Setting up a campaign can be a challenge. Where do you start? What’s important to develop before play? How the heck do you even start planning a campaign?

Below is a list of campaign creation resources available online:

• How to Organise Excellent RPG Campaigns (http://dukestreet.org/archives/004096.html): Eleven tips for working with players and what (and how much!) information to prepare for your game.
• How to Start an RPG Campaign Step 1 — Want It (http://homework.never-ends.net/2010/01/how-to-start-an-rpg-campaign-step-1-want-it/): The first post in a series on setting up campaigns. This one covers getting yourself motivated to begin a campaign. Other posts cover choosing a game system, choosing a genre, story creation, worldbuilding and more.
• Campaign Creation (http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/category/campaign-creation/). A list of posts about campaign creation on the Campaign Mastery website.
• Obsidian Portal (http://www.obsidianportal.com/): A site that hosts campaign wikis. A GM can set up a site for his game here, providing a one-stop place for the campaign’s players to look up important NPCs, summaries of previous game sessions, game calendars, and more. Offers both free and paid services.
• What qualities are important when creating a fantasy RPG campaign? (http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/11/what-qualities-are-important-when-creating-a-fantasy-rpg-campaign): Tops for creating a generic fantasy setting for an RPG campain.
• 11 Questions for starting a new campaign (http://www.rpggm.com/blog/2012/12/13/questions-for-starting-a-new-campaign/): My own post giving eleven questions that will help you set up a new RPG campaign.
• RPGTable Online (http://www.rpgtableonline.com/welcome.php): This site offers on-line tools to help you run your game, including die rollers, maps, monster stats, tokens, and more.
• Building RPG Campaigns (http://thewargate.blogspot.com/2011/10/building-rpg-campaigns.html): Advice on choosing a game system, creating adventures, creating a campaign story, setting up for sandbox campaign play, using published adventures, closing a campaign.
• Campaign, Adventure, and Encounter Design Articles (http://www.roleplayingtips.com/rpg-articles/#design): A list of articles on the Roleplaying Tips website related to rpg campaign creation. Some topics include Choosing a Setting, Preparation of Material for a Roleplaying Adventure,  Writing the Effective Villain, and more.
• Creating an RPG campaign for children, pt. 1 (http://rpgathenaeum.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/creating-an-rpg-campaign-for-children-part-i/): The first of three posts on planning a campaign for kids, using as an example the campaign the author created for his 7 year old son.

How about you? Do you have any favorite campaign creation resources? Feel free to post them in the comments section below. What do you find the most difficult about creating a new campaign? Any tips for making campaign creation easier? Please share!

[Image courtesy of aleske via Flickr Creative Commons]

Related articles

• The 7 RPGs You’ve GMed the Most, and the 7 RPGs You’ve Played the Most (gnomestew.com)
• A Tale of Two Types (gnomestew.com)
• 11 Questions for starting a new campaign (rpggm.com)
• Aging With The Hobby (rpgblog2.com)
• Gaming Charters and Social Contracts in Detail (gnomestew.com)
• For the future of RPGs…get rid of the DM! (geekken.blogspot.com)
• January RPG Blog Carnival: New Beginnings (koboldenterprise.com)

This is the 4th post of my series on introducing new players to your game.

Most of the time, when you bring an new player into your game, you’ll be adding someone who’s already an experienced player. But whether she’s been playing RPGs for 10 months or 10 years, remember that she’s still a new player to your game and much of the advice given in my post on introducing a brand-new player to your game still applies.

Setting Limits

In Introducing a New Player to an Established Group, I talked about knowing your limits. This is doubly important when you’re considering adding an experienced new player. Most GMs will realize that a brand-new-to-RPG player will take extra time and make them more likely to think twice before adding new players.

But it’s very easy to over-estimate how many players you can handle when adding an experienced new player. It’s extremely flattering to have someone wanting to join your game. However, while you can run pretty well with fewer than your optimal number of players, running with more than that is usually a recipe for disaster.

Figure out the maximum number of players you can comfortably handle and don’t exceed it. If you find you’ve got more people interested in playing then you have seats for, count yourself blessed. In this situation, you basically have two choices:

• start a second campaign (if you have the time and inspiration to add another game to your schedule);
• keep a waiting list of players who can join when one of your existing players has to leave.

Never allow yourself to be pressured into adding a player if you’re not ready to. No matter how much your current player wants to add his new girlfriend or how much that new player you met at the last convention begs, keep to your limit. If you don’t, you’ll probably find that running your game becomes a chore instead of pleasure. Remember: if you’re not having fun, no one else will.

Adding the New Player

Get to know him

Before asking that new player to join, spend some time getting to know him. Meet outside of a game session and just talk. Ask him about his previous game experience, what he’s liked or disliked about previous games he’s played. Do this before you tell him anything about your game.

