This is Part 4 in my series of how I plan roleplay heavy D&D campaigns. For the rest of the posts in this series, click the button and return to the index.
Integrating it all
Now we have a plan, we have a setting, we have a bunch of PCs. All that’s left is to tie them all together, come up with some rough pacing outlines, and run the campaign.
To tie the whole thing together, I go back and reread all my PC backstories, and look at the NPCs they know, and the life they live in my setting. I ask myself: where is there overlap between what Zakaroth needs and who the PCs know? Where can I tie the PCs goals to Zakaroth’s plans? Or Zakaroth’s minions plans?
This takes a lot of workshopping. I mostly think about this in otherwise idle time - like when I’m on a run/walk, in the shower, doing the dishes, etc.
For Siqram, some of the tie-ins were fairly obvious. Izzy was a dragon rider, and the dragon riders are responsible for patrolling the glyphs. What if something called her out of retirement? Maybe Izzy is the dragon rider from my kernel scene? Maybe that’s how the entire campaign opens. Izzy, who is supposed to be retired, is getting pulled back into war and conflict – which she hates.
Ash was super easy too. He’s the second-in-command of the army and wants to prove himself. What if the first-in-command dies, and he’s suddenly thrust into the most important military position in the city, right in the city’s biggest crisis? That’s a good way to prove yourself.
Some of them were harder; Arranis and Kayson were a lot harder. And it took a lot of workshopping for me to get there. But here’s where I ended up with the group:
What if Siqram was protected by ancient gods? What if Bahamut (god of the lawful dragons) was born in Siqram? What if he had a wife? What if that wife was The Raven Queen? What if Bahamut was missing, and so now his wife, The Raven Queen, feels a protective responsibility over the city?
What if Kayson is having doubts over her god because The Raven Queen is interjecting - she’s choosing Kayson as one of her acolytes to protect the city. The Raven Queen is the god of time and memory - maybe she knows the city is under imminent threat, but cannot intervene directly, so she must find her chosen.
What if all the players were chosen? What if Ash’s dad died on some mission for the Raven Queen? What if he had sworn that his entire bloodline would serve The Raven Queen, and she will help Ash prove himself?
What if Arranis, collector of relics, savior of memories, is chosen by the Raven Queen? What if she pulled him here from the Fey for some unknown reason?
What if Izzy’s dragon is somehow connected to Bahamut, and through that connection has the attention of the Raven Queen?
You can see how it would take many, many iterations to get to this point. And that’s okay! I spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off my very patient wife and getting her input. I’d go back to the players and ask to make small tweaks to their backstory to facilitate some idea I had.
But once I felt good about the broad strokes, I’d move on to the next phase.
Session outlines
This is the last step before I start scheduling sessions and prepping them. I make an outline of all the sessions and their pacing. This way I know roughly what I need to accomplish in each session, what plots need to develop, and roughly where it ends.
How do I do this when I don’t know how the players will respond to the villain’s plan? I take a look at how many sessions I want to run and how many steps are in the plan, and I try to align them.
As a general rule of thumb, I plan on alternating RP heavy and combat heavy sessions. Each RP session ends on a combat cliffhanger, and each combat session ends with the clues to pick up the story for the next session.
I’ve got a fixed number of RP sessions I can use to develop the villain's plan; I make the villain’s plan with that number of steps. Then, each session the PCs and villain are resolving one step of the plan. Sometimes the PCs completely foil the villain's plan at a certain step. And that’s great! My villains are resilient. They go back to the drawing board and figure out another step that will satisfy their goal.
My outline ended up looking like this:
- Introduce the characters, poison the glyph, explosion in marketplace, fight the demons, the players find a ritual, cliffhanger on stopping the ritual and killing the minor big bad
- Fight the ritualists. Ritual has a book with some infernal clues.
- Glyph has been stolen. Apparently the cultists want to smuggle some artifacts into the city - figure out why and stop them.
- Conflict with the artifact smugglers
- Really need to find that glyph. Try and find some help. Find the glyph and travel to it
- Conflict with the guardian of the glyph. Re-insert the glyph
- Boundary blows up! Oh no! Figure out where Zakaroth is going to be summoned
- Go kill that mother-devil.
At this point I’ve got an entire campaign outlined! I’m ready to plan out session 0 and session 1 and get going. I’ll go into more detail about how I do that in a future post.
Next up I talk through how I design the individual sessions for the campaign
