Natural 7

My First Campaign - 1

This post is about running my first long campaign and what I learned from it. It is the first of two or three posts detailing the same campaign.

Background

I've run three long campaigns, all using D&D 2014 (and then 2024 when it came out). When I say "long" that means my group played for more than 6 months. These games actually lasted upwards of 13 or 14 months, with at least 30 sessions apiece.

I first started playing D&D in 2019 at my friend's house. Then the pandemic happened and things got a little dicey. Not everyone in the group wanted to transition to online play, and so we sort of put the game on pause.

One of my other friends in that campaign volunteered to run a single-session adventure that might turn into a longer game if we wanted. About five minutes into character creation we decided that we all were interested in a longer campaign.

A few weeks into that campaign and we realized that we sometimes had some scheduling conflicts with one of the players. They could make it to some sessions, but not all of them, and we felt bad for continuously playing without them. So, to solve this, I offered to run a replacement adventure that we could play whenever that person was unavailable.

Back then, most of my knowledge about D&D came from the original Baldur's Gate games, Critical Role campaign 2, and the aforementioned D&D games. The adventure I wanted to run was called In Volo's Wake. I think it's OK. Probably not as good as Dragon of Icespire Peak, but it worked out well for a new GM. I had three players and we had a blast.

In Volo's Wake took a few weeks to finish, but it had ignited a little spark in me. I knew I was capable of running games for my friends that were fun, and I had a few ideas about what I would do if I wanted to write my own adventures.

The summer came and went, and I did not get to play very much D&D due to lots of scheduling conflicts (summer camps, travel, etc). That sucked because I really liked playing the game every week (I still do).

In the last couple weeks of summer I came to an ultimatum. Either I could wait for one of the campaigns to magically start up regularly (from the look of the pandemic, that wasn't happening any time soon) or I could start a new campaign myself.

A New Campaign

My first real GM notes were in a little notebook and a bunch of extra-large sheets of paper. I've since copied just about everything into a big google doc. Gotta be eco-friendly, y'know?

I did a lot of worldbuilding. Way too much, I think, since most of it never came up in the game. My friends did enjoy hearing a bunch of random facts about deities and distant locations, but it also was probably stuff I would now be able to come up with on the fly. Improvisation was a skill I had yet to develop fully, but is now an important tool in my arsenal.

I did just about zero plot or adventure writing before the game. This, I think, was fine. Most of the adventures were centered around the characters my friends made. I tried to tie all the characters up into a big knot that shifted around the map and kept getting connected to knew adventure leads. This made it so most of the characters were thrust together by circumstance and coincidently had reasons to continue working together. My process for linking people to adventures came from watching how the characters in Critical Role kept discovering that they were linked to some villain's agenda. Looking back, tying the characters into a knot and connecting it to other adventures is one way of focusing on the characters first and their relevance to whatever adventure leads are available.

I taught three new people how to play D&D and recruited two of my friends from the previous D&D campaigns into the game. We still had scheduling conflicts, but were able to play semi-regularly for the first year of the campaign. The second year was a lot more sporadic, and I ended up adding a sixth player about halfway through. We didn't like playing without everybody at the (online) table, so usually we would skip weeks that folks couldn't make it. Nowadays I'll run a session for at least three players, sometimes two if the players are up for it. This keeps me excited and fulfilled each week, and allows my players who have an open schedule to have some fun.

The Road to Divinity

The core premise of the campaign was for the characters to eventually have the opportunity to ascend to a sort-of godhood. Afterall, that's what 20th level D&D is all about, right?

Anyway we never really got close to that, but that premise led me to offer connections from the gods to the players. Characters could be champions of their deities and they would consistently receive visions, messages, dreams, and gifts from those gods. That was a lot of fun, and I learned that dreams/visions are a great way of conveying information to the characters.

We played for something like 20 months, off and on based on availability, and very sporadically for the last 8 months or so. The players made it to level 8, I think. I ran 27 sessions before we called it quits on the campaign (high school was over, we were all going to college, I think we were all ready to move on to something else).

Arc 1 - The Mystics of the Dark

The first arc of the game had the characters investigating a cult of mages. The cult, called the Mystics of the Dark, were led by a powerful archmage who had escaped an ancient elven prison that the PCs discovered in session 2. At the same time, they learned that the cult was seeking a powerful elven artifact called the Kalisar. The PCs found the artifact buried in the rubble of the prison, seemingly left behind.

The party spent a lot of time exploring a vast region of land and visiting many, many towns and cities. They were traveling everywhere to help bring kidnapped people back to their homes. During their free time, the PCs investigated the Mystics of the Dark, the Kalisar, and the name of the cult's leader: La'Shar.

I used dreams and visions to give guidance to my players about what dangers lurked ahead in their journey, and to keep the tension levels high. This also gave me opportunities to tug on background threads for characters that weren't super connected to the cult.

The Kalisar, on the other hand, didn't work so well. I had given a very powerful magic item to a group of level 2 characters, and was struggling to find a way to balance the item's power level with the game itself. I should have just used something from the Dungeon Master's Guide as a template, maybe giving a +1 to spellcasting stuff and some kind of interesting and useful effect, then letting the item level up alongside the characters as it adapted to their strengths and abilities.

As it was, the Kalisar went through three iterations of very powerful effects (max damage on a spell, automatic critical hits, then reroll spell damage). None of them worked great, and the early versions trivialized some combat encounters. The spell damage reroll was the version I stuck to, and probably would have been fine at early levels. This experience helped me learn how to critically design magic items so they are useful and interesting, but aren't overpowered.

Another issue I came across was an early character death. I think it was in our 3rd session maybe, that someone's character full on died. That kind of sucks in a D&D game, because even though resurrection magic exists and is common at high levels, no one has access to it at low levels. Also, the party was really far from civilization, so there was no way they would be able to reach and afford the holy magic necessary to save their friend.

This was a pretty substantial downward beat for my group. To help the situation, I could have offered a way to resurrect the character by visiting some mystical sage or location hidden nearby. But I didn't think of that and so we were all pretty sad for a bit that one of our beloved characters was now buried six feet under.

This was the beginning of realizing that I don't love it when characters die super quickly and in weird situations. For example, this character died because they made a stupid decision to sleep next to some cursed shadow liquid that was animate and threatening to eat the character. In my future campaigns, I thought about ways to mitigate early character deaths, or at least make sure that if they happened they would be impactful on the narrative so that people wouldn't feel as negative about the situation. Nowadays though, I'm more open to character death, especially in OSR games where it happens a lot and keeps the tension high.

At the end of the arc, the party discovered the lair of the Mystics of the Dark and set out to confront them. The heroes emerged victorious! They spent some downtime in a nearby city, made a bit of a name for themselves: The Hands of Fortune, and began planning their next adventure based on previous threads I had offered them.

Overall, the actual story we played through was a lot of fun. The players had opportunities to meet many interesting NPCs, I got to describe a lot of the cool worldbuilding I had done earlier, and we discovered a relatively emergent adventure thread with the Mystics of the Dark linking to all sorts of people and places.

Final Thoughts

This is the first post in several (two or three, I think) about the first D&D campaign I ran as GM. We talked about why I started running games, some of my initial background to the game, and the first arc of the campaign's narrative. I tried to implement a bit of an emergent narrative that focused heavily on my players and their characters. Some things worked well, like dreams and visions, while other things didn't work so well, like powerful magic items for low-level characters.

As always, thanks for reading and see you next week!

Things on my radar: