But I'm stuck at the one thing that has always caused me the biggest hassle, where to start the adventure/campaign. The standard "you start in a tavern" seems dull to me, I like an epic and memorable start, I've achieved it once with a crashing airship attacked by a green dragon but I can't come up with any ideas even remotely close to that now. I feel the start is so hard to do because you need to give an exciting adventure, tie the characters together somehow, and at level 1 there's only really 5 groups of monsters available (goblins, kobolds, humans, zombies, skeletons) all of which are a bit dull.
Another hassle on top of this is I don't like restricting my players much at all in terms of available races and classes, if you have a cool character concept you're welcome at my table. I feel D&D is a rare activity (for us) and we play for fun, I don't want to dictate what you can and can't do; obviously I have limits, but if you can justify it I'll generally allow it.
So my question to you is; what advice do you have on the first adventure of a campaign? What tricks do you use to tie the characters into an adventuring party?
And go straight to, "You find yourself in the middle of the forest, and have tracked the lost children to this general area. When suddenly the ground beneath you begins to rumble. The ground crumbles out from under you and you fall into the darkness. Roll for fall damage."
Let the PCs work for you. Instead of playing around with the pretense of; you start in a city, looking for work (the story), you find a collection of seemingly random people to join you (the other PCs), drop adventure hook or two, and finally you set off on your adventure.
Just jump straight to the start of the adventure, let the PCs figure out why they decided to make an adventuring party (they are going to make one anyway) and have them work it into their backstories of what led them to adventuring.
I just use that for my introduction for a brand new campaign, afterwards play as normal. Just my 2cp, hope it helps and happy DMing.
If you are ok with the diea of your world at war, Then let's re-hash your airship idea. Have an airship crash into the a major city or castle. What is first thought to be an accident is quickly revealed to be the opening salvo from a dissident group/race/rival kingdom, to start off a war.
If you want a more evil occult type feel to it, have something get decimated by a new form of magical attack never before seen. An entire town dissapears overnight and no one can explain why...the Heroes must then FIND the culperates.
Or you can always have an assassination at a major peace treaty event... To long time warring kingdoms finally aly down there arms for peace only to have one of the kings murdered the night before the official signing. I've personally used this one myself and it starts things off pretty well...
If you give me a more detailed idea about your campaign or story arc or even just a better example of your world I could help you come up with something.
As with DbD's suggestion, throw them into the meat of the situation as the introduction. Most beginner level jobs are not terribly complex, so even if they're doing something for a local quest guild or the like, the details are likely to be few enough that they don't need a long exposition before the first encounter.
If you don't want to restrict your players, then don't. This doesn't mean you need to come up with extensive backstory for each and every option (or combination of options) that exist in the rulebooks. Figure out what the PCs want to do and just build upon those. This immerses the players into the story right away as they are a part of known and existing element in your campaign world. Once the PCs position in the world is established, it's easier to write adventures FOR them rather than writing adventures that they just so happen to be a part of.
In regard to monster levels, three options exist to help diversify creatures without building your own fromt he ground up. Option 1 is scaling, which takes a higher level creature and alters stats and abilities until they are appropriate for a lower level creature. Option 2 is buffing, which starts the PCs out at a higher level, essentially handwaving the earlier boring parts of their career to get to where the real action in the campaign begins. Option 3 is reimaging, where you take a tride and true creature of the appropriate level and change the flavor of it without altering too many mechanics (such as changing a Goblin into a small Demon or the like). Either one of these works well enough.
Hope this helps. Happy Gaming
One important thing I failed to mention was our first game session thingy I intend to run as a build your character and link your backstories linking them, and I'll use this information to build the world. So very little is actually fleshed out.
