While my roommate has been reading through my copy of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, he and I have been discussing the structure of Critical Role's second campaign, and how remarkably player-driven the campaign is.
While it's one of now four (5 if you count SCAG) campaign setting books for 5th Edition, Wildemount distinguishes itself less in high concept - in fact, of all the setting's it's probably the most conventionally D&D-ish - but in the overall attitude and style of the campaign that it's designed to help you run.
In my general experience, I've run things with a plan. I know more or less the arc of the campaign, and generally figure out how things are going to go before I even know who all my players are going to be.
To tell the story that you, as a DM, wish to tell, this is, I think, the standard approach. And it fits with a lot of the published adventures, which naturally can't be designed for specific characters given that they're meant to be, well, modular (in old school terms, published adventures are called modules.)
The thing is, one of the things that makes D&D (well, and TTRPGs in general) so cool compared to something like a video game is that they can be custom-tailored to the players.
If you haven't watched Critical Role's second campaign (which I highly recommend, though I also know that it's a huge time commitment - I suggest listening to it in podcast form while exercising or if you have a job that doesn't require a lot of linguistic processing; I got through all of the first campaign while working on product photography) the structure has been remarkable, in that it all seems to flow from what the characters want to do.
While Matt Mercer, the DM and creator of the world of Exandria in which Wildemount is one of a few continents, certainly leaves hints and breadcrumbs to direct players toward certain plots, there is very little railroading. For example, at one point, the party discovers that the hometown of one of its members was recently attacked by one of the other major powers in Wildemount, and chose to follow the retreating attacks through their subterranean tunnels - something Mercer had clearly not anticipated, and which wound up changing the course of the campaign. But their choice led to some very interesting developments, and the the world was detailed and vibrant enough that things could continue with relative ease (or at least it looked that way.)
The Wildemount book is dense with regional details. Every village and town has at least one story hook that you could use for a local quest, and that means that when your party arrives there, you have something for them to do.
So why not just set them loose?
Player-specific plots are hard to work into a pre-planned arc. But the Wildemount book has a lot of methods and tools for ensuring that the player characters are fully enmeshed in the setting, and thus bought into the overall major plots there. There are also some guidelines on building arcs for your players, considering what goals and steps along the way need to happen for that character to have a satisfying story - should they survive (and spoilers for recent episodes: even if a character dies, it doesn't mean that their plot has to.)
Anyway, the other thing that got me thinking about this is that a friend introduced me to Inkarnate, which is a web-based map-making system. As someone who has plenty of imagination but limited skills as a visual artist, it's really great to have a system that lets you make pretty gorgeous maps. While I'm a little overwhelmed by the options to make battle maps (and I think I'll stick to the basic editor in Roll20) the ability to make maps for continents and other large areas has got me totally hooks.
In my homebrew world of Sarkon, there's a region called Nephimala, which is inspired by the period of western expansion in the United States during the 19th Century. Redwood forests, snowy mountains, wide prairies and vast deserts are the stage set for a young republic that seeks to expand into a sparsely populated land while the indigenous people struggle to maintain their autonomy and culture in the face of this massive conquest. And on top of this is a rush for ancient technology, a menacing army of bandits secretly controlled by an archdevil, fey crossings in the forests, and a bit of cosmic horror out on the coasts make it a place ripe for adventure.
Making a map will always inspire me to fill in more details - while I came up with five cities for Nephimala when I first came up with the Sarkon setting, building the mountain ranges, rivers, forests, and deserts inspired me to place new locations on the map, giving me a whole lot of additional locations, which in turn has made the place feel a bit more real and also given me a better sense of its history and the kinds of adventures that could occur there.
While still probably not as dense with detail as Wildemount, I could really see myself working on a few favorite regions of my setting and detailing everything from major cities to minor villages and remote shrines.
Now that my Ravnica campaign has hit tier 3 (though I don't know if it's truly halfway through - there are still nine guilds with Phyrexian cultists or their pawns subverting the plane's safety, and then a big interplanar treasure hunt to go on before taking the fight to New Phyrexia, not to mention player-specific plots) I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do next, and I definitely want to set it in Sarkon. While I have a few ideas for things to set there, one new idea cropping up is to really be pretty hands-off on the initial design and just start with in-depth character building, and take stuff from their stories to link to the overall campaign.
Having a place like Nephimala very thoroughly mapped out would probably do a lot to make that work.
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