Campaign Report - The Game We Want to Play

This is going to be a new series of articles on this blog. I will write about the campaign I will be DMing to my friends now that I am back to my home town. It has been 3 years since I last played D&D or any other tabletop RPG so I am kinda rusty.

On the other hand, I never read so much about DMing and creating a nice campaign and interesting adventures, so I do not feel so unprepared. One of the things I read about (in the Dungeon Master Guide 2) was Colaborative Campaign creation. So I decided to give it a first try with my group.

We were 5 when we were discussing what kind of game we wanted to play (there is another player that could not come that day). I handed them a copy of the sheet I made with questions about what they like, where they want the adventures to happen, what monsters they want to face and things like that (see the post Colaborative Campaing Building in April of 2011). I said them to not answer the questions about their characters yet until we decided what the setting would be like.

After 30 minutes or so, they gave me the sheets and I looked at them. They were quite different from each other on the answers, but a few points were present in almost all the sheets. They wanted a campaign focusing on exploration, with good amount of combat and with survival challenges. The favorite bad guys are undeads, tyrants, demons and evil gods. And the campaign would be short, maybe an entire tier or so. If it's still fun after that many levels we would continue, but the story arcs should not spam for too many adventures.

After that I already had an idea of what sort of adventures I could prepare to make my players happy, but I still had to decide where those adventures would take place, so I started talking to them about some of the campaign settings available and the possibility of we creating our own little by little. I talked a little bit about Forgotten Realms, with the famous personalities, it's ancient history, the recent magic mayhem that happened; next we went to Eberron and it's pulp atmosphere, the organizations that influence the world, the frail peace between the Five Nations; when we talked about Dark Sun the players got a little bit excited (maybe because I was also, I don't know). I explained the concepts, a dying world where only the strongest survives, where tyrants control the only civilized cities left in the world, how arcane magic is seen as evil, the lack of metal and water... Dark Sun really captured the attention of us all, and even after I talked a little bit about a possible campaign in Planescape (it was a close second choice) or Ravenloft, Athas was chosen to be the place of our future exploits.

So what did we decide in the end? The campaign would be short, spanning for about 10 level tops. It would focus on exploration with exciting combats (and maybe a little of intrigue). The villains would be Tyrants, undeads, demons and evil gods (in Athas? We will see about that). The campaing setting will be Dark Sun, a land of savage desolation, evil Sorcerer-Kings, ancient and mysterious history and in desperate need of heroes.

And you, how to you chose what kind of campaing to play with your friends?