Campaign Toybox
In A Nutshell: Getting a starting idea is actually the easy part, because there are so many sources around to help you. The internet abounds with awesome generators which automatically shoot out ideas for games, characters, settings or stories. Failing that, get you and your buddies to throw a dozen ideas each into a hat and then pick two or three to mash together. That’s what I call the Gareth Method, after my buddy who invented it, and it’s how I got my current campaign, alien invasion in the Napoleonic War.
Alternatively, read a news website now and then, or follow the twitter feeds of whatever roleplaying whackjobs you know who will obsessively do it for you. In the last few months we’ve had reports of the discovery of a drug called DRACO that could cure any virus, the long-lost personal diary and notebook of Bram Stoker and the translation of a previously indecipherable eighteenth-century handbook to an Illuminati-esque Secret Society. Just yesterday I read about an underwater ice tornado that kills everything it touches and today I discovered that scientists are turning swine flu into an airborne version so deadly it could kill half the earth’s population. That’s modern, horror, historical, sci-fi and post-apocalypse, ready to go; and all five could be used in fantasy by hanging “magical" in front of them.
The most important rule for where you start is to think big and wide and crazy. You can always justify anything after the fact. This is why randomness helps: our human minds like to follow old traditional paths so we’re less likely to ram My Little Pony and Being and Nothingness together. Random generators (and real life) know no such bounds so produce cooler, cleaner, newer ideas. And that’s important because you’re going to dig down into them: the newer the idea, the more there is to dig through.
The Story: Like I said, the idea is the easy part. Turning it into an actual setting takes work, which is why there are a lot more randomly generated ideas than campaign settings. The next bit is called development, but it doesn’t have to be a chore.
If the important thing with ideas is to be open to anything, the important rule with developing is to think big. If you think small, an idea is just a plot, just an adventure. To build a setting, the question is not about what happens, but how does that event effect an entire country, race or world? Too many settings aren’t simply not different enough from others, and they end up suffering because of it. Books and films have huge tapestries to show off the minute differences between one world and another; you have five guys around a table in our world, so all the differences need to be hard and to the fore. Having the Nazis planning to bring about Ragnarok is great for a Hellboy comic; having them cause Ragnarok and have a gigantic dead snake lying across Europe a year later is much better for an RPG.
If your thinking isn’t causing enough change, it may not be a good enough idea. One abandoned column for this series featured Godzilla attacking the Old West, but the truth is, she might as well be any natural disaster stomping across the plains. Anyone far enough away just reads about it in the newspaper and goes back to being a cowboy; anyone close enough gets stomped. Which presents the other problem: sometimes if you change the world too much you end up without your original element, and thus with just another old idea. So you go back and start again.
If you can’t change the world, change the genre. History stayed the same in Spied and Prejudice, all I did was change the focus to different kinds of characters, and thus genre. Sometimes you will need to change the world, however, to shift the focus onto a certain genre, providing a Macguffin to drive that aspect of narrative into a key position so it controls the fate of the world. Other times, however, finding a new genre or style of story can just be a matter of tilting the lens, to look at history from a different angle, finding the stories that so far, have been missed. Sometimes this means changing the people, but it can also work just as well to change the place or nudging the time, to those people, time and places less exposed in popular culture.
Style and Structure: Although your story needs to stand up to at least some scrutiny, it exists solely as a slave to style – to eliding a style and structure that feels different to other games. You may even want to pick your style first, then work backwards to justify it. Want to run CSI: Caveman? Then perhaps you’ll need some awesome back story to explain why murder matters so much in a world where dozens get eaten by sabre-tooth tigers every day. Or maybe not. That’s the other virtue of starting with style and structure: you can add just as much story (and thus just as much work) as you feel you need, or can be bothered caring about.
Also handy is that if your style and structure are nice and strong, your game will feel different, even if your story lacks some pizzazz. Whatever your backstory, CSI: Caveman won’t feel like D&D Cavemen, and will require whole different characters, rules and stories. Meanwhile, both will benefit from strongly raiding pre-existing works in their respective genres, so you gain all the benefit from the fact that CSI, D&D and Cavemen are extremely well-worn tracks, but because you’ve thrown them together in a new way, your game still feels new and exciting.
(Of course that’s the benefit of style and structure in general – stories can quickly feel hackneyed but style never goes out of fashion. Indeed sometimes the more formalized and repeated the genre, the more enjoyable it becomes. Detective stories or wandering murderhobos feel boring if they’re always in New York City or Conan-ville, but put them elsewhere (like in Conan-ville or New York City) and everything feels different yet the tropes remain the same. Don’t believe me? Watch The Hidden Fortress and Star Wars sometime, back to back.)
If you prefer to start your idea with story and then develop style from it, you have to work a bit harder to find your style and structure. Settings don’t necessarily produce them, and a lot of bad RPGs have been written without any thought being given to how an amazing new setting actually produces new and interesting stories. Indeed, many rpgs just assume the GM or players do all that themselves, or that PCs just wander around the setting in a style somewhere between travelogue and James Joyce, or that you’re going to be running Wandering Adventurers because That’s What RPGs Are. All of these assumptions are fine but if they are your assumptions, you have to work twice as hard to make your story different. But there are shortcuts, and they are based on the next two headings…
PCs and NPCs: Books and movies have it easy, they can be built on so many elements. But games are about interaction, and that means they come down to two questions: what tools do I have, and what do I do with them? And for almost all roleplaying games, that becomes who can I play, and what can they do? It’s the fundamental question of all setting design – all RPG design, really. The longer you go without being able to answer this question, the more likely you have a bad idea. Everything depends on it, and everything must flow from it.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it cheapens your setting by boiling it down to the Big Damn Heroes. The truth is, your setting can and even perhaps should be much more than just its heroes and what they do, but when it comes to making it into a gameable setting you must answer these questions and put the answers front and centre. This doesn’t change anything about how complex or wide the setting is in actuality, it just changes where the game chooses to put the focus. A great example of this is the Shadowfist/Feng Shui setting: I’ve had a lot of players of the Shadowfist CCG find the idea of roleplaying in the setting difficult to comprehend, because the CCG casts the players as distant observers looking down at the complex chess games of the nine different factions, whereas the RPG is about playing characters of just one faction, fighting the war on the street. Same setting, totally different focus.
