Friday, January 3, 2025

Planning a Campaign That, By Design, We'll Rarely Play

 For the past three years or so, I've been playing in a D&D campaign set in Wildemount, the continent from Critical Role's second (and, in my opinion, best) campaign on the world of Exandria (the shared setting for all three campaigns). We try to play every week, but between illness (Covid and other joys) and various scheduling conflicts (most of my friends are actors, and when you get a gig, you have to skip D&D) and other factors at play, we do sometimes miss the game.

Now, I'm a bum, and so I have basically tons of free time to both run D&D and also plan for it. So, I volunteered to start a "off-weeks" game for when our DM had to cancel for one reason or another (the DM is my best friend).

The intent, here, of course, is never to usurp the Wildemount campaign. After all, this is the game in which I am the most invested in my own player character, and very much want to see him grow and follow his adventurous path (not to mention get all those sweet high-level Wizard spells! I've got the first notions of what his Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion will look like - as a Triton, it's going to have a significant underwater section).

But even while I'm pretty busy running my weekly Ravnica game (which does have a path to its conclusion, but still many chapters remaining before we hit that point) I've had the itch to A: run something in my own homebrew world and B: play with the 2024 rules.

The C:, though, here, is that I also wanted to change the way I go about structuring a campaign. Brennan Lee Mulligan, the maestro of Dimension 20, had a very good point about how he approaches structuring a campaign: the player characters are the main characters of your story. And so, the plot should involve them.

Now, to be fair, there are for sure stories about people getting swept up in a plot that goes beyond them - Frodo, after all, has little more connection to Sauron than anyone else, except that his uncle happened to steal the Dark Lord's long-lost ring. His heroism, and that of all the hobbits, is all the more heroic because they're just the innocent, little folk who have never before had all that much of an impact on history (again, barring uncle Bilbo).

Still, even within that story, you have the most archetypically heroic character of all, Aragorn, turn out to be the heir to the throne of Gondor, whose ascension to kingship marks the beginning of a golden age that lasts for centuries. Indeed, Aragorn would be the unambiguous main character in most similar tales, but Tolkien's values, which among others, stressed humility, put this greatest and most righteous of kings into the role of a supporter and ally (while I'm by no means a royalist, and in fact feel deep in my bones as an American that the idea of a king, or any tyrant being above the law, is repugnant, I do really like that the proof that Aragorn is the rightful king is not from winning battles but from healing the seemingly unhealable, reviving Eowyn and Merry after the blow-back from their strikes against the Witch King of Angmar).

All of which is to say: I have restrained myself from coming up with a "big bad" until my players hand in their character backstories.

I do actually have one of them, and so the wheels are already turning.

Luckily, my world is pretty fleshed-out, so it's not very hard for me to come up with some options of what the loose plot threads in the backstory might refer to.

I actually have to hand it to this player for giving me some very evocative story elements that are pure mysteries to him.

Here, I'll detail them, but on the cosmically-small chance that my players are even aware of this blog (for the most part I like to keep my online and personal lives quite separate,) here's a warning to said players: thar be spoilers in these here waters!

The player whose backstory I've received will be playing a Stone Goliath Fighter, intending to go Eldritch Knight at level 3. The character, like all the ones in this campaign (unless anyone changes their minds) is older, in her 50s. She used to be a mountain guide just over the border into the rugged land of Hymora (basically Conan the Barbarian meets Feudal Japan meets Viking-era Scandinavia) before she met a human man who traveled the region trading in magical trinkets. She and the human wound up becoming friends and then settled into married life almost by accident.

They lived comfortably on the edge of a town in Wolfengard (the main region for this campaign, and the center of the continent-spanning empire that Hymora is also part of - think sort of UK/France/Germany/Ireland with the "gothic" dial turned up to 11) until her husband found a strange box amongst the wares in his magic shop, which contained a bunch of tiles that made parts of a face - two eyes, two ears, and two halves (left and right) of a mouth.

Her husband became obsessed with the tiles, and gradually attained some kind of magical capabilities - the most obvious explanation being some kind of Warlock powers. He then became kind of irritable, and finally took her to a nearby grove known for ancient protection magics, where he gave her a letter she should open in case anything should happen to him. Some time passes, and then the husband disappears.

But the goliath character decides not to open the letter, feeling some mix of being unready to do so and also feeling somewhat comfortable in her settled life, even without the husband (I will need to clarify this with my player, but I kind of get the sense that they're sort of an ace/aro couple, more platonic life partners than a romantic couple).

And that's where I pick things up.

So:

There are a lot of options here, but the first instinct, which I've come to decide will be what I go with, is that the tiles (they might have been less like tiles and more like weird bits of jewelry or even prostheses) are associated with one of the Great Others - Malkazod, the Black Prince in a Thousand Flames.