Ask about his favorite character and why it’s his favorite. How he describes his character can tell you a lot about his preferred play style. If you’ve got an entire group of Character Actors, and your prospective player starts telling you about his character’s stats and all the cool bonuses he’s gained and how much damage he can do in combat, he’s probably not the best fit for your game.

If this sounds like a job interview, it is, in a way. And like at a job interview, the player is likely to be on his best behavior. He’ll be eager to make a good impression and will probably tell you that your group’s play style is his absolute favorite thing. That’s why I recommend asking him about his interests before you tell him anything about your game.

The most important thing here is to listen to your intuition. Does this player seem a good fit for your group? Are you completely comfortable around him? It’s okay to feel a few jitters about having to talk to someone completely new, but if he makes you feel unsafe or even just uncomfortable–even if you can’t say why–thank him for his time and tell him you don’t think he’s a good fit for your game.

Tactful honesty is definitely the best policy here. You don’t want to disappoint him; because of that, many GMs will admit a new player, even if they’re not comfortable with him, rather than hurt his feelings. But no matter how hard it is to turn a player down, it’s still much easier to turn the player away at this point than it is to kick him out later when he turns out to be a problem player.

Meeting the group

However, you’re not the only one who needs to be comfortable with new player. The rest of your group needs to be comfortable with him, too. If, after talking to him, you think he’d be a good fit for your group, ask him to sit in on a couple of game sessions. This will give him a chance to see if he thinks he’ll enjoy your game and give the rest of your group a chance to meet him.

After he’s done his “sitting in” time, ask each of your players individually what they think of him. If any of your players feel uncomfortable around him, try to find out why. If it’s because she “doesn’t like his energy,” pay attention to that; it’s probably her intuition picking up on something wrong. In this case, he’s probably not good for your game.

If, however, it’s because he looks a lot like her ex-boyfriend, but she knows she’ll be able to get beyond that after she gets to know him better, go ahead and add him. Players with minor concerns can usually tell you exactly what they don’t like about a player. Usually the group can work through these issues. But you never want to sacrifice a good existing player for an unknown new player.

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Next time, I’ll talk about ways to actually add the new player to the game and Beg, Borrow & Steal (my newsletter) this month will cover six ways to add a new PC to your game. It’s a free monthly (roughly) newsletter of GM tips. You can sign up for that in the sidebar of any of this blog’s pages.

[Photo courtesy of jeffreyw via Flickr Creative Commons]

Other posts in this series

• Passing it On: Introducing New Players to RPGs
• Introducing a New Player to an Established Group
• Characters for Brand New Players

Related articles

• Introducing New Characters to Your Campaign Milieu (paperspencils.com)
• Changing how your players play (the right way) (stuffershack.com)

Want to write your own adventures?

You can learn to write good adventures and The Adventure Creation Handbook will show you how. Maybe you’re searching for an original idea. Or maybe you’ve just looking for a way to take that exciting climatic battle you see in your head and put it into a form your players will enjoy. Wherever you are in the adventure creation process, this  book will guide you step-by-step through the process of creating an adventure for any genre, any game system.

Overcome creativity blocks and dry spells. The Adventure Creation Handbook describes several methods of coming up with adventure ideas your players and you will enjoy.

Customize plots for your group and your game. By using your players and their wants as a starting point, this method allows you make adventures your players will want to play.

Integrate adventures into your campaign. This method integrates the adventures into your game system and campaign world from the very beginning. No trying to shoe-horn or retrofit ideas that don’t really fit.

“If you ever opt for an affiliate program, I’d be proud to represent your book.”
Johnn Four
http://www.roleplayingtips.com
http://www.campaignmastery.com
http://gamer-lifestyle.com

What’s included:

• A step-by-step method for creation adventures that covers
  • Generating the original idea
  • Translating that idea into a series of events by asking and answering questions
  • Putting the events in a meaningful order that’s flexible enough to take player whim into account
  • Developing incentives to entice your players to go on the adventure
  • Getting it all down on paper (or in the computer) so you don’t forget anything important
• Suggestions for running your newly written adventure
• A worksheet to help you put your ideas in order
• A checklist so you don’t miss any steps
• Printer-friendly black & white design. No heavily colored pages to eat toner.

In addition, when you purchase The Adventure Creation Handbook, you receive these free bonuses:

1. Life time updates. You’ll receive a free copy of this book every time it’s updated or revised. No need to go searching for errata or buying the next version, just to have up-to-date information.
2. An example of adventure creation using this method, illustrating each step.
3. A booklet of GMing tips from my blog Evil Machinations.
4. 90-day unconditional money-back guarantee.  No questions asked.

What’s it cost? $7 for the next 30 days. That’s a special launch price. After August 15, 2011, the price will go up to $10.

