Getting started

Inspired by James Wyatt's Dungeoncraft article in Dragon #151, I want to start a new campaign for 4e D&D. Typically my games have been in Eberron, a detailed published setting. I start with a large plot and go top-down in developing it (or use a published adventure). Then, after I've figured out my plot, the players create characters which are wedged into the format I've already decided on. This is sub-optimal for many reasons.

My goals in this game are to have minimal prep and character-driven plot. I want to try to do more on-the-fly. I want to avoid overly complex plot lines that the characters never really pick up on. I want to avoid spending time onbackstory and plot elements that will probably never come into play. I don't want to use a published setting, because there's actually too much information there. I don't get the feeling that the players are actually exploring the world or interacting with it. They make too many assumptions. If they own the books, they already know all the interesting bits. I think I'd like there to be a theme to the game, to help me choose events and bind things together. I don't know what that theme is yet.

D&D 4th Edition is supposed to have monsters that are much easier to run and develop, so that will hopefully help with a lot of the on-the-fly work. I'd like to revisit some of the classic elements of D&D - goblin raiders,orc tribes, evil necromancers with skeletal minions, etc. Stuff that seems cliche now, but it's been such a long time since it was used that maybe it can be new again. The basics, like "rescue the princess," "save the children from the goblins" and "orc and pie" are simple plots, but can still be effective. I also like the idea that people aren't going to be reaching for supplements right away (mostly because they won't exist).

The bottom-up approach James uses for developing his starting town is appealing to me. Develop elements of the setting as needed and as appropriate, rather than all at once. "Points of Light" is a major theme in the default D&D 4e world. Small pockets of civilization surrounded by darkness. A journey even to the next town over has a real element of risk to it, and characters don't know much about what's outside. The PCs will start at first level, in a small town, to minimize their exposure to the wider world. As they move out from the town, they will be introduced to the wider world a piece at a time.

Culturally, I think I'd like the world to be Germanic in influence. I want the players to think "hey, I'm in a fantasy Germany" instead of England, France or just "Europe." I'm hoping the Germanic feel will make things a little bit different and interesting while leaving many of the basic assumptions and elements the same, like an alternate style sheet over a web page. Same content, different colors. A message board post on EN World helped me find a few sources of info, and it sounds like the Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing game has a heavy Germanic/Holy Roman Empire feel to it, so I'll be looking to that for more inspiration. Wikipedia has lots of historical information like names and dates, but it's hard to find cultural elements that are useful. More on the Germanic feel later.

While I intend for the plot to be mostly character driven, I will still have a larger plot in place to give them something to fall back on or cling to. I'm going to try to keep it very simple. Here's a rough outline of what I've come up with so far.

1. Characters get established in town.
2. Town gets raided by orcs or similar. Many dead, but many missing.
3. PCs go after missing townsfolk.
4. PCs rescue townsfolk, discover that orcs are part of larger army or dangerous group.
5. That group, in turn, is part of a larger plot. Possibly invasion of the region by a hostile army.
   

The nice thing about this kind of plot is that it grows in scope as the PCs grow in level. It's also vague enough to easily change or adapt to the current situation, and if the PCs take off on their own tangents, it can be fairly easily abandoned - or worked back in later to bite them in the ass.

For my NPCs, I'm going to try to use Conflict Webs, a neat idea for PC interaction. (The blog where the conflict web post originally happened (http://bankuei.blogspot.com) went defunct and the archives lost. The author has a new blog (http://bankuei.wordpress.com) and the old archives areaccessible on the Wayback Machine at http://archive.org.) Basically it's a relationship map indicating general reactions between people (or political bodies, or whatever): friendly, antagonistic or indicative of some kind of obligation. Anyway, I figure this is a good, relatively easy way to map out a town, or a nation, or a group of nations. That, combined with short descriptions of character, personality and notable appearance, should hopefully be enough to keep my prep limited.

I'm tentatively calling the game Hammerstein, after a possible name for the starting town. One idea I had for the town was to have it heavily economically dependent upon a brewery, which I'm sure will pique my player's interest. The Hammerstein logo will be a hammer embossed on a stein, which will feature prominently on the kegs.