When you start a campaign, solo or with a group, the best advice is always to start small. Unless you're following a published sequence, the most satisfying turn of play is to begin with one locality and watch the inciting incident grow into its own world.
But even starting small, it might be hard to come up with concrete details on the plain canvas, or it's tempting to try and visualize the campaign end game, and then back-engineer details to the very beginning.
This method gives you a starting point and leads, but is also open-ended, so the campaign grows as you unfold it. I've used it to launch solo campaigns and group campaigns, and it's always astonishing how soon you can find yourself in a fully-realized setting with a rich set of options, when all you started with was a punch-up in a tavern.
1. Set the entry point
Specify the point where your adventure begins. This could be the first step into the dungeon, or a mountain pass, or a rough tavern, or the starport, or something broader, like the western marches or a border city. The tone, theme, and style of the starting point are up to you: this is the world you want to enter, but you're only concerned with where to start, not what comes next.
2. Generate branching paths
This step takes inspiration from solo roleplaying. Using whatever semantic generators you have at hand – and why not Play ALL the Books – create 3–4 possible options. These are not whole scenarios, but possibilities, rumors, adventure hooks. Assign them to points just beyond the starting point.
For example, imagining a campaign of into the wilds treasure hunting, with a fantasy element, we started at the edge of the old empire and generated these random prompts:
- Plain, village; closed, suspicious
- Rough, farm; urgent hunt (beast)
- Hills, hamlet; innocents, omens
- Plains, hall; ruins, wolves
Of course, if you need stronger narrative hooks, you can flesh out preliminary ideas so:
- A crypt said to contain a weird black sword
- A village threatened by wolves and bandits
- An abandoned wizard's tower infested by goblins
- Imperial spies are searching for an unusual schematic
- A strange group of cultists, threatening residents of a peaceful hamlet
3. Follow a path
Now, either choosing yourself, randomly, or following your player’s decisions, begin to play out one of the potential scenarios, expanding on and developing the simple prompt with encounters and locations, as you would.
As you go, keep thinking how the other paths not yet taken might link to and reinforce the situation that emerges. Are those bandits lurking in the woods somehow connected to the goblins crawling over the ruined tower, and in that case, what are they really looking for? Who do they serve?
In the case of the first example, the randomly generated hamlet (innocents, omens) was under threat from a strange cult, following omens and clues linked to a prophecy and a lost ceremonial blade. It turned out that the place they would seek the blade next was the ruined hall where wolves were prowling, a day’s march across the plains.
4. Shadows and omens
By now, you probably start to see how the situation suggested new branches and possibilities. They can generate new options and points to move to, or begin generating connections between the existing points. Develop the next scenario that follows organically from the first.
But to create something that is more than just action and reaction, you can begin sketching out the points and movements that hover just beyond the horizon of the current play. In Dungeon World, these looming possibilities are called “fronts”. In Against the Darkmaster, there are wonderful generators for establishing the identity of the “Darkmaster” the players will eventually confront. I think of these as threats or shadow states, that are established but not yet explicit, just at the horizon of the next branching path.
In the example I started above, it turns out that a dark god of the old empire, a patron of greed and destructive consumption, was rising again in the near-forgotten ruins.
It might take a while to get there – that’s the campaign.
