Giving Myself Time to Prep for a New Campaign

I have a new D&D campaign starting soon. By soon, I mean the beginning of March. As you're likely well aware, it is the third (well, fourth by the time I post this) of January, which might mean that this definition of "soon" is rather generous.

I love my original campaign, and while it's been much less frequent in the last year, I do not intend to give up on it. But I think there's a lot of potential to apply lessons I've learned running that game toward this one.

First off, I want to really give the players time to come up with characters. There is something to be said for distinguishing between "Backstory" and "Frontstory," the latter being the story that develops for a character over the course of a campaign. Naturally, the relationship between characters that evolves is important, but I do think that, as a DM, I can more effectively delight the players by incorporating their characters' existing stories into the narrative as a whole.

The new campaign will be set in Ravnica. And it's a bit different than usual.

The biggest thing is that I have a massive number of players. There are now a full 10 players signed up to play in the first session. While having a large playerbase will be very useful in order to keep the game going, and my policy will be that as long as I can get at least three players involved, I'm going to go forward with a session, it also means that as a DM, I'll need to take extra care to make sure that every character - and more importantly, every player - gets content that speaks to their character.

The Guild-membership structure of Ravnica does aid with that - anyone who's a member of the Golgari Swarm is likely to perk up when we're doing stuff involving sewers, undead, and fungus. But I think the challenge I'm setting up for myself is to really ensure that each player feels like this is their story.

I do know who the prominent villains of the campaign will be (not saying so here on the off chance a player stumbles across it) but I also want to allow for a more diverse and branched narrative, and one that hopefully allows the players to direct it to an extent.

I've outlined the first two major adventures, both of which are designed to both be completed in single sessions and also introduce two guilds apiece - I want to spend tier 1 really showing off the various guilds so everyone feels situated in the setting.

But I'm exercising some restraint in not really putting that much thought into subsequent adventures, as I really want to get a sense of the player characters and their contacts, which could inspire future adventures.

Happily, I'm seeing people mostly picking different guilds. Ideally, I'm hoping that we have at least one player character in each guild (Dimir characters, who have their true guild and then another they've infiltrated, do allow us to sort of get a two-for-one) though I can definitely say that the Dimir and Izzet so far feel like the most popular ones.

Part of my preparation is creating music playlists for each guild. It's not super easy - I only use video game music for D&D playlists, and I'm really disappointed that the Darkmoon Faire music from World of Warcraft doesn't seem to exist on Spotify, as I think that would be absolutely perfect for the Cult of Rakdos (instead I've used a lot of Cuphead music for both the Rakdos and the Izzet.) Hey, anyone know good video game carnival/circus music?

Anyway, while there's certainly some overlap between some guilds, a couple do well with particular games or series. I've gotten a fair amount of Metroid music into the Simic Combine playlist. The Dishonored series works fantastically for House Dimir. As you might guess from this blog, I tend to use a lot of World of Warcraft music. Both Human and Orc-themed music works well for the Boros Legion, while Tauren and Night Elf stuff often fits well into the Selesnya Conclave. And creepy Scourge/Forsaken music works for just about all the black-mana guilds.

I'm hoping that I can really get the players excited knowing that they can level up so quickly. In my first campaign, despite being about four years into it, the players are only at about 9 due to a mix of RP-focused play and, of course, irregular meeting. Players are going to be level 4 after just four sessions in this one, and I can actually imagine everyone getting into tier 4 without a decade of play to get there.

Of course, level 4, 10, and 16 (and 20 if we get there) are going to be bigger ones than the others, as the level cap comes into play at those levels until we are ready to move onto the next tier. I intend to make these moments big, main-plot events that make the transition into a new tier feel like a big deal - and that means that we'll probably see at least 2-3 sessions at each cap (I might make the tier 1-2 transition a bit faster because I think tier 2 is when the game really starts to get good.)