences.
A pickpocket gets caught and tries to appear innocent
by planting the booty in a PC's pocket. A lay preacher tries to foretell doom
and gloom in the town square. A barbarian gets drunk and knocks on the wrong
door. A chicken escapes from its coop and a 500 GP reward is offered for its
return. A beggar is given a copper piece by a PC and begins to follow him everywhere,
seeming to recognise him no matter how he disguises himself. Think of something
outrageous, and then let events proceed as far as they will, at their own pace.
It not only helps integrate the characters with the game world, it's light entertainment
for everyone.
You should also integrate some of these things into the
main scenarios. An old rivalry between NPCs who haven't met in the PC's presence
before, for example. This helps add to the believability of the big scenarios
as they start out just like "everyday life" for the characters, and
it helps with the pacing aspect of the campaign raised in point 10.
Think mundane - with a twist.
6. Unpredictability
The last ingredient in an epic campaign
is unpredictability. Immediately after a player predicts exactly what you were
going to do, change it! The guy on the throne with the smarmy smile and the
eye-patch, stroking the cat, is not the big villain -just the flunky. The real
villain is the cat, which is actually a robotic extension for a supercomputer
hidden in the throne. Maybe the guy with the cat is actually a good guy, and
the mission the PCs thought they were on is not what it seemed.
Of course, once the players get used to this, they will
start second-guessing that there's going to be a plot twist. Once you reach
this point, it's no good going back to doing the obvious - it will just seem
insipid and dull, and will disappoint the players even as it surprises them.
So insert a plot twist somewhere else.
No-one likes to read a book that gives away the big surprise
on the first page. In an ordinary, disconnected campaign,
you can get away with the occasional spot of predictability, but in an epic
campaign, the predictable does not merely weigh down a single scenario, it's
a millstone around the neck of the whole campaign.
So, there you have it, everything you need to run a campaign
that will keep your players talking for years afterward - perhaps even for as
long as the campaign itself!
Good playing! Back |
