The Campaign: How It All Began

desertdm — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:02:26 +0000

This campaign started out as an idea quite a long time ago. Some of my friends and ex-players wanted to game on a non-regular basis, and my regular players wanted a change of pace form the (very) long campaign we’re currently running.
So I tried to run a few one timers.
They were a disaster.
I really don’t know how to run a full game in one session – I’m too much of a storyteller DM, there aren’t a lot of tips on how to do it out there (if you find any – please, let me know. I’ll really appreciate it), D&D combat tends to be long-winded (no matter what you do, every encounter is going to take 15-30 minutes and more to run), and four-six hours to establish a story, motive, setting, characters, villains, run encounters of various kinds is just to little; someone’s going to suffer, and it’s usually the story (which, being a storyteller DM is something I absolutely won’t have).
So what to do?
Here Alexey came to the rescue (now you know who to blame ) with the idea of running a long-term one timer: a casual game run every month or two with the same characters each time and with a full story line.
To say I was thrilled by the idea is an understatement. I opened a new notebook immediately and started to think about campaign ideas.

The first idea came from Dragon Magazine (RIP) – my savior many times before. The magazine had just published the Dark Sun campaign setting, updated to 3.5. Now although I’ve heard of the Dark Sun campaign setting before, I’d never actually encountered it until then. But the world of Athas gave me the first few ideas for the game (which like first ideas, haven’t survived to the actual campaign we’re playing). From there the core story was developed, changed and expanded (as some of these posts will demonstrate), and from there the main antagonist was created – a much more sophisticated, intelligent and devious villain than Accor , the villain in my current campaign.
But hopefully, more of that, later…

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The Campaign: How It All Began