5x5 Next steps

Well, I'm finally really closing in on the finale of the 5x5 CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER front. For those of you just tuning in, this is my campaign design model. I don't focus on anything more than a very high level view of where the campaign itself is going, and even then, my high level plans are left deliberately sketchy so as to be easily adjustable depending on both PC action and player interest. There's a lot of hooks to bite into, but my approach for planning where those hooks go is more about planning what the villains are likely to do, with only an extremely light touch on what the players are likely to do. My biggest problem with ideas like Paizo's Adventure Paths—which are indeed an interesting concept—is that they are prewritten and make no allowance for 1) what PCs you're going to get, and 2) what your PCs will do during the course of play, and 3) what your players will particularly take an interest in, or even more importantly, what they will not be interested in pursuing. These issues can and should be mitigated at the table, but because adventure paths are so heavily written out with lots of detail, it turns out that mostly they are not.

My own experience, playing Age of Worms, is that I created a character that I thought had some really interesting backstory that my GM could really do something with; he was one of those Eberron changeling characters (a kind of junior doppelganger) who was in Diamond Lake because he was in hiding from a crime lord in the Free City. He was doing a kind of Some Like It Hot vibe, where he had run away disguised as a woman. Of course, adventure paths can't account for character specific backstory, but adventure paths are written in such a way that it takes a really extraordinary GM to weave character specific stuff into them. I had a pretty good GM, but he wasn't extraordinary in his process, he was good at an ordinary process, which meant that he ran the adventure as written, and added character and life to the modules to it without adding content, if that makes sense. About halfway through the campaign, I decided to change the character because having a rogue that was in disguise from an enemy that was never going to show up, and who had a skill-set based around intrigue and stuff like that—which was never going to be relevant because we spent most of our time doing dungeons—just wasn't fun anymore. More fool me for treating an adventure path like a homebrew, I suppose. Using another Eberron race, I created a shifter ranger/barbarian who was a damage output monster, and who had a more simple role-playing hook.

It was a better fit all around for the rest of the campaign, but also a bit disappointing; I thought I was bringing some real potential to the game that never got any traction. Not that I didn't already know this, but without having gone through that experience, it might have been one of those things just in the back of your mind that you don't recognize how important it is; but I've ever since thought that campaign design and structure needs to be loose enough to really accommodate the players and their characters, not just be "generic" and can be run as is with faceless and "character-less" characters. In fact, you nedd to play specifically for that up front. In the past, I usually didn't even bother planning very far ahead, and that worked pretty well. I enjoy planning campaigns, though, so I came up with this 5x5 design format to give me just enough high level structure to know what I'm most likely to be aiming for as the campaign rolls out, without jeopardizing my ability to really integrate the PCs themselves in to the game and make certain that there's not a generic "plot" that will roll on through like a steamroller without regard to the actual characters that I get to go through it.

I had some logistical stuff to work on that I've done on the side; name lists for the inner inserts of my GM screen, for instance, and some other stuff like that. I'm still working on some content to facilitate travel, but it's very nuts and bolts, and I probably won't post it here. The Dark Fantasy X rules specifically use the Angry GM "Getting There Is Half the Fun" method, but I've re-written them to be a bit more succinct, and to fit better into the Dark Fantasy X rules (they were originally meant as an add-on subsystem for 5e.) The nuts and bolts aspects of it are that I need a good list of potential discoveries for the PCs to stumble across as well as pre-screened encounter/danger situations. I actually have a really big list, but that doesn't mean that that's what I want to put on my inner GM screen, or that it's really ready to work as is.

This nuts and bolts work isn't insubstantial, but it also isn't very hard or too time-consuming. I've got kind of a busy work and non-work schedule this week, but I still hope to get the inserts ready and printed and good to go, along with any other supplemental tables or lists. Then, I'll just need to do one final thing to prepare for my (at this point, still hypothetical) Dark Fantasy X game: some more detailed plans for a first session or two, and what I expect and need to have ready to have a good first session. The most important session of your game is always your next session, but that's especially true when your next session is also your first session. Having a high level plan for the whole campaign is not nearly as important as having a good plan for your next session. I will not be posting my nuts and bolts namelists and stuff like that. You can find that kind of information quite well on your own. I actually have a book—although sadly, I'm not 100% sure where it is right now—that has tons of name lists by culture and region. If I could find that, I'd probably just bring that instead of creating a GM screen insert, but again—I can't remember where it is. I probably will have to dig through a number of boxes to make it turn up. Here's an alternative book that looks like it's the same kind of content, although I won't buy it until I've run out of places to look for my book.

But let's assume that I find my name book. If I do, I won't need a name insert, even though I've already created it. I'll just use the Anglo-Saxon (and Norman) lists for the Hill Country, and German and Romanian (and possibly a few Czech or Medieval Bohemian) lists for Timischburg, various Celtic names for the woodwoses, and ancient middle-eastern names of various types for Baal Hamazi, Kurushat and even Lomar as needed. My inserts can be reduced to some random encounter and discovery tables for travel.

And finally, I'll need to draw or re-draw the map for the campaign. I've mentioned before that I want to have campaign specific maps, and the details may differ somewhat from my general setting map. Not only will the campaign maps have additional detail and new places relative to the original setting map, but it may be distorted, and have other "rearranged" details. If there's ever a question as to which is the "real" map, the answer is "All of them. None of them." Which is the "real" map which trumps all alternatives is the wrong question to ask. In any given campaign, the campaign map takes precedence, but outside of that campaign, the setting map usually takes precedence. But with new details being added to the campaign maps, a bigger, better campaign map is probably going to be called for after the three 5x5s are all done.