HOBBYIST PROJECT: D&D CAMPAIGN
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SUMMARY
I created and ran a homebrew D&D 5e campaign for a group of friends over the course of eight months, providing plenty of opportunities for world and encounter design. Here are some of the highlights!
KEY DISCUSSION POINTS
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Designing a desert island where players didn't feel alone
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Risk vs reward system design to add a novel layer on top of an existing ruleset
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Avoiding railroading by giving players freedom to solve puzzles how they choose
ROLE
Designer, DM
TYPE OF WORK
Primarily pen and paper, creative
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BACKGROUND
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Having cut our teeth on a premade campaign, our D&D group was ready for something a bit larger. I spent a month or so creating the skeleton of an expansive homebrew campaign, which we spent 7-8 months playing. The campaign was created almost at the exact time the first Covid lockdown started in the UK, and so there aren't many visual assets to show - it was largely theatre of the mind, as we were still novices and hadn't discovered tools like Foundry or Roll20.
Although we didn't even get close to finishing it - and the group has since dissolved due to real world circumstances - it was well-received and I still have a record of the world design and some of the encounters the players grappled with along the way. Here are the highlights!
WORLD DESIGN AND NARRATIVE
GOALS AND CONCEPT
The concept for the story started with warring factions fighting for control of an island kingdom, Talendria.
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I wanted to build a campaign where each player's character had a strong identity that would feed back into interactions with members of their home faction, and bring them together to solve a greater threat while giving them the agency to change the course of events on the island through their actions.
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To further fuel this narrative, I needed a reason for players from these disparate factions to naturally meet and work together in the first place, within an environment that wasn't overly biased towards any one faction. So the neighbouring desert island of Firente came into existence as a way for the Talendrian factions to all contest the same place, where none of them held any power. The players start out washed up on the shore of this island and venture inland.
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The ultimate goal was for the players' actions on Firente to result in notable change on Talendria itself, and for them to journey there as a "part 2" to the campaign which would confront them with the consequences of their decisions. Seeds of these changes were planted early and often.
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BUILDING TALENDRIA
Once the concept was in place, the key was to build a strong and consistent narrative. I began this by fleshing out each of the Talendrian factions and used them as pillars of the campaign. My original writeup for personal reference can be found here, and the plot summary I sent to players can be found here.
I aimed for a variety of possible backstories, and also to work in some particular races such as firbolgs and kobolds which had been requested by the group. To achieve this, I began creating focal points spread throughout Talendria using the theme of unification. What would a kingdom of wildly different unified factions look like? How would they signal their intent to cooperate?
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I settled on six major cities, and four lighthouses at the compass points of the island. I imagined unification as a fair division of duties, and a commitment to work together to collectively teach and train the island's future generations.
Each city was responsible for a different aspect of governance - for example: treasury, military, technology - with a distinct social system to understand and navigate. One city would have a nominal seat of power for the leader who had unified the factions.
Each lighthouse was administered by one of the factions, and served as a form of university with people travelling from far and wide to train there.
Players were free to choose whether they trained at a lighthouse and which city they'd come from, which naturally provided hooks on which to base their characters, and I worked the campaign around their choices.
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FIRENTE - A DESERT ISLAND THAT'S FAR FROM DESERTED
When creating a desert island, the last thing I wanted was for it to feel soulless and empty. Usually open-world design relies on macro landmarks to give potential destinations to the players and provide orientation, but on a desert island this is much more challenging to do. The concept of a proxy war between Talendrian factions helped populate the island, but I also felt it was important there be a variety of characters from the differing factions that the players meet early on, both to guide them through the early sections of the campaign and to introduce small choices about who to help.
A full writeup of the campaign's opening chapter can be found here.
Key to this feeling of Firente not being empty was to have characters whose motivations aligned with the players', and so were inclined to follow or help them. A famous rule of good DMing is that if players need help, the story should come to them and not vice versa. This was my tool for achieving that, and the characters - in a sense - became my open-world landmarks.
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Early on, the players meet a gnome called Gellin Brightspark, an academic who's investigating the island. Creating Gellin and introducing her as the first character was a conscious decision to have a likeable friend who would be able to make suggestions, provide context and generally help unlock the island's mysteries in situations where players might be at a loss for what to do. Gellin ended up being a staple of the group through much of the campaign, and will make a reappearance on this page in a dungeon design!
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There are several other characters introduced early on from disparate factions, both within the same cities and different cities, to illustrate the divisions to the players and teach them that they have choices about which groups to court. Examples in the above linked chapter who became recurring characters include Lucius, Ellis, Reno and Erin.
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THE AUGMENT SYSTEM
MOTIVATIONS AND DESIGN
The players in the group were already familiar with the 5e rules, and I wanted to introduce a small change that would distinguish the campaign from other premades. Thematically, the players' exploration of Firente would involve a lot of "evil energy" and corruption of people who came into contact with it; early on I knew I wanted to reflect that power vs corruption tradeoff, while still not affecting players' experiences too negatively.
