Campaign Framework- Help!

[Evard's Small Tentacle]

I am working on a new campaign based on a vague premise:

- The PCs are children of the former Emperor/Retinue/Allies who royally fked up and semi destroyed the world. He and his retinue fled into a safe location where the next generation has grown up, ignorant of the broader world and goings on.

- I want the main focus to be the PCs setting off to explore the devastated world, with the opportunity to "set things right," if they so choose to.

Some open considerations:

- How the Emperor fked shit up and some "keys" to potentially fixing it that could be part of the larger objective
- How long and how many generations it has been since the Emperor fked shit up
- Why the players would even consider leaving the safe haven
- The Potential Safe Location (is it a hidden town? living in plain sight? underground cavern location?)
- Some mentors and such within the Location (how the society might have evolved, and including enough breadth for races and classes)
- Any modules and adventures out there I can steal from, I mean be inspired by

 

[squeen]

Cool idea!

Off the top of my head.

a) At least 2 generations --- that's enough time for some strange stuff to have come into existence
b) unleashed a plague that "devolves" lifeforms
c) something stumbles into the Safe Haven revealing the lie that the Outside is unlivable (Logan's Run)
d) I instantly saw the Safe Haven as a (domed?) valley encirced by mountains with only one (known) tunnel/passage to the Outside.


Hope that sparks something.

 

[squeen]

I always played elvish magic-users when I had the rolls --- but over time I have really come to dislike "races" for PCs.

My elf acted exactly like a human anyway. The NPC elves had way more "class" than either I or my cohorts.

It's serious takes away from the magical wonder of ANY imagined world when the players get to "own" it.

Me thinks: PCs should be human (full stop).

 

[Two orcs]

I thought of a similar campaign framework, the royal dynasty is driven out by invaders and taken in by a neighboring kingdom. After a generation the scions are hungry for revenge and to liberate their former subjects so they build their military experience and wealth by raiding, plant agents and the seeds of the reconquest before finally assembling their army and going for it.

 

[squeen]

I've found a new form of procrastination in the form of "re-organization" of my campaign book. Basically, I've broken down the elements into more bite-sized chunks so that LaTeX natural Part-Chapter-Section-Subsection formatting will be compatible with labeling my maps. Sounds simple right? Well, it had me flummoxed for years. I wanted three parts (I now have 19).

I also had to fight with how things are labeled --- roman numerals, numbers, letters, etc. The issue is that if you use letters, you can only have 26 items. Also, roman numerals don't look good on maps (hello B1!), but two-digit numbers and capital letters do.

The take-away is don't fight the system. Especially if it's a computer.

The result of my auto-generated Table of Contents is currently the following:





You can tell readily by page-count which sections have some meat to them and which are just placeholders. This was entirely influenced by the places the party chose to go.

The one exception to that is the first part of the mega-dungeon. It's started out as a single-page map I made in 1986. It was not the first dungeon I had made, by any means, but this one I decided to type up on my Apple ][+ computer and print out on my dot-matrix printer! It was probably in response to my group's DM heading off to college - which meant no more weekly games. It was my attempt at transitioning from player to DM for some other HS aged kids. I was very much trying to walk in his foot-steps. I only got as far as keying the first 20 rooms, but the blue-print for much more was formed back then.



A lot has changed on this map since I came back to D&D for my kids, circa. 2012. But perhaps the most surprising to me was how little time they actually spent in this tent-pole dungeon (maybe a year out of the last 10). So much of their interest seems to be focused the surface world, its politics, and traveling hither and fro---that's why the TOC exploded and my naive segmentation of the campaign write-up in three simple parts (wilderness, human kingdom/city & underworld) ended up being too small a bowl to fit all the ingredients.

I seem to have an affinity for long, seemly impossible to complete, projects. The procrastination-exercise of re-organizing the contents of existing material may seem pointless, but for me its really motivating to see all the pieces of the jigsaw laid out. It shows what's missing and motivates me to nudge the task ever so slightly closer to completion. I know how many maps need to be re-done. How many illustrations I need to draw. How many rooms I need to key. How many tables I need to add. And, yes, how many walls-of-text I need to condense (avoiding that!).

When you look back at things you wrote a decade ago (or even 4 decades!) you realize how immature it actually all is. Also, how poorly organized. I think having some distance from all that naive "creative brilliance" will help make for a tighter design some day---if I can get there. Post COVID ("vaccines"), my energy has seriously lagged across the board.

However, even with this latest warty incarnation, I think I may send it to Lulu to print a proof in hardback...just to get a feel for how it might look some day. I have it currently laser-printed in a plastic-comb binding, but a real 450+ "book" would be a very cool thing to hold. I may even go whole-hog with "glossy" paper!

 

[Beoric]

I seem to have an affinity for long, seemly impossible to complete, projects.

So, that makes you a... DM?

 

[squeen]

Right on man!

 

[Avi]

A point about Sections...
Did you ever consider the lifeless "point" system? 1 1.1 1.1.1 and so on?

My old handwritten notebook are cringey to look at, but have some raw bursts of unrestricted creativity!

 

[The1True]

The result of my auto-generated Table of Contents is currently the following:

Now this is the kind of OCD insanity I've been talking about! So glad to not be alone
C'mon guys, let it all out! I'm looking for examples of unrelenting madness. Hours of work utterly pointless to anyone but yourself. Extra credit if it was in the process of creating something intended for public consumption!!!

