I asked a number of people who GM very little or not at all what they would want to know if they were going to start GMing. This was one of the responses.
What are the key points to decide and write first to build the storyline around? Do I decide on a main antagonist? A town or area the story takes place in? What is the main storyline? Where do you start putting together a campaign?
I felt this was the next appropriate question to answer after “How Do I Pick The Right Game?” [1] It’s from the “If You Were Going to Start GMing” series I’m working on.
First thing. I’m writing to you under the assumption that you’re looking to build your own campaign and aren’t running one from a product you’ve bought. If you have a campaign setting, most of this will still apply, but if you have a campaign book like Curse of Strahd or The Wild Beyond the Witchlight then a lot of this work is already done for you. Imma start with an old campaign I ran called the Airy Peaks as our working example.
The Airy Peaks
What if there was a great dragon that lorded over the lands for several centuries, popping up every few years to pillage different parts of the world, and then the dragon just stopped?
- This dragon has a lair, a whole ass small mountain range.
- This dragon has taken a Smaug amount of treasure over the years. A Smaug amount of treasure is “many-much treasure” in adventurer standard language. If you’re still confused, read or watch The Hobbit for the reference… or just Google it.
- The dragon broke its pattern of appearing and hasn’t been seen in 20 years.
Adventurers went to see what happened to the dragon and found that its lair was a labyrinth of caverns and tunnels throughout the mountains, with many wondrous and strange biomes within. Many monsters made their home there, and there was many-much treasure to be claimed.
The reason the dragon stopped? It wants more, and the only more it can think to get is to become a god. So the dragon has turned his mountains into a soul collector for his ritual to become a god. Any creatures that die within the mountains become fuel for the ritual. The dragon lured monsters here with dreams and promises. The treasure lured the adventurers. Now there’s just a cycle of death that will culminate in the rising of a dragon god very soon.
Start with ideas, then find the conflict
Starting points can be tough. When I came up with the Airy Peaks, it was a bunch of ideas that came together in a moment of inspiration.
- I wanted a dragon fight at the end of a campaign surrounding a funhouse megadungeon.
- I wanted to have an experience where the adventurers adventure and then return to town to rest, recuperate, spend loot, and then go adventure again. Classic stuff.
- I wanted to do it in Dungeon World because I loved the idea of the 12 HP dragon and had run a dragon fight in Dungeon World for a friend’s bachelor party. It was a lot of fun.
Inspiration and moments when lightning strikes are great and all, but that’s just leaving it up to chance. There’s a way to generate the start of a campaign, and that’s by hitting a bunch of things on a checklist. The first thing, for my money, on that checklist is to start with a conflict. Whatever ideas you have, make sure there’s conflict attached to them. My conflict arose out of those three points of inspiration. It was the dragon wanting to become a god by perpetuating a cycle of death and making sure that my adventurers had reasons to come look for treasure in the Airy Peaks.
Generate Ideas
Step one is generating ideas. This isn’t hard as long as you don’t try to be original. Just remember, whatever idea you have has probably been done before… or at least 90% of it has been. If you’re having a hard time generating ideas, just start writing down stories you like and the parts of those stories that make you smile or give your brain that chemical rush. Just generating that list may inspire your next campaign. If your list is too big, then pick the 3-5 things that make you feel the best. This part of the process is a lot of vibes because you want to GM a game that makes you feel good.
For my money, there are three primary places where ideas can lead to conflict: history/lore, a town/starting location, or an antagonist. Your list will probably have some of these concepts on it. Let’s look at them a little closer.
History/Lore
These are the important events that have led up to what ends up being the first session of your game. They’re the important bits that give you enough feel for the setting so you can create scenarios for your PCs to engage with. The important thing is making sure the history of the world creates big conflicts you can create scenarios and smaller conflicts out of.
An example would be the evil empire that occupies the setting. See Star Wars or Avatar: The Last Airbender. When their stories start, the oppressors are already in control. The events leading up to this allowed the evil empire to be in control, and that history creates details and the conflict inherent in the setting. Here are a few examples:
- Rebels fighting against their oppressors.
- People who look to curry favor with the oppressors.
- People just trying to get by in a space where they could have more of their freedom, or even their lives, taken from them at any moment.
If you go this route, you’ll need to decide how much of this history and lore you want to create before you start playing or even getting your group together. My suggestion is to create enough to be comfortable creating scenarios for your game, but not so much history and lore that it’s all you’re doing or you’ve solved all your setting’s problems. Remember, the goal is to have big conflicts you can make smaller scenarios out of that begin dealing with the larger conflict.