You can design your entire setting before you turn the lens on the PCs, as long as you’re careful to leave them plenty of space to exist, and ideally, ways for the setting to revolve around them. A lot of great settings have been ruined because they either didn’t leave the space or forgot to come back and develop it and make it a strong focus. If you’re designing more than just a setting – ie a setting to be used - don’t make the same mistake.
It’s also a good way to get lots of NPCs as well, and to make sure they aren’t cookie-cutters or stereotypes. If every faction could be the focus of an RPG, if every bad guy could be a hero, you know you’ve built something really dramatically interesting. Developing people is also a great way to bring any part of a setting into focus so that it becomes both instantly understandable and something that can influence players at the table. It’s one thing to tell me that a mountain range is enormous, it’s something far more rich and inspiring to tell me that High Priest Bob of the mountain folk explains to travelers that his people’s word for dead literally translates to “beyond the peaks" – because all who try to cross them never return. Except one, who came back twenty years later, his mind gone, his body broken. Now I not only have a better sense of just how damn enormous the mountains are, I have two NPCs (Bob and the hero who returned) and a conversation Bob and others can have with the PCs, and a plot hook – finding the wanderer for the information only he possesses.
Plots and Villains: Some settings are static, and make it work, but most need either movers and shakers playing power games, or inherent tracks of cause and effect which will cause the pillars of heaven to be moved and shaken even without some bad guys to do it. Having exigent issues means that whomever the players are, they know exactly what they’re doing, because somebody has to. That’s what plots and villains are about: making sure there’s plenty to do.
Like PCs and NPCs, this is a question you need to be able answer clearly and strongly. Also like PCs and NPCs, though, ideas for these should come thick and fast from your style and structure, if not your original idea itself. They’ll even come from your PCs and NPCs if they’re written well enough. Stephen King said that the definition of a character is a person who wants something – if potential characters don’t suggest ideas for plots or obstacles then there’s something wrong with the characters already. Which is to say that if you’ve done your work properly so far then this is the easy home stretch: a solid idea developed with a strong style and plenty of things to be should be raining down ideas for adventures and campaigns like manna from heaven. Sometimes the issue isn’t finding ideas but picking the best ones from the list – ie the ones that give the characters the most to do in a style most appropriate to show off the setting’s unique aspects.
Also make sure the plots develop into actual full narratives, too. Sometimes you can have strong hooks that never actually go anywhere. A war between two factions is great for motivating characters to do things to stop one side from winning, but what kind of things do they do to stop this? How close is one side to winning? And what do they involve, and where, and when, and how? A plot is more than a hook, and just because it’s getting easy is no reason to skimp. Develop, develop, develop, even if you’re playing a game entirely driven by PC goals, it’s worth imagining some random PC goals in your head and making sure that whatever they might be, you can see they’d produce plots and villains aplenty. That way, you know the pudding is proofed before it is served.
Sources: Even though a good setting feels new, the best writers steal everything. Why? Because the familiar is strong. We love things we’ve seen before, and cling to them with unconscious but powerful strength. The trick is tacking old things together in a new way, to form a quilt that looks nothing like any of the originals, but still smells like home. Nothing has perhaps ever been quite like CSI: Cavemen but if it feels like CSI and it reminds us of Far Side comics or The Flinstones, it’ll be that much easier to get into, and make a stronger impression on our minds. Yes, there’s something to be said for the completely new and avante-garde but not so much when you’ve got five people shooting the breeze around a kitchen table. They need strong resonances and easily-recalled imagery. Don’t disappoint them: find your sources, know them well, and reference them often. And steal wherever you can. That’s the most important reason to do research: it’s possible to take a D&D adventure and refit it for CSI: Cavemen but it’s much easier to steal a CSI episode or the plot of Year One and not have to do any reskinning at all. As always, just make sure your players haven’t seen the source in question – familiarity is great, but repetition is awful.
RPGs: Stealing for stories and images goes double for RPGs. Design isn’t like art, you don’t lose points for copying. Every new car is based on old cars because there’s a science to what works and what doesn’t. The same goes for game mechanics. When you’re building an RPG to run your campaign, start with something you know as well as possible, and ideally, so do your players, because again, familiarity helps. It brings not only an emotional connection but a sense of intellectual control over the outcomes. That way, when you add tweaks both you and them can see easily how they work and what effect they’ll have on play. And steal those tweaks from other games, too. Even if you’re making the game to sell, no matter how critics rave on, there really are no prizes at all for originality, and creativity always needs somewhere to start. The blank slate is your enemy. Look at what works and use it. Doing otherwise is reinventing the wheel. What you make will still be unique, because of your crazy new setting idea, and what you and your players bring to the fog of war we call the gaming table. That also counts as playtesting which will not only iron out any mistakes, but also hide a lot of the theft because of the aforementioned fog. And then all of a sudden, you’re not playing anyone else’s rpg at all – you’re playing something totally new.
Then all you have to do is add some words, slap in some art, and put it on Lulu. Assuming you want to be a published game designer, instead of just a game designer. Which, even if you never run your own campaign world, is what all of us who roleplay already are, by virtue of all the strange flights of fancy and creation into which this ephemeral, creative hobby inevitably leads us.
Take my toys, in other words, and go build your own.
