I've been running my Ravnica campaign for about a year and a half. Given the pace of it, I think it will be at minimum one more year before we finish it.
I've given a lot of thought to how I want to structure the next campaign I run. My Ravnica game was very much built before players made their characters - the premise is a gradual infiltration of the plane by the Phyrexians, who have recruited (some willing, some even unwitting) powerful members in each guild to serve their purpose, with a promise to some that they will emerge as the "Praetors" of the new, Phyrexified Ravnica. Thus, the party has some thematically-arranged boss enemies to fight as they level up.
What this doesn't account for, though, is the personal plots for the player characters. While most players have done what I think is pretty common in D&D and picked broad adventurer characters that will happily slot into any existing adventure, one of my players in particular gave me so much fuel that I sort of regret that there is so much of the "main plot" for us to get through, thus meaning that we naturally have to "slow down" to handle his character's story. (In fact, I've tied it into the main story in ways that should be pretty obvious if you were reading this blog, so I hope he doesn't).
I've just begun playing in a Wildemount campaign in which our DM had us all figure out characters and their backstories before he came up with anything for the campaign's plot (the setting, of course, being established already). What was so exciting about this as a player was that I felt I had a real sense of agency in guiding the campaign to deal with things I personally find interesting. So, I made my Triton Wizard and had him meet "The Elder of the Gate-Books," the soul of an ancient wizard whose order had their minds and souls inscribed into books that served as portals to other planes (I feel it important to remind everyone how big Myst was as an early influence on me.) This ancient wizard, Sarkavo, gives me a personality for my Awakened Spellbook (thus meaning this character could only ever be an Order of Scribes wizard) but also more or less guarantees that, at some point in the campaign, we're going to do some planar travel - which is something I think is very cool.
While my version of Ravnica has been highly customized for the purposes of the game I want to play, it's still someone else's setting. I feel a certain obligation to respect the canon (which I know is not actually an obligation, but more of a preference,) and so while I might invent additional districts and play up the modernity of the setting provided by the Izzet League, I still, for instance, treat the planar system in the way it works in Magic the Gathering. One does not simply learn the Plane Shift spell - you have to be a planeswalker (and one of the "marvelous coincidences" of the campaign that totally wasn't actually orchestrated by House Dimir is that every member of the party started the campaign with a latent planeswalker spark - some of which have since ignited). There will be no mention of the Nine Hells or the Shadowfell (though Agryem, the Ghost Quarter, serves as a rough equivalent of the Shadowfell).
But while this respect for canon does focus the campaign and its boundaries, I've been thinking about how to open things up.
In my primary homebrew world, I came up with a device to prevent travel beyond the world - travel to the outer planes, or even other worlds of the prime material, were impossible due to the Great Barrier. The only other planes one could access were the local portions of the Shadowfell and Feywild and the Elemental Planes. And the Ethereal Plane. But the Barrier basically existed in those worlds as well, so that one was still trapped on the same geographical equivalent.
I honestly don't know why I did that. My initial ambition was to have my own, unique planar system. But as I've played more, I like the idea that a homebrew world can sit within the broader D&D multiverse.
As a player, I like to be allowed some broad latitude for character creation. And I think the main reason DMs will place significant limits on those options is mostly about keeping the story manageable.
But I am a foolishly ambitious storyteller.
In fact, I think the only reason I'd really want to push players to limit, say, their character's home world to one option is that I want people to engage with the homebrew world that I've spent so many years refining and working on.
But what if I tried something different:
It's easy for me to shove players into my world - a portal opens up and they all get deposited there. But that's probably enough.
Let's take a step back and approach from another angle.
As WotC has come out with more and more campaign setting books, I find myself torn - I really want to run a Ravenloft campaign (especially after the release of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.) I really want to run a Planescape campaign (no 5E book yet, but I'm hoping that's in the works.) I think an Eberron Campaign would be cool (though it's got a lot of similarities with by own homebrew world, so that's a lower priority.)
So, when figuring out where my next campaign takes place, what if the answer is just: "Yes"?
Already, my general policy with character options is that, when things are in my homebrew setting, any officially published stuff is fair game. Want to a play a Vedalken? Sure, they exist in my world. A Warforged? I had the party discover a vast vault full of them from the fallen civilization that existed 20,000 years ago. Dhampir? You bet your ass. Mark of Making Human? Um... ok, that's very Eberron-specific, but we can make it work.
I only really draw the line at homebrew or unofficial content, primarily because I want to be able to quickly and easily look up what you're working with (5E.tools is profoundly useful - I buy all the books, but being able to digitally search for these things is an enormous benefit).
But the point is, if I open the floodgates, we can build a campaign in which every player is truly playing the character they most want to, and the joy of the D&D stuff all existing within a connected multiverse (with some exceptions we'll address later) is that there is absolutely nothing preventing a Reborn Artificer from Lamordia grouping up with a Tiefling Sorcerer from Sigil, a Warforged Paladin from Sharn, and a Fairy Cleric from Babbling Mad (this last one being a city in my homebrew world's portion of the Feywild).
One of the great appeals of fantasy as a genre is that everything can happen, and I think that RPGs benefit greatly not only from players feeling they have agency in the moment of play, but also when they feel they have some control over the direction of the story. I saw a Matt Colville video recently that talked about how one of the joys of DMing was not knowing what the players are going to do. As I see it, creating RPG characters has the easiest and most fun part of story writing - coming up with a premise and a beginning - and then letting yourself be surprised by how that story develops. Essentially, the DM knows things the players don't yet, but the players will do things the DM hasn't anticipated. And that balance between what different players know is what makes the reveals so fun.
Ok, stepping back from the philosophical:
Restrictions can certainly breed creativity. And sometimes, by not being allowed to do exactly what you want, you can come up with something that is actually more interesting.
But I do think there is also something to be said for taking all the action figures and mixing them together. And the synthesis of the different kinds of stories that the different settings allow for could give you something new and exciting.
And at worst, it's just a convoluted mishmash that still, ultimately, has you rolling dice to see whether you kill that big dragon before it can kill you.
I don't know if this is actually what I plan on doing, but the idea is growing on me.
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