So far, in this series of posts on creating a full adventure from an adventure seed, we’ve written down the adventure seed and asked ourselves questions about it, then answered the who and what questions of our adventure, now onto our “when” and “where” questions. Once we’re done with the questions, we’ll move into creating the actual events of the adventure.

[Photo courtesy of Orin Zebest via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0]

When Questions

When is this performance to take place?

How much time do we want to give our PCs to prepare for their assignment? We want to let them have some preparation time, but we don’t want to slow down the adventure by giving them too much time so that they run off on tangents. Lets give them a week. So, the performance is going to take place one week from the time the PCs get their assignment.

What is the current date?

This is the in-game date. If we’re hooking this adventure into a larger campaign, the current date can be significant. If this is a stand-alone adventure, we don’t really have to set the current date. But it might be useful for us to figure out how much time the princess has spent in seclusion already (two months–so she’s definitely ready to talk to someone from the outside world) and how much more time she has left to go (four months, which seems like an eternity to her at the moment).

How much time do the PCs have to prepare?

We’ve answered this question above, but we’ll restate it here: one week.

How much time do the PCs have to complete the mission?

They basically have as long as the performance lasts to get everything set up. They should plan on actually getting the princess out as soon as possible after the performance.

How long is the performance to last?

Two hours.

Where Questions

What is the nation is the princess from?

If you’re using an already created game world, you’ll want to make her a member of a nation that already exists on that world. But let’s assume that we’re creating this game world from scratch as we go along. So we’ll call the princess’ country “Sunfall”, and place it in the eastern half of our new game world (where the sun seems to set).

Is the PCs’ employer from the same nation, or a different one?

The same nation. He’s her younger brother.

Is it the same nation as the PCs?

For maximum impact, lets make the PCs from a different country and call it “Seavale”, a coastal nation. Seavale borders Sunfall, but relations have been strained between the two countries (yes, I am making this up as I go along ). Prince Alexei deliberately looked for people from Seavale, so that if something went wrong with the plan, he could claim that Seavale agents were trying to kidnap the princess for their own ends.

Where is the compound located?

Near Sunfall’s royal palace, which is located near the middle of the kingdom. The compound is close by, in case relatives want to visit and so that the king and queen can visit and more easily keep an eye on who comes and goes from the princess’ seclusion location. But let’s say it’s between the palace and the Seavale border, which means that the far side of the compound is going to be well-guarded by people the king can trust.

Where is the performance to take place?

Let’s interpret this to mean “where in the compound the performance will take place”,  since we already know that the performance will take place in the seclusion compound. We’ll schedule to performance to take place in the compound’s inner courtyard.

What is the adventure’s starting location?

The prince will want to meet the PCs somewhere where they can talk freely and he won’t be recognized. The first thing that leaps to mind is the very much overused seedy tavern, just inside the Seavale border. Trite though it is, this location does have a lot of aspects in its favor. For one, if we posit that the crown prince has kept a very low profile in the kingdom, so much so that few people outside of the royal family would recognize him, he should be able to come and go from from such a place without notice or comment (unless someone does recognize him…). People in these types of places are used to minding their own business. Depending on how competent we want our prince to be, he can either dress down to match his surroundings (the prudent course of action) or he can flaunt his wealth, attracting every major pickpocket and cut-purse in the area, which could create some wonderful complications to the adventure.

What is it’s ending location?

That will depend on if the PCs get the princess out or not. If so, the adventure will end at a “safe house” the prince has set up on the border of the kingdom. If not, the adventure is likely to end in the princess’ seclusion compound. Either way, we should have the safe house location prepared.

What other locations might be important?

The castle, the wizard’s tower are all possible locations, but the bulk of the adventure should take place in the princess’ compound, so that’s the location we’ll spend the bulk of our location preparation time on.

What are the languages, customs, and practices of the entertainers? Are they different from the PCs?

We could go hog-wild on this one and set them up with a different language and some really unusual customs, making them originally from a very different culture than the PCs. But I don’t want to spend time on that aspect, so we’ll make all of them–the PCs and the entertainers–from the same basic area, Seavale.

However, theatre people tend to be a superstitious lot, so we can have a little fun with the PCs by giving our troupe of players a few quirks, but not so many that they take over the game session. So, first, we can have the actors begin their day with offerings to whichever god in the campaign world watches over performers and traveling players, followed by a couple of hours of vocal and physical warm-up exercises. So unless you’ve got a party full of bards, that should help push the PCs out of their comfort zone somewhat.

The day would continue with rehearsals of the current performance, as well as some stage combat practice (less deadly, but just as demanding as real combat practice)., finally concluding with some street performances to bring in needed money. The PCs will be expected to take part in these, so that they can learn what they need to know to preserve their cover.

