How to Write Rpg Campaign for 1 Player

Writing Your Own Campaign

Trying to write your own homebrew adventures for a tabletop rpg can feel like a daunting task. Here are some tips to get you started.

Maybe you're tired of running from pre-written modules or adventure paths a n d you want something different, or perhaps this is your first time in the game-master's seat and you want to try your hand at making your own campaign. You sit down in your chair and begin writing, and then are paralyzed, not knowing where to even begin. Asking yourself some simple questions can help you get started, and gradually take you where you need to go to crafting an epic adventure for you and your players.

Question 1: What is the setting and scope?

Before any plot can take place, we have to make some decisions about the setting and scope of the campaign. Are you using a pre-established setting or making your own? Some stories take players travelling across the entire world, planes, and other galaxies even, while some never leave the confines of their own city. This helps determine how much work you're going to need to do on creating the setting.

For city-based campaigns, it's not as necessary to build an entire world your players are never going to see, but they are going to be spending more time with a single city than in a more sprawling campaign. Personally, I like to take care and personalize individual street names, businesses, and factions within a single city if I know my players are going to be spending a lengthy amount of time there. For all sake's and purposes, the city is the world that needs to be built, including its internal politics, key figures, and ongoing problems.

For more sprawling campaigns, it's important to keep in mind the technology and transportation at the player's disposal. This will limit the places they can travel to and how quickly they can reach them. Are they all walking on foot and horseback from place to place? Consider then the roads between cities, patrol routes for guards and bandits. Or are they sailing through the galaxy on their own space-ship, stopping only at stations and exploring distant planets? Just like with a city campaign, gauge how much time they're going to be spending in an area, for how detailed your world-building needs to be.

Regardless, these are key-things I ask myself when creating any place in a tabletop setting:

Who is important here? Think about important figures relevant to this area. These are individuals who have a major impact either in this place in general, or to the story that surrounds it. They may be key political figures, or prominent characters your players will interact with frequently. These characters can range in roles as wide as a friendly tavern owner who allows the player's to stay for free while they investigate a murder in the city, to the governor of the entire region.

What is happening here? Regardless of the size of the place, I like to make sure that any place my players go has something interesting going on, whether it's a local election, or an ongoing feud between two crime families, I love having them stumble into the middle of a story when they enter a new area. No matter how peaceful, every community has problems and conflicts that will make these places feel more memorable and interesting. Sometimes these conflicts will play into your larger narrative, and provide another stepping stone for your players along their ultimate goal.

What is the culture and tone like? Every place in your campaign should have some defining cultural characteristics. In one of my previous campaigns, I worked hard to ensure the town that'd cropped up around a trading outpost had a wholly different feel from the walled city-kingdom the players would enter later on. A peaceful little hamlet shouldn't have the same culture and feel as a bustling metropolis. What are the laws and culture of this area? Are they oppressive, fair, neutral? Is there class disparity? Some of these questions might lead to answers that help you define some of the events of this place.

How is it all connected? This can also be rephrased as why here? What has brought your players to this region, city, planet, etc? This is the connective tissue that draws the rest of your world together. Even in a city-based campaign that rarely leaves the border, your city is still connected to a larger world. It's important to at least note the role this city plays in that society.

Once you're done with the setting and some of the smaller conflicts, you're ready to begin thinking about the overall conflict of your campaign.

Question 2: What is the overall problem, and how do we solve it?

This isn't the most elegant way to phrase the question, and it can be changed depending upon the mood, genre, and nature of the campaign you're running. Who is the badguy and what are they planning, for example, might work just as well for a standard fantasy narrative. The important key here is conflict, as conflict drives narrative. It propels the story and defines the dangers your players will be facing along the way.

Already half the work has been done by creating the setting, and looking at each of the major players. If the nature of our conflict has a key-villain, then we can look to our setting for what the villain has to gain. We can think about their motivations and what drives them to do the unspeakable things they do.

In my superhero campaign, the villains are a shadowy secret order controlling the city who's motivations are similar to that of the heroes: purge the city of criminals, however their methods are genocidal and authoritarian. This lead to a clash of motivations with my player-characters, which made the final confrontation and reveal of these villains all the more exciting. Sometimes having villains who hold up a distorted mirror to your protagonists can create interesting stories.

Once your villain's motivation has been decided, we can start getting more granular, thinking about how your villain plans to accomplish their goals and ambitions. Every step of their plan may leave clues that can serve as the bread-crumbs for your players to follow, gradually piecing together the story along the way. At some point in the story, your players may take it upon themselves to try and actively stop this plan from taking place, and try to thwart your campaign villain halfway through their process.

Some campaigns don't have an overall villain. There are simply events unfolding in the world with complicated individuals involved and various factions coming to blows. A war may be brewing between two nations, with your characters caught in the middle. Perhaps they find themselves embroiled in a corporate squabble between vampires. What are the causes leading up to these events, and how do they affect your player characters?

Thinking about these things gives us a good overall picture for how our narrative might go, and at the very least can serve as a good roadmap for future planning.

Question 3: What is the immediate problem, and how do we solve it?

Once you've nailed down the larger conflict, we can start to look at immediate problems for our protagonists. Sometimes these smaller conflicts are ripple-effects created by the larger problem. Maybe the ritual the evil cult is performing has caused the occasional undead to rise in the nearby fishing village. In Pathfinder's Curse of the Crimson Throne, the assassination of the king causes civil unrest in the city, leading to riots, increased crime, and even an otyugh bursting forth from the sewers. When you have a larger conflict brewing, sometimes it can cause smaller more immediate problems that have to be solved first before your players can even begin to consider the larger issues at play.

We can look to our established setting for inspiration as well. The larger plot at work may have an effect on these smaller conflicts and exacerbated them to the point that they require the attentions of your protagonists. As the players investigate, they may stumble upon clues that will allow the story to unfold organically.

It's helpful to think of these more immediate problems in terms of narrative arcs. Focusing carefully on each arc bites up the more daunting proposal of writing an entire campaign into chunks, as each arc connects to the next, the entirety of the adventure comes through.

This is only one way to write and run a tabletop adventure. There are many others, that might even work better for what you're working on or the system you're running. I've found that this process works for me whether I'm running a mystery horror scenario, a superhero soap opera, or a high-fantasy cartoon romp. You may also decide that you don't need an overall plot, and want to concern yourself with merely episodic adventures loosely connected by the cast of characters, or you may wish to wing it in its entirety. All of these things are valid, so long as you and your players have fun.

You can read more of Dorian's work and support their writing at patreon.com/doriandawes

How to Write Rpg Campaign for 1 Player

Source: https://medium.com/@RealDorianDawes/writing-your-own-campaign-8971cb8126f

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