Campaign Toybox
Like I said, sometimes it doesn't matter. And sometimes, it's incredibly obvious. And sometimes, a great way to give a kick to a new or old campaign is to change up that reason to be. So here's thirteen suggestions (the next thirteen will come next month) you might not have considered....
A is for Agents
A very obvious one, this, but it's worth thinking about in every campaign, no matter what the setting. After all, why shouldn't fantasy heroes work for the King's Society of Dungeon Clearing and Dragon Slaying? Agents are great not just because they are so easy to drive into narratives, they also come with built in story structures and world scaffolding. Agents have bosses who give them missions, reasons for doing what they do and standard operating principles. None of this has to get boring or formulaic, and it also provides its own drama when the bosses are compromised and the missions are lies – and when the reasons get fuzzy, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Indeed, it can be the whole point of playing agents.
B is for Bounty Hunters
Boba Fett may have been cool, but he also gave bounty hunters a bit of a bad rep. Maybe it feels to close to the slave trade to be hauling folk around in chains, but if you can get past that, bounty hunting makes for a great PC hook. As with agents, it provides an endless supply of missions and each of them have a very clear and specific goal so the players will always know when they're finished – no leaving the dungeon unexplored if the target isn't dead or in custody. As with agents you risk things becoming formulaic but you also gain the possibilities of economic considerations: players get to decide whether each take is worth the risk of bagging their target. But the economics stays simple: you don't have to design a whole infrastructure of galactic spice trading just so people can be a bit mercenary.
C is for Conspirators
Normally conspiracies are bad things. Why? Because if they succeed, they aren't called conspiracies any more. Technically speaking, any hidden or secret order of knights or warriors can qualify as a conspiracy, be they Jedi or Musketeers, because it's a group with an agenda acting against the law of the land. Don't be afraid to go one step further though and make that agenda more specific and time-dependent. Not just “do good and stay hidden until the tide turns again” but actually working to turn the tide and get rid of the forces that keep them hidden. Too many games flounder with clichés that do nothing but preserve the status quo: stop the assassination, return the princess, protect the long-standing city. An easy sting can be achieved by simply swinging those around and having your heroes planning the assassination of the evil king, kidnapping the evil princess to curtail her magical power and leading the dragons to destroy the wicked (and now leaderless) city.
D is for Dilettantes
A tricky one, this one, because dilettantes, by definition, have no real reason to do much of anything. They just do what seems like a good lark at the time, which is much the same as not having a hook. But if the heroes are specifically, explicitly dilettantes, they know to do whatever seems the most amusing and ridiculous. What's more, they may need to do certain things to protect their dilettante status – not get into too much trouble with authority, say, or stay in a certain location, or avoid some catastrophic event like passing exams or getting married – and that's plenty of drama-fuel right there. Dilettantes are also strongly defined by what they don't care about and what they do not lack – no need to fear the PCs chickening out on something just because they are too low on money or too high on morals, for example.
E is for Explorers
Not uncommon in fantasy, gets a mention in pulp, but rarely fully explored for an entire campaign. And how many times have you supposedly gone into the wild unknown and yet discovered everything there seems to be already civilised and named? When was the last time you handed a blank map to your players and told them to fill it in as they went, names included? When was the last time they were the first people ever to see a fantasy creature or magical item (and again, get to name it)? Exploring is also at the heart of all sci-fi, yet is so rarely done in this hobby where settings are all written up from the beginning. Scientific or magical exploring counts too, and again, sometimes settings with rules work against this. But maintaining a sense of wonder means going beyond what's known and breaking the rules – the rules of the setting and even the system if need be. Technically you can't be a vampire and a werewolf in the World of Darkness, but that doesn't mean people aren't exploring ways to break that rule – with extremely interesting results.
F is for Faith
Paladins are always a tricky thing to play. Play up the religion too much and you're the whiny guy who turns every kobold capture into an ethics discussion. Play it down and you're nothing but a middling half-cleric in plate. The solution is to make everything be about faith so everyone can be the paladin. That doesn't mean everything is written in stone (ala Dogs in the Vinyard), it just lets everyone in on the discussion on the same level. Nor does it mean everyone has to be a priest, monk or a missionary out to bring religiosity to the fuzzy-wuzzies (although, faith and exploration make a great pair): knights and Space Marines are creatures of faith. Faith can work a lot like Agency – there's often a boss (even if its a distant deity) and for the most part unquestionable orders. The difference is in the flavour of the boss and the kind of orders, and most importantly, the kind of people who choose to obey the former and follow the latter. Redoing the X-Files with Vatican agents would make a totally different show. A totally awesome show.
