This Month’s Subject: The 6 Step Campaign

Greetings my fellow Game Masters, I thought I’d take a little time away from my production schedule to make my return to the Behind the Screen Column and get back in touch with all you guys who are faithful gamers for B.P.P. Inc. What better way to do just that than to show you how to put together a long running campaign with minimal effort on your part.

Let’s get started: If you are like me, and have very little time to put together games sessions for your group of players then perhaps this will work for you. I call it “The 6 Step Campaign”. This is a less work intensive way to run a long term, story-driven campaign that should take your PCs from 1st to 10th level and not be more than 24 hours worth of work on your part. I know 24 hours is a lot of time, unless you break it into a few 20 minute work sessions throughout the life of your campaign. You’ll need about 5 or so hours work time to get everything going, the rest is used in between session book keeping and adventure tweaking to better fit your Player’s.

Step #1: pick 6 pre written game adventures. These can be free stuff found on the web (such as on our site here) or published adventures or things you have written yourself in the past.

I recommend this breakdown if possible: (1) 1st level adventure, (1) 1st -3rd level adventure, (1) 3rd -6th level adventure, (1) 5th -7th level adventure, (1) 7th -9th level adventure and (1) 8th -10th level adventure.

There are a few rules you should follow: No adventure should be much longer than 20 pages. This will get you a good 3-6 hours of play time and won’t take you more than 20 minutes to read and familiarize yourself with. Also the more generic the better. This makes linking them easier as well as keeps you from having to change location names to fit your own game world.

Step #2: Pick out and artifact from the DMG or some other source. This will be the overall goal of your Campaign. If you like you can make the artifact, but this cuts into your work sessions so I don’t recommend it.

Step #3: Create your main antagonists. A Cult or guild is always good, since you can have multiple members of various levels. You can get this one in one 20 minute work session. Make up a single 1st level stat block and then add an additional level to it to make a “leader type” NPC. Once this is done scratch out a page or two of what the groups goals are and how much pull they have in the areas your 6 adventures take place.

Step #4: Create your Hooks. These will be clues that lead the PCs to the next adventure. You will need five of these. The first one is best to be a Key or a Map. No adventurer worth his salt will leave a Key or Map behind. You will place this in a faily easy to find place in your 1st level adventure. After that the Hooks can be anything under the sun. Perhaps a friendly NPC, strange runic clues or even more maps and keys. it really does not matter. Just make sure your PCs take the bait and try not to let them know they are taking it. You should be able to take care of this in another 20 minute work session.

Remember some of the best “keys” are magic items. Your party’s barbarian is less likely to give up his cool +2 Great Sword than he would be some brass key he found laying about.

Step #5: Interludes: These are short single encounters that will help your 6 adventures flow together into a single story-line. These can be a as simple as an antagonist ambush or a role-playing encounter with a helpful NPC that gives the PCs some information about either their quest, enemies or just world information. They also are great to use along with Hooks the PCs may have missed in the previous adventure or shows the PCs that what they took for a random encounter was much more sinister.

Try and mix these up, if a bunch of crazy cultist attack the PCs at the end or beginning of every adventure it will become dull. If on the other hand if the PCs are approached by an old sage seeking aid in finding this artifact, then they are attack by a band of thugs. The next adventure the same sage seeks them out, but is killed right in front of them by some of the same thugs a story begins to take shape. Now the next time someone asks them for aid they will most likely help or be ready for the thug attack. Either way it works out give the PCs what they are looking for, but let them get the jump on the thugs this time.

You will need to design 10 of these. They will be used starting at the end of the 1st adventure and take place on at the beginning and end of each adventure until the end of the 6th adventure. You can get away with only making five or so and reusing them, just changing the numbers or levels to better fit the PCs.

The stats for NPCs you can steal from the DMG or other published material or even old PCs if you wish. The role-playing encounters need only a couple of lives of info that need to be pass to the PCs. You should be able to put this together in a couple of 20 minute work sessions. Read the rest of this entry »