I considered a few systems. One early draft allowed the players to upgrade weapons and armour at the expense of them being cursed or otherwise problematic - such as dissolving into dust after a while - but this felt like too big a penalty, and also didn't fit the theme of corrupting people. I also considered a "sanity" mechanic as being the negative side of the tradeoff, which I gather has been used in other premade campaigns; however, I worried that it would encourage negative play patterns as people optimised around it, and I wanted this to be something that empowered players and made them excited rather than fearful.
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In the end, I landed on what I called augments - a risk-vs-reward system which powered up players' class abilities or stats at the expense of a relevant and proportional downside, tailored to each of them.
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Players would occasionally come across pockets of Val'jar's energy scattered around Firente - some large, some small - and have the option to choose whether to accept it. Each pocket of energy could be taken by one player to give them one augment.
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LEANING INTO CLASS FANTASY
A full list of the augments I created can be found here. The players in the group had already become really attached to characters they'd created, so much so that some wanted to replay existing characters from the previous campaign. As such, I wanted to lean into their class fantasies - one person, for example, was really invested in the chaos brought by their Wild Magic sorcerer, whereas another was excited to talk their way out of everything as a Bard.
The augments themselves therefore took a variety of forms. Some were extensions of the way people wanted to play their characters, while others promoted usage of lower-level spells or abilities that might have been forgotten over time. My goal with all of them, however, was to further the class fantasy they wanted to fulfil.
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For the Wild Magic sorcerer, for example, I created lots of augments which introduced crazy random elements, such as the Hand of Fate. The party's tank would receive augments which made them into an immoveable object, selflessly defending allies and placing themselves in harm's way - I was particularly proud of the shield sacrifice mechanic, which I felt was an easily-pictured hero moment.
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Finally, as I wanted to encourage players to use and take advantage of these risk-vs-reward effects, many of them had "may" clauses in the description - allowing the players to take advantage during moments they felt would be useful, rather than forcing them into something which might ultimately make them fearful of using a core ability.
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REFLECTIONS AND PLAYER REGRET
No matter how much fun I had designing the augments, as I had no way of testing them I knew there was a chance that some of them wouldn't work well, and I had to guard somehow against player regret. Although the players never needed it, I had prepared an NPC who was able to magically dispel any undesired augments for a reasonable price, hopefully giving the party the freedom and confidence to experiment with augments. Looking back, I'm glad I did this as there were some augments I'd redesign with the benefit of hindsight.
In particular, the Bard's medium augments weren't implemented particularly well. The first is doubled proficiency bonuses - a big deal for a Bard, since their Jack of All Trades passive allows them to add half of this proficiency bonus to any skill check in which they're not proficient. The downside is that any skill check they fail is a critical fail, having especially negative effects. While this is perhaps an acceptable tradeoff in theory given their increased propensity to succeed, in practice there are many involuntary skill checks they have to make - for example, when avoiding sudden traps - and failing those would feel particularly bad. In a worst-case scenario, it might even make the player more reticent to make voluntary skill checks for fear of what could go wrong. An easy fix here would have been to add a "may" clause to the effect, as with many of the others.
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The second is turning Bardic Inspiration into a d10 instead of a d6. Mechanically there's already an issue here - the Bardic Inspiration die type increases as the Bard levels up but there's no eg. d14 or d16. However, the augment's downside is that the result has to be added before the player in question rolls their d20 - which effectively destroys the best part of Bardic Inspiration, that you can wait until after the roll to decide whether to use it. I'd probably cut this entirely if I was running the campaign again, and find something more interesting to affect Bardic Inspiration.
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SELECTED ENCOUNTERS
BLOODSCALE'S LAIR
My writeup on Bloodscale's Lair is sadly lost to time, but I do have handwritten player notes on it. The lair is an old and crumbling tower formerly occupied by Firente's previous inhabitants, and now haunted by their ghosts; it's been taken over by a dragon called Bloodscale, who attacks a settlement the players are in and temporarily flies off, leaving the lair unguarded. The tower was designed to take about one evening session to complete.
As they climb the tower, the players must solve a series of riddles to prove to the ghosts left behind that they are worthy of unlocking its secrets. The riddles were on the simple side, but to help the players out if they were stuck - while retaining narrative consistency - I scattered around hidden scraps of paper with hints on, blown into crevices in the wall or piles of rubble after being left behind by adventurers who had tried before. The players could also pass DC 13 INT checks to get a further hint for each riddle. In the absolute worst-case scenario, the party could also kill the ghosts to continue, although this wasn't necessary.
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Each floor had one riddle and a separate short activity or encounter to break up any potential monotony. On the third floor, for example, a banshee called Mira chills the air and floats around restlessly, deeply protective of a chest in the corner; it was up to the party whether they chose to risk her anger or leave without conflict.