G is for Geniuses
Why do the heroes do what they do? Maybe because nobody else can – or very few, indeed - because they're just not smart enough. Often PCs are special entities, either explicitly or implicitly, especially in games where the average PC can rip the arms off Joe Peasant. But go beyond pure strength and statistically superiority and consider other qualifications. Certainly various agencies and faiths of history have demanded extreme mental acuity and scholarship from their employees, because the kind of work they were doing needed a mind that could deal with totally alien concepts and extremely complicated tasks, and a huge amount of superheroes are scientific geniuses or master detectives to stop the plots from snapping half. And of course, the entire mystery genre depends on geniuses, of a kind. Genius here doesn't have to exclude muscle, either, as long as you frame it in scholarship terms: you're not the mightiest warrior of the hill people, but you spent your entire life studying combat so that there is now nobody more skilled than you. In other words, if your PCs are Midnighters rather than Apollos, you'll get a whole new feel.
H is for Heroes
This then is the opposite of geniuses. The heroes aren't anything special except that they're the Chosen Ones. They didn't train, they're not naturally gifted or elevated specimens, in fact they may not even be very good at anything at all (sans divine intervention). They are just capital-H heroes and at least a few people in the setting have spotted that. Whether this destiny is well-known or secret, this is a common feature in fantasy games, and is often explicitly written into the setting. Yet it isn't always played up as much as it could be (how does the average person deal with a walking God? And how does the newly-crowned God feel about that?) and that's the key. People like to talk about the similarities between Harry Potter and Star Wars but one of the main differences is that Luke has no idea he's the boy who lived until the very end of Empire. And speaking of those two, both of them broke new ground by taking their scions out of fantasy and into other genres. Learn well.
I is for Inescapable
If the gods have tapped you in for the fight for love and glory, it can feel hard to escape, no matter how fast you run (see Rincewind for examples). Inescapable adventures don't just belong to the cosmically chosen, however. They are equally foisted upon the entrapped (like Cudgel the Clever or Snake Plisken) or the fleeing (like Blake's Seven, Battlestar Galactica or Richard Kimble). In the latter case they aren't being so much forced to go on missions as being exposed to the unknown because they can't go home again – not yet, anyway – while the former have to do missions so things can go back to normal. In either case, this sense of urgency and helplessness adds a huge edge to what might otherwise be fairly mundane plots. Your players won't give up dungeon crawling in favour of selling magical items if they know that the market is crawling with their enemies, and only on the Borderlands can they stay free – as long as they also stay alive.
J is for Justice
Flip Jean Valjean around and you get Inigo Montoya. Same cliché, but it feels completely different. Now the reason the PCs are going into the Borderlands and facing the orcs and trolls is not because the bad people are after them, but because they are after the bad people. And maybe this cave, or the next, or the next, will have the clue that helps them bring down their target. Or targets. Like bounty hunters, justice-seekers may have many targets on their list, but unlike bounty hunters, this stuff is personal, and as such, can be a great way to bind characters together, too. The danger here is if you catch the guy(s), the ball game's over, but there are ways and means to achieve reboots or delays. Justice never sleeps, after all.
K is for Killers
This one is less about changing the nature of the PCs – because let's face it, most of them are killers – but changing the setting around them. The idea being that even though we might believe there are folks who need killing in this world, people who are crazy enough or twisted enough to actually do the killing are a rare commodity. And a sought after one, when there's trouble brewing, and a terrifying thing when trouble isn't around. This isn't very common in fantasy – apart from Warhammer, where they consistently make the point that adventurers are kind of nuts, and that's a big part of why Warhammer is so great. It is also a long-standing pillar of the Western, and part of the emotional heart of that genre. So it's got to be worth considering.
L is for Lost
It's like being an explorer, except by accident. Surprisingly common in fiction, but hardly ever used in RPGs because again, the setting is all pre-set and un-mysterious to players and GMs. But like a pursuit for justice, this can be a desperate, personal quest that can unite parties and define the whole story. Farscape was fuelled by it, and it was what kept Scott Bakula continually Quantum Leaping. The risk here is Gilligan's Island syndrome: you know the heroes can't get home until the end so every time it seems like they might, you have a groaning certainty that it's all lies (Star Trek Voyager, I'm looking at you). So don't play that game. Give them hope, make it possible, but don't yank their chain. If you want it to take a long time, make it a long way to travel. Hope will burn for almost forever, as long as they keep moving forward.
M is for Made
Made as in Made Men, ala the mafia (although the men of Mad Men aren't far off from that). This is kind of like being agents, in the sense that the PCs have authority and power. Thus they don't have to scramble for information and access, because they have some swagger and influence. The difference with being Made is the authority isn't backed by the legal system, and isn't always socially acceptable – and only exists in certain cultural or social areas.. Nor is their authority always going to be perfectly solid, because the power structures are far more fluid. Those power structures are also not just jobs to the PCs, but their culture and background and social lives – and they'll have to work to juggle those social lives and those power structures, as lieutenants and leaders in both. Note that none of this requires organised crime: Vampire works along these lines, assuming the PCs have any rank in the local masquerade. It also parallels really well with things like races and alien species, because that's where organised crime tends to live. Being an elf is a lot more interesting when you realise you're a role model to younger elves growing up on the street...
Next month: More things with letters.
