If you spend enough time in D&D forums and similar spaces, you’ll come across people asking for ideas on how to start a campaign other than “you all meet in a tavern.” My short response is this:
Begin the campaign in medias res — with action — and with the PCs already an established group with a shared history. There are two major advantages to this strategy:
- You can start your campaign off with a memorable moment of exciting action located anywhere in your world. Maybe the PCs are being chased by a horde of orcs, maybe they’re in a deal just about to go bad, maybe they’ve just tracked down someone they’ve been hunting for weeks, maybe their camp or surveillance post is under attack in the middle of the night, or maybe they’re all dangling from a cliff when a dragon or helicopter flies by and they need to find cover before it comes back in for the kill.
- The PCs have a history together. There’s no forced camaraderie or “it takes time before I trust others” going on. No wondering why they’re together. They’ve been through all that offstage before the game begins.
Of course, you can’t just hand wave that and tell the players this is the case. Well, you can with the memorable moment of action, but that too can be established through the creation of the group’s past history.
As I would answer these “how do I start a campaign” questions, I further developed my own ideas, which I then put into practice, and then revised my responses until I started a Google Doc that I shared, and, eventually, a workshop for the One-shot Fridays Discord Server.
A good part of these ideas don’t originate with me. Some of them I’ve borrowed from GMs whose games I’ve played in, and some from other sources likeMichael Shea’s Sly Flourish blog and Lazy DM series, Seth Skorkowsky YouTube videos, particularly the Playing RPGs, GM Toolbox, and RPG Philosophy playlists),1 and Justin Alexander’s The Alexandrian blog and now So You Want to Be a Game Master. I know, for instance, that Sly Flourish discusses starting with action in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, but I think I started starting campaigns off with action before I read his book.
So, how do you do you establish a pre-existing team of player characters dropped into the game world in medias res? Create the back history first, and then decide the action. As a group, we do this through a variety of exercises in what I call a Session 0.5, after the we’ve made the player characters.
In future posts for this series, I’ll cover activities for establishing shared histories for a party and tie the PCs to the game world before we play, and why I use them. They include
- That Was Me! Part 1
- That Was Me! Part 2
- That Was Me! Part 3
- That Was Me! Part 4
- Boons, Part 1
- Boons, Part 2
- Tell Me about Me
- Rumors and assumptions
- Who Do You Rely On/Who Do You Protect
- Established Goals
- I’m not a big fan of watching YouTube TTRGP advice and actual plays, even by most of the big names out there, so the fact that I look forward to watching Skorkowsky’s videos is worth noting. ↩︎