Town/Starting Location
Locations in the world are great starting places. A town, a neighborhood in a city, a lone tower of apprentice mages in the wild, a spaceship, or a pirate ship. Any of these locations can be filled with interesting places and people for the player characters to interact with. The trick is finding something about the location that creates a conflict for the players to deal with.
Let’s say we have a fantasy town called Pirin in the north of a country. This town is near an important river and just south of some woods they log as a primary export to the capital. The town also has a dead necromancer’s laboratory beneath it. An excommunicated enchanter from the local enchanting guild has discovered it and started to learn necromancy. He hates the town. Also, to the north are a bunch of chimeric humanoids who live in the forest and don’t take kindly to the people of Pirin starting to encroach on their lands.
We have a location with a dungeon to deal with below, especially as undead start to appear in the town. We also have a group of people who have a legitimate issue with the town in the chimeric humanoids. Those conflicts have plenty of potential to create scenarios surrounding the town. That doesn’t even count what happens when you start deciding how the town operates with its logging operations, any bandits that might hit the river caravans that ship wood downriver, and the individual NPCs’ stories and issues they might have.
An Antagonist
Having an overarching antagonist is a good place to start too. A lot of people think it’s Darth Vader in Star Wars but it becomes quickly apparent that it’s the Emperor. Fire Lord Ozai is the antagonist in Avatar: The Last Airbender. You could have the leader of a criminal organization in a more urban-based game.
Ideologies Plus Power
All of these antagonists can create conflicts because of their ideologies plus their power. You’ll need to decide how their ideologies would influence their use of power, decide how much power they have, probably a lot to be an effective antagonist, and how they use that power. The trick here is deciding whether they will be influencers like Iago from Othello or the Emperor from Star Wars, who use influence, scheming, and deception as weapons, or whether they’re simply powerful like Fire Lord Ozai, who built a strong army and navy on the back of his immense personal power and power base, along with cunning military strategy.
Mixing power with an ideology can give you a solid concept for how the antagonists will function in the game. The Emperor’s ideology was about gaining as much total personal power as possible, and he would use whatever tools he could to do so. Fire Lord Ozai is a little more complex, as he believed in radical imperialism, supreme authoritarianism, and social Darwinism. Say you stripped off the names and trappings and just used those two concepts in different genres and with different characters, but kept the power base and ideology. That would give you some solid points for how they’ll behave in a game and can even let you decide on some motivations for them.
To go along with that, most antagonists are also the heads of organizations, which means they have underlings. These underlings also have motivations, ideologies, and power. This starts getting into organization building, and that’s not what we’re doing at the moment. But you can flesh out as much or as little of the antagonist and their organization as you want. Just don’t get bogged down writing a story. We want potential for conflict, not plot.
Now Factions
What you should have at this point is an idea and a starting point with some bubbling potential conflicts. You might even have some ideas about the other NPCs and factions in your setting. This is the time to give them a little more attention by understanding their goals and motivations, along with how they might be operating and where they might be living. You’re still just generating the base parts of the setting and the conflicts you think you’ll need to get your game going. I don’t think you need too much, but start with seven people and/or locations. Take a look at them and decide if you feel like you need more. If you do, jot down a list of what else you think you need and why, make the locations and NPCs you decided you needed, and ask yourself the question again. Don’t do it endlessly. Just do enough that you’re satisfied and you can remember at least the rough concepts of all the locations and NPCs.
Plan Out Your Session 0
This isn’t running your session 0, it’s planning it out. It’s just making a checklist of the things you need to go over so you have enough information from the players to get the game up and running with a firm foundation. It is also a way for the players to have some contributions to the game too.
Decide Who You Want to Play With
First things first, you need some players. You have some ideas for the game and a rough set of NPCs and locations to use, along with some conflicts that you can drop PCs into. If you have the choice, maybe you select people who would fit the game you’re playing and send them the pitch to see if they’re interested.
The Pitch
This is a tight 2-3 sentence pitch for what the game is about. This is so your players can make an informed choice about what they’re getting into. I also like to add to the pitch the schedule of the game, which is just as important as the pitch itself. Timing and setting aside time for stuff like this is important if you want your games to happen.
Information
Create a 3-6 bullet point information document for the players with the most important setting elements and game concepts. Really, this can be expanded into whatever you think is important for the players to know so they can understand some of the more interesting thematic, tonal, or rules-based elements you plan on using. The trick is to make sure you don’t overload them with information. That’s why it’s 3-6 bits of information. You can even send it out early to the people who agreed to play after you pitched the game.
