Campaign by Design
Part One: Where to Begin?
Long-time readers of the Archive's boards and resources will recognize me as the author of a periodically expanding campaign setting that I have named Tolrea. It began about four years ago, as an idle project to show that the city creation rules in the Dungeon Master's Guide can produce usable gaming material in the hands of a Dungeon Master who is prepared to apply some thought to the input and output of that sub-system of the core rules.
That project blossomed into the Mereflow Valley, which I conceived of as a miniature campaign setting, and has now expanded to cover an entire world (as well as several dimensions outside of that world). And updates are still coming. In this column, I will discuss not why I did things a certain way, but why I am doing things a certain way. The idea behind my writing this series of articles is to provide you readers with a look at how one DM addresses the challenges of putting together a campaign setting of his own. I do not speak from a position of authority in this column, and I do not intend to try to do so. Instead, I hope that the topics I discuss will help inspire other DMs to think about the same issues—and maybe to find better (or different) solutions than the ones I come up with.
To begin this series, I submit the proposition that, even though Dungeons and Dragons in particular and fantasy fiction in general have long been considered "escapist," an engaging campaign setting has to turn that idea on its head. I have encountered very few players or DMs who would truly enjoy playing in a game that does not address questions of morality, ethics, faith, and other themes that are important to our understanding of the human condition. To the contrary: for an "escapist" genre, fantasy attracts a surprisingly large number of people who care deeply about these themes and issues related to them.
This is to say that in my experience, Dungeon Masters and players alike have a marked tendency to engage in thought experiments as part of their gaming. It is also my experience that Dungeon Masters vary widely with respect to their skill in setting up these experiments. The best of them spend much effort to set up scenarios such that the player characters face real moral ethical choices, do so in ways that make contextual sense, and also manage to make the experience interesting and enjoyable for the players. When these attempts go awry (because of lack of preparation, or inaccurate assumptions about how the players or their characters will respond, or because the Dungeon Master thinks the idea is too cool to "waste"), the player characters are forced onto a single path of action. In gaming slang, they are "railroaded."
There is no way to make it impossible to railroad a gaming group through an adventure. It happens even to the best DMs from time to time, whether because they are unprepared on the wrong night, or they misread the group's level of interest, or because they just . . . can't . . . let go . . . of an idea that the group obviously hates. But I think that it is harder to railroad if a game is run in a detailed, fully realized setting. The larger, the more finely textured a campaign world, the more choices a DM can offer to a gaming group. And the more choices available, the easier it is to introduce thought experiments that hinge on conflicts that can catch and hold the players' imaginations.
Conflict is Everything
From this line of thinking, it follows that the best campaign settings will evoke situations that are hauntingly familiar to us from the evening news. Imagine a scenario in which an orc kingdom and a federation of elven city-states war for possession of a small tract of fertile land. Each side has long-established cultural ties to the real estate in question; sites with religious significance dot the area for both nations. Each side has experienced a period during which it ruled the territory in question. And imagine that the orcs have now been pushed into a small corner of this territory by the elves, who make frequent raids into the remaining orc-held territory. Imagine that most of the orcs are simply tired of fighting, and want most of all to be left in peace to make a living as best they can. And imagine that a relative handful of orcs hides amongst them to lash out at the elves whenever they can. There is no clear villain, no side clearly in the right or the wrong; both sides have legitimate claims, and a look at history shows that the elves have been through periods seemingly as bad as the orcs are now experiencing. There is scope for adventure in the scenario I have described here, and there is also scope for quite a few of the sort of thought experiments that I have discussed above.
The scenario just presented is notably different from "classic" fantasy because it treats orcs sympathetically, and casts elves in a morally ambiguous light. It reads classic fantasy against the grain, if you will. In a classic fantasy scenario, the heroes would pick the elves' side because elves are the good guys. Duh. In the version I gave, there is some doubt as to whose side the player characters will come down on. And if this story sounds familiar, it ought to. I lifted its outline from the ongoing strife between Israel and Palestine. Substitute the elves for Israel. Substitute the orcs for Palestine, and the militant orcs for HAMAS. Current events can and should inform how Dungeon Masters design their campaign settings. That does not have to mean that we crib from real life as directly as in the example I have offered. It does mean that we should ask ourselves whether our campaign settings depict political, religious, or economic conflicts that would be newsworthy if we translated them into real-world terms. If we wouldn't care about something if we saw it on the news, then it is unreasonable to think that a player character would care about it, either.