In my setting, around 3000 years ago, there was a super-advanced, nearly utopian society in which technology (on par with 24th Century Star Trek levels - like, cheap and reliable teleportation, near-elimination of disease, matter replication - everything but space travel, which was unattainable for reasons I won't get into here). However, a small conspiracy of well-connected villains arranged for a singular moment of mass-death, killing billions in a single day, all in order to spawn a number of new pseduo-gods by siphoning the souls of the dead into a massive rift into the Far Realm in the floor of the world's ocean.

This succeeded, and so the world has a kind of pantheon of Lovecraftian beings, though unlike those in traditional cosmic horror, these beings are mostly rather new - far younger than the more conventional gods. Of them, Malkazod, also sometimes known as the Raven's Eye, is the most human-like in his psychology and motivations. He (and he's one of like two that would even use a gendered pronoun, the others being more likely to go by "it") is still super-alien, and as I tend to think of "Great Old Ones" in D&D, really kind of outside of traditional alignments. Essentially, he has an obsession with heat, and might somehow be associated with the ultimate expression of entropy: the heat-death of the universe. But superficially, he acts a lot like a devil would, making deals (through proxies) and recruiting when he can. He, or maybe his cult, likes to recruit primarily by convincing potential cultists that he's a force for the greater good - that some far more terrifying evil is out there, and that only his power can protect the world.

Now, while the Great Others don't actually have physical form, they can have constructed avatars, which each have their own specific names for each Great Other, but are collectively called Mak'r. And these do have consistent forms; even if one "Mak'a'sht" of Malkazod is built and destroyed centuries before another one pops up, they'll both look pretty similar to one another.

And Malkazod's physical avatar is inspired by the Magic the Gathering card "Horror of Horrors," which depicts a monster with a human-shaped silhouette but whose actual nature is a tangle of eyes, mouths, teeth, horns, all arranged in a decidedly inhuman configuration.

Hence, the note about the eye, ear, and mouth tiles the character's husband found made me think that this could have connected him to this particular eldritch being.

Taking some inspiration from the most iconic cosmic horror story, the Call of Cthulhu, and specifically the part in which numerous artists are compelled to make representations of the octopus-headed horror, the husband was not the only person to be touched by Malkazod, and this will lead this character to a painter in a nearby city who has felt compelled to make his "Black Prince" the center of a William Blake-like oeuvre of mystical, prophetic works.

Malkazod's resemblance to a devil can serve as a major red herring, while this artist interprets it through the lens of esoteric alchemy (convinced that the Black Prince is representative of Fire, the element at the top of the alchemical hierarchy, returning to enrich the Earth, the basest of the elements, with fertility and fecundity - not unlike how a forest fire makes the soil richer).

In fact, Malkazod's, or perhaps his cultists', plot is ultimately to burn down the vast Schattenwald, an ancient old-growth forest that is saturated with energy from the Shadowfell - an act that would have cataclysmic repercussions for the entire world.

So, no, I don't have all the pieces figured out here. I don't even know if this Malkazod plot should be the centerpiece of the campaign. I still need to get the more specific details from the other three players - one of whom is playing a dragonborn ranger who is a smuggler from Highrealm, a loose coalition of jury-rigged villages and towns built using stolen Cloud Giant ruins, as well as a shifter warlock who's a conspiracy theorist who publishes a lightly-circulated 'zine/broadsheet, herself from the imperial capital, and finally a gnome druid who is the goliath's best friend and next-door neighbor, though neither has learned the other's name and it's been too long to just come out and ask.

But those are just the broad character pitches - I haven't gotten any specifics about their actual backstories (and no one but the one I have a backstory for has a name).

Now, of course, this campaign is only going to be played when we can't do our regular one. That creates some real limits on adventure design, requiring, likely, to make each session somewhat self-contained. This, then, touches on some of the challenges we find with pacing that I discussed in my previous post. As such, I'm probably going to plan for this campaign to be limited to tiers 1 and 2 at most, and to only slowly allow leveling.

Now, I generally don't like to leave players at level 1 for more than a session, and in fact, the DMG even suggests this. I will probably continue this trend. But rather than racing to get to tier 2 as fast as I can, I'm likely to let them stew for a bit at level 2. This, as well, is a level I will want not to wallow in too long, as everyone now (even the Warlock and Druid) will only get their subclass at level 3.

Of course, the intermittent nature of this campaign means that it could take a very long time to hit level 5 anyway - in an ideal world, we're playing this campaign only ever two months or so, which means only six sessions in a whole year. I'm all right with the characters being level 3 or 4 at such an interval, but I don't want them to have to wait half a year just to get a subclass.

But we'll see.

Really, this is a bit of a test-run for the follow-up to my Ravnica campaign, which will probably be more epic in scope (though not necessarily go all the way to level 20 - we'll see how nostalgic I am for tier 4 play - really, more importantly, is that I won't rush as much through tiers 1 and 2). But that's probably years off.

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