Character Connections
Decide on how characters are connected to the setting. This will be important so the players can understand some of the constraints on character creation. This can be done with prompt questions. Prompt questions are leading questions that push the players to give answers within some parameters specific to the question. For instance:
“You’re a member of the Crosswater Adventuring Guild, a guild of professional adventurers with a fairly exclusive membership. How did you gain a spot in this prestigious adventuring guild?”
That is a question I asked my players who participated in my Arch Mage’s Legacy campaign, since the Arch Mage’s Legacy was connected to the Crosswater Adventuring Guild. It put them in the middle of the primary conflict of the game.
I like these questions a lot since they can do a lot of work to bake the characters into the fabric of the game. You can bring up important NPCs to provide connections too, organizations like the guild I just mentioned, items, historic beats, etc. Whatever the major or minor conflicts of your game are supposed to be, these questions can tie the characters right to them. The trick is to make sure that the question, while guided, has plenty of wiggle room for creativity on the players’ end in their answer. In the example, they’re going to be a part of the Crosswater Adventuring Guild. That’s what I needed, but they got to tell me how they ended up in it.
One of them ended up being the granddaughter of the guild master. Another was the prince from a foreign country. A third was an elf who’d been a part of the company for 80 years but hadn’t gotten out much to adventure in the past 50, and their skills had atrophied, but they also had a granddaughter who was just joining the guild. She was an NPC and not the PC. Another was a dragonborn who rose up out of their tribe and came highly recommended for their swordplay and ability to create artifice and machinery. It created interesting ideas I could, and did, use for the length of the campaign, which is another reason to do this.
Safety Tools
Decide on what kinds of safety tools will be useful in your game. When I’m running fantasy, I tend to use Lines and Veils, Script Change, and Stars & Wishes. In reality, I use those tools for almost every game I run. Lines and Veils cover an upfront set of protections. Script Change is a great in-game set of protections and storytelling tools for editing and veiling things we didn’t think of earlier, and Stars and Wishes is a good review tool so we can tune the game as we go.
With that, you have your plan for your session 0, which will allow you to build the rest of the foundation for the game with the players with confidence. When you get off track hanging out and chitchatting about games, and pop culture, or whatever your friends do, you’ll have this to reference to get back on track. You’ll also have an endpoint for session 0, and knowing when something will end helps people get through things.
The First Game
This is getting your first scenario together. You might do this after your session 0, once you have all your stuff together, or you might do it early and modify it after your session 0 when you have new information. The trick is to decide on the first problem you want the characters to solve. I would make it a symptom of the overarching conflict developed from your starting point.
Once you decide on the problem you want the characters to deal with, you need to come up with a first scene. I would do the following things:
- Make sure the characters are in it.
- Give the characters a chance to introduce themselves in some way.
- Start the scene with a hook that the characters will care about, along with providing some conflict or mystery.
This hook is important. It’s the moment that draws all the PCs into the narrative of the game. It needs to motivate them to act. It should do these things if your session 0 questions provided enough motivation for why the characters are involved in whatever the premise of the game is. But things happen, and if the PCs don’t seem to care about the hook you can just ask them, “Why do you care about this?” Now, this is a last resort if the ideas generated during session 0 don’t work.
To go along with this hook, you should make sure there’s a strong start to the game. This means you need to give the characters something to do right away. This something could be a fight, but it could also be a chase, a clue that they can follow up on right away, an intense conversation that leads into a choice that needs to be made right there and can affect things going forward, or something else I couldn’t think of.
After that, you put together the rest of the scenario. If the players make it through the scenario successfully, you’ll want it to solve the symptom problem. Now, what this scenario looks like depends on the game you’re playing and what the game supports, so if it’s dungeon crawling, they go dungeon crawl, and if it’s an investigation, they start having scenes where they look for clues and talk to people. These are two types of frameworks for play, and your game should give you some advice on how to put them together. I’m still gonna give you these last few pieces of advice:
- Make sure there’s a solid resolution for the characters at the end of the scenario.
- When you play the game, just let it play out and don’t try to steer the game towards moments you want. Use the framework of play based around the scenario you’ve put together.
- Write some Bullet Points of Potential related to the characters and the scenario that you’ve put together. Bullet Points of Potential are things that would be fun to have in play, but you don’t need to force them. If the opportunity presents itself during play, then you can introduce them.
With that, you have your first game prepped and the foundation for your campaign built out. After that, it’s about deciding on what problems the PCs should be dealing with or which problems the PCs will start choosing to try to deal with based on the conflict. But that’s dealing with story arcs, scenario design, and campaign design, which aren’t about how to start a campaign. So I’ll talk about that some other time.
So what did I miss? What would you do to start a campaign if you’ve never really GMed before? What advice would you give if you have? This is my take on it, but I’d enjoy hearing yours.