Archived thread started by Andrew:
I've been working on various campaign ideas for a while now, from a La Femme Nikita/Alias-inspired Cyberpunk 2020 game set in Neo-Soviet Russia to a Forgotten Realms campaign set in my own version of the Moonshae Islands, yet I can never seem to get organised to sort it all out. Have any of you got any tips for doing this? I've looked at various releases like the FR setting book and the Brak Sector sourebook for WEG Star Wars but never seem to get my own ideas sorted out. How do you personally go about it? Or is it just a matter of self-discipline in typing the material out?
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteI tend to divorce my setting material (which can be reused) from my campaign notes. The campaign world is then described in three documents, an overview, a rules digest and a setting bible.
The campaign overview i one or two pages long. It describes the basics of the world, playable races, the role of magic, and so forth at a very high level.
The rules digest covers any rules required for the setting, including variant races and classes, available prestige classes, deities and spells, and so on. It typically runs to about 10 pages, and is written as though I were not using any House Rules (hence references to favoured classes in the Tollis rules digest, when the campaign itself doesn't use them).
The setting bible is about 100 pages long, and describes every aspect of the setting, at a fairly high level. This is not rules material, purely fluff, but should provide enough detail for another DM to pick up the setting and run games there. This document is also available as player material; an interested player should feel free to look at the Tollis setting bible to find out what Spellweavers are, for instance.
If I'm using a pregenerated setting, I don't need to prepare any of the previous documents; the work is already done for me.
The rest of the work is specific to a given campaign. I start with a notebook, in which I make some high-level notes about the campaign structure, theme and goals. For instance, my notes for the current game include such gems as "Ancient Prophecy", "Dragon", "Missing Children", and the like. For D&D, I also include starting and ending levels, and a note on how long I plan to run the game. None of this is fixed in stone, but is merely an aide for me later.
The next thing I prepare is a document describing character creation and House Rules. This lists the books that are in use, and then builds on the Player's Handbook, the Rules Digest, and other important works. Everything I think of goes into this document. Therefore, the current campaign house rules document includes the method for creating ability scores, the fact that there are no multiclass penalties, and the fact that I'm using the Monster Manual II and the Fiend Folio for monsters. The corresponding rules document for the most recent Vampire game I ran included instructions about the playable clans, modifications to the points granted to characters, and the new XP system I used.
I try to keep the House Rules document as short as possible, because I don't really like using house rules much. However, I also try to keep to the discipline that everything that is used is either in the core rulebooks, the rules digest, the house rules document, or a book listed in the house rules document. Simply put, there is nothing that pisses me off more as a player than a GM who springs house rules on the group without warning, or who changes the rules in mid-game, and I will do my damnedest to avoid making that same mistake.
After that, I return to my notebook, and start preparing. Sad to say, I don't really have any organised ways of working beyond that.
Hope that helps.