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The top floor is occupied by the ghost of the tower's architect, Khaddin. She serves as a story hook, explaining more of the history of the island to the players and teaching them about Val'jar, the demon at its centre.
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The players were left with one final choice - how much loot to take from the dragon's hoard at the top of the tower! Too much and they'd risk angering Bloodscale when it returned; too little, and they might pass up on some good upgrades.
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THE INFINITE BRIDGE
I had a variety of short random encounters and puzzles penned for the players as they explored the map, and would occasionally roll a d4 to determine the encounter they came across, replacing each completed encounter on the list with a new one. One such encounter involved the players venturing into some mist to cross a bridge over a ravine of jagged spikes - but the bridge would loop infinitely, and they'd never reach the end.
My aim with this encounter was twofold: firstly, to present a bizarre problem which required them to experiment and think outside the box to solve it - in contrast to the many simple and conventional puzzles they'd had so far; secondly, to give the players something particularly memorable, as the character who set the illusion would return later in a dungeon. The character in question was Aldous Whisperwind, the ghost of a deranged wizard who delighted in playing pranks on his victims - so the weird nature of the setup and its solution both made sense, and each goal fed into the other. Whisperwind was eventually a boss encounter several sessions later.
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The first part of the encounter is reaching the other side of the bridge, the solution to which was simply to turn around and walk the other way. This fit into the "silly prank" theme, while also being a very obvious, if unusual, solution that players would try - meaning that they'd land on the solution naturally before getting frustrated. This was important to train the players to think a particular way for the second part.
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After walking backwards for a short while, the party comes across a giant stone golem blocking the other end of the bridge. The golem explains that it's been put there by its master to test anyone who would cross the bridge, and that its name is Tiny. Having trained the players already to think counterintuitively, the solution is simply to overcome their fear and walk towards the golem - who decreases in size as the players near him, until eventually they can step over him and he disappears.
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Once the mist clears, a hat is left behind with the initials A. W, and Khaddin - by this point travelling with the party - regales them with the story.
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WHISPERWIND'S TOWER
Several sessions later, accompanied by Gellin, the party headed to Whisperwind's Tower. The players enter the tower through a portal, and are confronted with an empty expanse with a few floating platforms. In front of them is a portable dial which they can turn to phase different platforms (and a treasure chest) in and out, which I achieved by using layered images in GIMP and sharing my screen. Their job was to get to the other side of the room, at which point they'd fight Aldous - who relied on a similar phasing mechanic. This was easily one of the most interesting outcomes of a puzzle I set for the party, and taught me a lot.
On the face of it, I thought for sure this would be solved quickly. I placed the dial directly in front of the players when they entered the room, and Gellin was with them as a narratively-consistent means to provide hints if they needed. I also felt that it would be a satisfying problem; one of the key markers of a good puzzle is a short duration between the "lightbulb moment" - where the puzzle is mentally solved - and putting that solution into action. Here, once the players have understood the phase mechanic and plotted the path, they need only say where they want to go and how they want to turn the dial.
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In practice, the party understood the phasing mechanic almost immediately but believed the solution was turning the dial to the "one correct phase", rather than turning it as they followed the path. This led to a (highly amusing!) session where they set up a complicated sequence of jumps and impromptu rope bridges between floating platforms to get themselves across the chasm, something that became a running joke within the group!
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Throughout the session, the players kept saying that they felt like they were missing something - but because they already believed they'd had the lightbulb moment, that never manifested into them asking Gellin for further advice. My job as a DM in that situation was not to railroad them, but to try and accommodate their solution as best I could within the parameters of the game - and they did reach the other side!
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This taught me a lot about puzzle-setting, and how even solutions that seem obvious should both a) accommodate any solution which makes sense and b) be careful not to contain intermediate steps that seem like they might solve the problem on their own.
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OUTCOMES AND LEARNINGS
NOTES FOR NEXT TIME
Eventually the campaign stopped, and the group has since disbanded for various personal reasons. However, it was well-liked by the players, and achieved some of what I set out to do!
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There were a few key learnings in particular:
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The campaign I created was way too large, akin to the skeleton of an epic series of books rather than a realistic-length story. In 7-8 months of sessions, we got through perhaps a quarter of the story in part 1. This led to a feeling of hopelessness on my part to some extent - that we'd never get anywhere near the end - which affected morale as a DM.
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The problem here, though, was only partially that I bit off more than I could chew - it was also that the size of the campaign was baked into the story from an early stage, which meant that in order to adjust the campaign length I would have had to make major changes to the story. For future campaigns, and in narrative design more generally, I'd leave myself more room to manoeuvre with regards to the expansiveness of the story and content.
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The augment system was interesting, but the party were reticent to interact with it too heavily and so they very rarely (if ever) got the larger augments. Previous D&D experiences - like the classic "the chest is a Mimic" - had conditioned them to treat almost anything with suspicion. I could have gone about this in a couple of ways, but I think perhaps the best would have been having the augment be illustrated on someone else like Reno first to communicate it was safe.
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