We can also give the troupe a couple of superstitious habits, based on real-world theatre superstitions, the primary one being the practice of never wishing “good luck” to someone going on-stage (hence the real-world practice of saying “Break a leg”). Let’s say that actors in this world say “Crack your head”. Also, having a black cat in the theatre house prior to performance is said to bring good luck and a successful play. Since ours are traveling players, they don’t usually perform in theatres, so let’s say they keep their own pet black cats who travel with them as companions and that it’s a very bad omen if one runs away or gets harmed.

Next time, we’ll finish up the questions with “why” and “how”.

Other posts in this series

• And *Then* What Happened?: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas
• Step By Step: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, part 2
• Setting an Example: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, part 3
• Answering the Questions: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, pt. 4
• Questions Continue: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, pt. 5

This is part 5 of our series on how to develop a full adventure from an adventure seed.

Last time, we began answering the questions our adventure seed suggested. We answered the “who” questions; today we’re going to continue with the “what” questions. As before, none of these answers are set in stone–we can come back and change them at anytime.

Now, onto the “what” questions:

What are the exact goals of the mission?

Players need concrete goals that allow them to know when they’ve succeeded or failed in their mission. Let’s say the princess is in the secured compound because she’s been betrothed to the court wizard, who’s also her father’s best friend and 30 years her senior. We’ll call him “Roman” and add him to our growing list of NPCs to create. And let’s give the kingdom a tradition where a bride-to-be spends time in seclusion with only her closest female friends and (in the case of nobility) maids.

Our PCs are going to be tasked with the mission of smuggling the princess out of her seclusion so she can marry her “true love”: Feodor (that’s what Prince Alexei will tell the PCs). We’ll go into more detail about this when we get to the “why” questions.

What is the performance the players are going to do?

They’re going to perform a play that’s been popular in the surrounding kingdoms, a romantic piece about true love, high adventure, and daring-do. Given the fact that most PCs have little to no performing skills, Kirill’s, our troupe’s leader, plans to use them as stagehands. This will also allow the PCs more room to fulfill their mission, as they don’t have to be on stage at any particular time.

What kind of performers are they?

A troupe of actors, who travel around performing plays at various courts and festivals.

What security measures are in place?

We’ll come back to this question later. Once we’ve answered the other questions, we may have a better idea about what resources the kingdom has to draw on to create the security measures.

What maps do you need to create?

As of this point in time, the only map we really need is one of the secure compound where the princess is serving her “seclusion”–that is, a time before her marriage takes place. But we’ll go into this more in our “when” questions.

What special items might the PCs need to succeed?

So far, we’ve got nothing to tell us that the PCs will need any special equipment, but we may come up with some as we further flesh out or adventure.

What does the compound look like?

Given the fact that this is for the princess, it wouldn’t be odd for the “compound” to be beautiful and comfortable. It would be filled with the princess’ favorite things and probably display the wealth of the king, her father, and of the kingdom itself. So think soft, comfortable furnishings, artistically painted walls, probably with murals, perhaps even an internal courtyard with a garden and a pool.

What group or faction does the national leader belong to, if any? What group or faction does the PCs employer belong to, if any?

Our adventure isn’t shaping up to include factions or groups, so we can safely ignore these two questions. If we change our minds, we can always come back to them.

What obstacles might stand in the way of the PCs succeeding?

Well, first and foremost, there will be the security measures we’re going to detail out later. Other possible obstacles could be Kirill, if he discovers the nature of the PCs’ mission and doesn’t like it. Another obstacle could be the princess herself. What if she doesn’t want to be “rescued”? What if she actually wants to marry the wizard. Of course, the PCs won’t know this at first–they’ll have been told by Prince Alexei that Fedor, Roman’s apprentice, is her true love. And if, despite her love of sappy love stories, the princess is extremely competent, she could pose a formidable obstacle, indeed, particularly since she knows the compound much better than the PCs do.

What will happen if the PCs succeed?

First of all, they’ll have made a enemy of the princess. But Prince Alexei will be willing to pay a rich reward for foiling the official wedding plans. This is where having knowledge of your PCs comes in handy. What reward would they wish? Perhaps Alexei, not being the most astute of princes, will allow each of the PCs to name any reward within his power to grant.

What will happen if the PCs fail?

The princess’ wedding will go on as planned and the PCs will have gained the wrath of the crown prince and possibly the wizard’s assistant, as well. If we postulate that the wizard himself doesn’t want the marriage to go forward (perhaps he sees the princess more as the daughter he never had), they could possibly be granted a reward by him. We’ll hammer out the consequences of success and failure as we go along.

Next time, we’ll cover “when” and possibly “where” questions, as well.

[Photo courtesy of Vikki-Lea via Flickr Creative Commons 2.0]

Other posts in this series:

• And *Then* What Happened?: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas
• Step By Step: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, part 2
• Setting an Example: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, part 3
• Answering the Questions: Using Adventure Seeds/Hooks/Starts/Ideas, pt. 4