 

[The1True]

The result of my auto-generated Table of Contents is currently the following:

Seriously though, how hard is this to do, because I have a couple of indexing projects I've been putting off...

 

[The1True]

My old handwritten notebook are cringey to look at, but have some raw bursts of unrestricted creativity!

I dug up a couple of old projects the other day and I was surprised at the raw creativity. I've gotten a lot tighter with my writing and 'crunch' over the years, but it's amazing the stuff you come up with when unencumbered by rules mastery, eh!

 

[squeen]

A point about Sections...
Did you ever consider the lifeless "point" system? 1 1.1 1.1.1 and so on?

My old handwritten notebook are cringey to look at, but have some raw bursts of unrestricted creativity!

Oh yeah. Been there, tried that. It's ugly on the page and almost impossible to use to label the map. The last bit is key.
Anything other than 1-2 digits or single upper-case letters on a map is cumbersome.

When I get the world-map redrawn, I'll show you how it plays out. Large regions are "Parts" with roman numerals and titles. Then a blow-up map of each region is itself labeled with upper-case letters. That means each region cannot have more than 26 major sites. The sites (e.g. a lair or dungeon) themselves are labeled with numbers for points-of-interest (e.g. rooms), as it typical. Finally, if a particular POI (like rooms in an inn) needs multiple parts, then I'm back to letters. I haven't fully committed to capital letters in boxes or lower case at that lowest level of detail, but I'm leaning towards the former.

Seriously though, how hard is this to do, because I have a couple of indexing projects I've been putting off...

This is why I mentioned I'm doing it in LaTeX. If you use its built-in document elements (parts, chapters, section, subsections) you can control the formatting of those (e.g. font & numbering style). Then you just issue the command \tableofcontents, and BAM!, it shows up in the PDF. I also use it for all cross-referencing, so if the numbering floats around, it auto-magically points to the correct item (e.g. "...the shoggoths in room 12"). And you'd better believe---over the 10 years of tweaking this thing---the numbers float like those little marshmallows in your Lucky Charms.

I am a programmer. That's probably why I love LaTeX.

 

[Beoric]

Now this is the kind of OCD insanity I've been talking about! So glad to not be alone
C'mon guys, let it all out! I'm looking for examples of unrelenting madness. Hours of work utterly pointless to anyone but yourself. Extra credit if it was in the process of creating something intended for public consumption!!!

Probably nobody here will get this but you, but what is likely my biggest, stupidest project that I can't stop myself from working on is assigning all of the classes, class features, feats, powers, spells, character themes, paragon paths, and other options to various martial and magical traditions. So that if you are trained in any school you are more or less competent but not optimized, and if you want to be optimized you need to find teachers who were trained in a different way from you. AND assigning training costs for all of those options.

So starting players either are trained in a particular school (which may have in game financial or RP consequences) or by some rando mercenary or hedge wizard with a completely random set of options. And whoever they train with, they are stuck getting the options that their teacher knows.

And like, some options may only be known by the remote Jhorash'tar orcs, and others by the elite Aereni Deathwatch, and if you want the option you need to convince them to train you.

And, because I'm basically a masochist, it isn't enough that the Jhorash'tar orcs have a single fighting style. Every tribe of Jhorash'tar orcs has to have a fighting style that is both recognizable as Jhorash'tar, and yet somewhat distinct from every other tribe of Jhorash'tar orcs.

 

[The1True]

Probably nobody here will get this but you

Aw yeah. This is cathartic!
I want more! Anyone here spent half a year writing up procedural tables for a 14 room dungeon, or several months coding an automated hex generator, or devized an entire runic language for one clever magical door trap? Let the poison out folks!

 

[Beoric]

I have a spreadsheet to suggest names, alignments, genders, personalities and hooks for NPCs, as well as relationships with other NPCs in the table. So I plug in all the NPCs the players are likely to come into contact with (blacksmith, leatherworker, chandler, etc.), and then overwrite the suggestion cells (which are random lookups) with the actual data. And then it concatenates it all into a single entry for each NPC, which I can cut and paste into a document. It's pretty clunky if you don't know what all the cells do, but it works.

There are some add-ons I'm planning. The race suggester isn't quite on line, since I need it to be different by region. And I think the links to the table that suggest names by race or nationality are broken.

I also have dumped all the data from Appendix A of the 1e DMG into a spreadsheet, along with stuff from Courtney's material and other sources. I press F9, and it spits out the next bit of dungeon geography (corridor, intersection, door, room, etc.), and where appropriate, the presence of monsters, traps, tricks and treasure (using Moldvay stocking). It will suggest a monster type, how treasure is guarded, the type of trap and how it functions, and the DMG keywords for a trick.

I also have a spreadsheet that works as a random name generator. I listed all of the names commonly associated with a race or nationality, but I also broke those names down by syllable, in order to create unique names using the same sounds. So it randomly selects among existing names and randomly generated names. Of course I integrated that with the random NPC generator.

EDIT: I also have a spreadsheet that randomly determines which hexes on a map will be keyed. I have been playing with a random terrain generator, but I haven't found a paper one that I'm happy with.

 

[The1True]

-sniff-
truly beautiful

I have a pretty good terrain generator, but I suspect I'd have as much luck explaining how it works as you would explaining your NPC generator.

 

[Osrnoob]

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