Matt Colville has a video on the "hot start," a way to start off a D&D adventure or campaign that throws the players into the action right away. His first example has the players starting right before the stairs down into the final level of a published dungeon, with an immediate crisis to resolve.
I was thinking about this and how it relates to a TV show that I love, and that just ended after its sixth season: The Expanse.
Now, The Expanse is a science fiction story, but it shares a lot of DNA with tabletop RPGs - in fact, the show was based on a series of novels that began its life as a tabletop RPG, and the writers initially wanted to pitch it as an MMORPG before they chose instead to write it as novels.
The story is a hard sci-fi story about a future in which humanity has colonized the solar system but then divided into factions - Earth is governed by the U.N. as a western-style social democracy with a number of powerful corporations, Mars is a somewhat democratic but highly militaristic society that blames Earth's aggression for their delayed efforts in terraforming the planet to make it habitable outside of sealed dome-cities, and "the Belt," which represents the people who inhabit the asteroid belt and stations on the outer planets, which has no official legal authority and struggles under the colonial control of Earth and Mars.
Technically speaking, the "party" as it were, doesn't really get a "hot start," as we do get some scenes establishing their initial life aboard the Canterbury, a commercial ice-hauler that brings water from icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn back to Ceres Station, the biggest port/city in the Belt.
But things get really, really crazy by the end of the first episode. A small group from the "Cant" takes a shuttle to check out a distress signal coming from a ship on their route, only for a mysterious stealth military ship to emerge and destroy the Canterbury while they're away, setting up a crisis of survival in which this small group needs to survive the damage to their shuttle, being taken prisoner by the Martian flagship, and then escaping said flagship when more of those mysterious stealth ships come to attack the Martians.
It's in their escape from the Martian's ship, the Donnager, that the main characters, James, Naomi, Amos, and Alex, get their hands on a prototype Martian gunship, which they re-christen the Rocinante, and which becomes their ship for the rest of the series.
This establishes the status quo of the series - that these four people (two Earthers, a Martian, and a Belter) have an awesome ship that they go around on, effectively doing quests to fight evil and protect the solar system. Indeed, in true RPG fashion, they start off as nobodies, but by about halfway through the series, they're famous system-wide as a powerful independent force for good.
What I think is really interesting about the way the series starts, though, is that the kind of climactic, explosive action you'd usually expect to have to build toward for a season finale is actually where things start.
I think this is a really cool approach you can take to a D&D campaign, too.
Essentially, I think that a lot of campaigns start off this way: a group of adventurers meet in a tavern, and they start taking kind of generic bounties - there are goblins in the forest attacking travelers, and the local authority wants them taken out. Maybe the blacksmith's daughter is taken by kobolds to the nearby abandoned mine.
This kind of typical low-level adventure can be very useful in terms of game mechanics, given that 1st level characters are very squishy, and there's a fairly small number of monsters you can throw at them without risking killing a PC with a single critical hit.
Still, I think you hook people more easily by putting them into a serious crisis - without making the encounters overpowered.
The way I think you can do this is by imagining the party as being on a soundstage with a big green screen around them. What they can interact with exists on the stage itself, but what you fill in with that green screen can be something enormous.
Huge battles in D&D don't really work that well if you try to run them conventionally - if you have ten thousand orcs attacking a city with a garrison of five thousand guards, there's no way you're going to go through the whole initiative order with every single one of those creatures. The way you run that is that you have the party fight through vignettes as discrete combat encounters, while the clashing armies are off "in the background."
This frees you up, though, to have crazy, high-level stuff happening out there.
Let's say your big bad is a powerful spellcaster - a lich, or even just a really powerful wizard. Perhaps you start off with the campaign as if it's going to be conventional - the party starts in the capital city of a major kingdom. They're looking for the usual bounty postings and odd jobs. But then, something strange happens - the clouds part suddenly. The party looks up and sees four blazing meteors plummeting toward the city. They watch as one of them strikes the royal palace, destroying it, and then they see another strike much closer - perhaps two blocks down the street, obliterating a small market and all the innocent people who just happened to be there.
It becomes clear that this is the opening salvo of an assault on the city, and the party's objective becomes clear: survive this battle. Surviving the big bad's meteor swarm spell looks like it was a matter of luck - just not being in one of the spots the big bad targeted - though of course it's because the DM isn't actually trying to kill them yet. What dangers the party encounters at this point will be level-appropriate. The lich might send his Death Knight minion in to lead the charge as they break down the front gates of the city, and the party might see this horrible undead knight slaughtering any soldiers who stand in her way, but the party is separated from that fight, and instead is facing off against the skeletons or zombies or mercenaries that make up the bulk of this invading force.
So, the party fights off some level-appropriate bad-guys, but in the meantime, they're ducking out of the way as a dracolich strafes the city walls with a blast of poison. The party experiences the energy of a high-level encounter even as they're playing through level-appropriate content.
And this then sets up very clear stakes for the campaign - the party will have a world where the established order has been overturned, and depending on how you want to run it, you might have them dealing with desperate survivors turning on each other or perhaps a more optimistic campaign to rally the forces of good and turn back this vile threat.
Basically, there's no reason you can't start things off epic in scope, even when the players aren't ready to be major players in such a plot.
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