Campaign Design 101

Carl Sagan said it best when he said "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe," except in this case instead of apple pie I want to make a place of darkness where the players face off against death and madness. There are countless game world's and adventure paths I could use, but there is a little charm about creating something new and sharing it with other people.

The goal of campaign design is to create a background for fantasy gaming that provides rich choices to both players and game masters alike. In addition, the successful design must establish sources of conflict and motivation for heroes and villains who act in the setting to entertain the players. I am designing this to run for my own games, but if I commit to the process it should be viable to hand off my notes to another game master for them to run. With some direction taken from The KOBOLD Guide to Worldbuilding I am going to explain the two processes I am going to use in campaign design, at least initially.

It may be my recent experience with narrative focused games, but I still view the campaign setting as a work of collusion between the game master and the players to create something entertaining. The best part of the game is when the game master is being lead by the players, developing the game around the players' choice. The players are deciding upon the course of the game and the climate charts and trade routes, which may be useful bits of worldbuilding, are largely invisible to the players.

The goal of a campaign setting is to inspire players to explore and change the world. Neither of those depend much on mechanics. If I can sketch out enough of a sense of place in a few sentences to inspire a few sessions of gaming then the campaign setting is a success. If my setting inspires no urge to run the game then I have failed.


There are several approaches to campaign design, I'm going to try and pursue this as a collaborator and from the inside out. A novelist develops a setting as a backdrop, and any design that doesn't focus on the story that they're telling is a waste. They have only one story to tell. Conversely, where the novelist creates a world to facilitate the telling of a single story, a game developer needs to build the world for a thousand stories. I may just be intending to tell a single story, but the world needs to be a lot broader in detail than the novelist's.

This brings us to the collaborator. If the game master has the infrastructure of the setting established then the players can actually contribute to the development of the creation of the world. I often just have the most important non-player characters and locations sketched out and then develop my story around the ideas that the players have come up with. This has led to some great sessions where the players were amazed that I had anticipated their character aspirations and felt I had really fleshed out the setting (hint: I was winging it).

This brings us to the inside-out/outside-in dichotomy. Inside out means you decide where you story is going to start and you build up the local area. Is there a vast empire of mutes on the other side of the world? Is it relevant to the story and the starting area? If it is not then I do not need to concern myself. Land of mutes going to play a role? I will make some notes but I do not have to flesh it out.

Outside-in starts with the big ideas and fills in from there. What happens when you kill the god of war? For Chris Pramas you get the Sundered Empire setting. Like many parts of the Greyhawk campaign setting, he briefly outlined several areas, sometimes only mentioning names with the expectation that game masters will later flesh out these ideas.

So I have an idea, but not necessarily an idea to build a world around, but it should form a seed for the campaign and the local environs. Dungeon of madness, an evil so primordial that it was already forgotten by ancient civilizations. Gateway to fortune or passage to the afterlife?