The Dungeon Master's Guide is a useful tool for the DM interested in plotting out the sources of conflict in a setting because it provides a rule set for determining the nature of a community's power centers. As settlements get larger, they develop more power centers, and the types of power exhibited in them become more diverse. A small farming village may only have a village council or a mayor to make decisions. In a teeming metropolis, it would be much more likely for the player characters to encounter a powerful merchants' guild, a magical university, an organized crime syndicate, and a warlike nobleman vying for power. When I began creating the towns that eventually became the Mereflow Valley mini-setting, I was surprised at just how much of the work the dice did for me. By the time I finished rolling for Port Hope, the largest city in the Mereflow Valley area of Tolrea, I knew that the city had three power centers: a conventional center consisting of a nobleman who ruled the surrounding area, a nonconventional center consisting of a council of guilds, and a nonconventional center consisting of an organized crime syndicate.
But if the dice did much of the work for me, I cannot claim that they did all of it. Once I knew the broad outlines of how power would be structured in what was to become Port Hope, I still had to decide the specifics about how these power centers interacted with one another, as well as the details of how their internal operations work. I decided that I wanted Port Hope to be a relatively stable place, so two of the power centers needed to get along with one another reasonably well. Those ended up being Lord Merenstone Hope's government, and Guild Master Soren Vast and the rest of his council of guilds. This was not much of a stretch, since both entities have clear reasons to prefer that the entire city remains prosperous.
By the time I created Port Hope, I had also created several smaller communities, and I had decided that not all of them would be friendly to the larger city-state. It was about this time that I decided that Woods End would be an ideal candidate to fill this central role. By this time I had also decided that I wanted to stress the possibility that people who are not evil can still be pretty nasty. So I made the ruler of Woods End a militant elven druid who has seriously restricted the amount of wood that can be harvested in the Mereflow Valley's major forested region. The elf in question is Mintinarn Ceretheliaul. He is Lawful Neutral by alignment, but he is also a serious anti-human racist. And he presides over a faction of druids whose alignments are all over the map--LN, CN, TN, and NE are all represented here. As a result, Ceretheliaul's situation is every bit as precarious as any Middle Eastern potentate's. He has a resource that is badly needed by his most powerful neighbor. If he cuts off Port Hope's lumber supply completely, there will be war. But his own racist tendencies combine with the antics of some of his less-predictable "followers" to ensure that relations between Woods End and Port Hope are characterized by the D&D equivalent of HAMAS's rocket attacks into Israel.
By fashioning a campaign world in which important NPCs have varying goals and equally varying degrees of control over their followers, by emphasizing conflicts between these NPCs, and by judicious departure from a few standard tropes of the fantasy genre, I reaped a few clear benefits. First, I gained the opportunity to present my PCs with challenges that ordinarily would not be available if I had followed the standard propositions that elves and dwarves are always among "the good guys." Second, I provided a background that would allow the player characters to have political preferences and aspirations. I think that this is a big deal for classes that lend themselves to "social" skills like Diplomacy, because such characters get the most benefit out of their skills when they have the chance to develop a network of friendly NPCs who can provide help and information. It represents a broadening of the player characters' options overall, because it gives them an alternative to the old "kick in the door, kill all the monsters, and take their stuff" school of gaming. And third, I attained a more fully realized campaign world.
Still to Come:
In the next column, I discuss race—and racism—in Dungeons and Dragons. Come back and read for a few words on all of the following aspects of those topics:
- Can a character be a racist without being evil?
- How can a political system work if its citizens' lifespans vary by hundreds of years?
- Are humans and orcs "equal?"
- Does the existence of "always evil" or "always good" in the alignment line of a monster's stat block make D&D a racist game?
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but if you find the questions interesting . . . stay tuned.
