Category: Campaign Creation

  • Summing Up: Writing a Campaign Synopsis

    This past Sunday I wrote a thread on Twitter I thought might be worth posting in a clearer format here. We’re putting out the casting call soon for [REDACTED] so I needed to pull together the campaign synopsis, which is one of my favourite exercises for a new campaign. They are an absolute necessity for…

  • From the Campaign: Emberhaunt

    Here’s a little something I thought I’d share, that will make an appearance in one of my upcoming D&D sessions. I’ve been developing a haunted location in my game, and I wanted something a little special to spring on my players. Enter the emberhaunt. After I’ve had a chance to run it a few times I…

  • Making Scrolls Magical

    I wrote before of ways in which you can make the magic in your game more magical. Today I want to focus on that most ubiquitous of magical items, the scroll. Casting magic from a scroll has been a staple of fantasy for longer than there has been fantasy. Mythology is rife with scrolls being…

  • Racial Backgrounds to Fit Your Campaign

    One of the most satisfying pieces of creating the world for my D&D campaign was selectively re-skinning the races to fit my world history. I didn’t want to change any of the mechanics, but I needed the racial descriptions to better fit my world. Besides satisfying that need, re-skinning also helped inspire some of the…

  • New Campaign Smell

    A week ago we started our brand-new 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Ever since I got the new books (a birthday gift from my Thursday night Pathfinder group, oddly enough) I knew I would want to run a 5th Ed game. But I also knew I wanted to do things a little differently from…

  • Campaign Creation: What’s Dead Can Never Die…

    Looking back through the logs, and it has been a while since I did one of these. So let’s start with a quick recap of what I’ve done so far: created a starting location (The Ruin and environs) created some NPCs important to the party picked the main monsters/monster types the characters will encounter first figured…

  • Campaign Creation: Messing with FATE

    If you tune in regularly to the blog you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking all I play is Pathfinder. I’m the Venture-Captain for Edmonton, Golarion is my current favourite setting, and I am currently GMing three different Pathfinder campaigns. But despite that busy schedule, I do find time to cheat on Pathfinder play other role-playing games.…

  • Campaign Creation: Random Encounters

    As we head ever closer to Christmas, I want to make sure I stay on top of blog posts. So they’ll keep coming this week, they’ll just be shorter. In that spirit, here is a Random Encounter Table for The Ruins. You can use whatever method you like to determine when an encounter happens; I…

  • Campaign Creation: In the Depths

    Last time, we talked about all the nasties awaiting our brave adventurers above ground. Now I want to look at what (or who) might be lurking underground. Giving it some thought, I want to split the Depths, as I’ll call them, into three main areas. The first area will be just below the surface, at…

  • Campaign Creation: Here Lie Monsters!

    In the previous Campaign Creation posts we established the basics of the campaign’s starting point and the NPCs surrounding the party. Today I want to look at monsters the party is likely to encounter, for at least the first few levels and beyond. The Ruin is the remains of a vast, ancient city. Little is…