Question of the Week: How do you prepare your campaigns?

[JohnnFour]

Everyone has their own approach based on skills, experience, and influences.

For example, some GMs to heavy world building first, then create the first adventure, then build encounters. But other GMs start with a village or space station on a blank piece of paper and see where the campaign takes them.

So how do you create and prepare for your campaigns?

1. Step 1
2. Step 2
3. Step 3
4. etc.

 

[ExileInParadise]

For my Salvage Space campaign:
1. Pick a starmap - in this case, the stars within 50 light years / 15 parsecs of Sol
2. Generate the star systems on the map using AstroSynthesis
3. Pick a star system with an at least marginally habitable world
4. Put a space station home base in orbit of that world
5. Start fleshing out the rest of the worlds as a sandbox - going thru books of adventure seeds, sorting them into which worlds they might play well on.
6. Consider the government, corporate, NGO, underworld, and other "factions' that might be present - overt and covert - and relate the hooks from the sandbox to them.
7. Session Zero

So, basically heavy use of generators for idea seeding - then a second pass to start laying it all together logically.

 

[JochenL]

For my current Borderland game, I started with world-building before setting out to adventure. You can read about my process on the RPT Blog.

Before that, usually:

1. Select an existing setting (sometimes optional)
2. Devise a premise/razor for my campaign
3. Recruit players
4. Create characters
5. Build the first adventure based on my premise and the characters
6. Run the adventure and feedback events into the world

This has been pretty lightweight before and sometimes just wasn't too successful either by not integrating the characters enough or by keeping the world too sketchy.

 

[hauke]

I'm playing in the world of the german rpg "Splittermond", but with rules from the "FATE" rpg
So I don't have to build an entire world, just read the materials für regions and of course the adventures (I don't have the time, to prep everything myself)

So creating a campaign is more a deciding, which adventure comes next, and from the adventuers which encounters I want to use.


Prepping the next session is something like that (I know it's not the main question here, but I noticed that to late and I don't want to delete it ):

So what I do:

1. read the stuff, I have to know for the upcoming adventure
2. I prep 3 to 5 encounters ahead, so the PCs can't get pass me
   • >> everything that "happens to the players" is in my head an encounter (german "Begegnung")
3. prep every encounter
   1. CL the first
      1. What comes next >> session notes from the last encounter
      2. "Transferring" the basic infos of the encounters from the written adventure to CL
   2. CL the second
      1. What is the dramatic question for this encounter?
      2. What is the hook for the PCs?
      3. Where das "conflict" come from?
         • >> Fate specific >> which aspects of the players might I be able to compell
      4. When does the encounter end?
      5. 4 to 10 decisions points (for non combat encounters)
   3. putting all the stuff in foundryvtt
      1. map (I'm always using a map) (from my "stockpile" or creating a new one in dungeonfog, or in inkarnate)
      2. npcs (pictures from my stockpiles, (pinterest, patreon)
      3. short infos for the players
      4. ...
4. let's play
   
   
   
   

 

[Stephan Hornick]

So, I just prepared a hook for a campaign. Actually, I was inspired by Jordan's thread and here it is what I created in a couple of minutes:
A technocrat roman emperor fighting off an otherwordly evil by corruption and force

My steps were easy for me. I'm a very visual guy, so I imagine already scenes and locations and how NPCs might talk or how stories go, even if I just read "roman empire" or "otherworldy evil" and soon connections are created between those factions. Yes, factions, motivations and cinematic impression is what leads my stories on. I was intrigued by those words and the world of imagination just rushed at me.

Afterwards, I will tweak this or that relationship, but for the time being, I have for myself an impression about the tone and genre I want to create, maybe even about story I want to tell.

Second, I imagine the most interesting position the PCs could start in. An origin story so to speak. In presenting the leading factor of the campaign right at the beginning, I will make the course of the adventures clear. E.g. like I did in my summary above.

Third, usually I already have a couple of players who want to play, so finding them is not an issue. More to the point, it is mostly me who has no time to actually GM a new campaign...

And then, every other day my mind fills with ideas for the campaign and I write them down and get all hyped up and my players also. Until we eventually play the first session, I may already have written books about the world, NPCs, all kinds of things. I could already run the campaign for ages. And this is my mistake. I have hardly ever completed a campaign and it is nagging me and my players alike. And this is where I need to improve.

Roughly quoting @JohnnFour here: "What is the goal of a campaign? It is to complete it."

 

[JohnnFour]

Cool beans!

A technocrat roman emperor fighting off an otherwordly evil by corruption and force

My suggestion would be to add an OR ELSE. The way my mind works, I want to see STAKES or WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) angle so I know why players should care.