I do intend to if at all possible use ideas from the other campaigns that the players never got to experience. The basic premise would be the dusk war, with the primal pact being broken at the end of heroic, so the primordials and gods return to the material plane to war. The players are forced to flee, taking refugees with them. Fleeing to the underdark they spend the first half of paragon there before establishing themselves in sigil. At the end of paragon they take part in the war proper (fighting for either the gods or the primal spirits). However the war (and everything up to that point) has been orchestrated by Lolth to weaken all her foes, and she now reviews her self, primed to take over the cosmos and the players must haul her.
Due to the big bad being Lolth, she'll probably have a number of puppets pretending to be the BBEG, often unwittingly; including Bane, at least one demon prince, maybe even tharizdun.
Once again thanks for your thoughts so far, looking forward to more.
Oh, I should also mention that the sort of game I'm after is a relatively traditional D&D game, points of light setting. Using most of the canon of the assumed 4e setting. I'm just not a huge fan of traditional dungeons, I like my settings to feel like a place with a purpose and a history.
- the classic, "As we open our story, your characters are suddenly attacked... roll for initiative!"
- another classic, "the PCs all wake up together in a strange location with no memory of how they got there..."
- "...you stand at a doorway, the remains of the door you've just kicked in laying in splinters in the room... and Rast the Wizard is backed into a corner near a fireplace, looking frantic and shaking in terror, a parchment scroll held dramatically over the open fire full of flaming books, maps, scrolls, and papers... you've searched together for a long time to find him, and he's finally in your grasp! Rast says, in a shaky voice, 'I don't know who you people are, but you'll never take me alive!' What happens next?"
- the story starts with PCs and perhaps a couple NPCs as the only survivors of a ship wreck or train/plane/airship crash in the middle of the wreckage
- "...you are in a very strange and exciting location together, when suddenly something you hear an omionous noise / see something that doesn't belong / the environment changes to something dangerous or dramatic... what do you do?"
It's a great, exciting way to open a story, and it helps inspire creativity and curiosity from the players. It's hard to beat those benefits
I suppose that a trickier way of doing things might be to start the first session in media res near the end of the story, with the PCs passing skill challenges and fighting a few monsters to get to a dramatic climax to save the world and finish off a Big Bad Evil Guy, and then, before actually doing anything with that dramatic climax, telling the next several adventures as a series of flashbacks leading up to that climax, with the PCs free to contribute their own explanations for how they met up....
In any case, in my experience players tend to usually be pretty good at brain-storming their own explanations for how they know each other, once it's assumed they do know each other and are already on an adventure together.
Depending on how the character-creation session goes - and maybe with a nudge from the GM - you can have the PCs soldiers or specialists drafted to help in the war, then given a mission. If you make it an appropriate mission, you can immediately have their HQ wiped out so they are 'forced' to operate independently. In one of the first sessions of my current campaign, I had a dying commander throw the Hand of Vecna (!) into their boat, freshly hacked from an enemy, with instructions to keep it out of enemy hands and get it to safety. They've been carrying it around for a couple sessions now, with 'the thing in the bag' occasionally whispering darkly or wriggling around, making their way to the capital through occupied territory. Gave them a goal, and a role to play in the war that isn't too unreasonable for starter-level heroes. And when they get to the capital, it'll be a good chance to give them some background on what is happening in the wide world without just resorting to blocks of flavor text, and to introduce important NPCs.
and at level 1 there's only really 5 groups of monsters available (goblins, kobolds, humans, zombies, skeletons) all of which are a bit dull.
So my question to you is; what advice do you have on the first adventure of a campaign? What tricks do you use to tie the characters into an adventuring party?
I must disagree with this statement about 5 groups of monsters. I'm about to start up a new campaign soonish, and my players first encounter will be with a ghost (they start at lvl 1). You just have to modify the encounters so they are survivable and beatable from your players powerlevel. Ie. my ghost will not be a traditional ghost, but instead one using telekinesis in different ways to make a hassle for the players, like animating a robe to try and strangle them or grapple them... Since they dont have magic items and thus can't hurt the ghost, they should be more focused on solving the ghost's mystery so it will disappear. Which in turn leads to an adventure involving 2 different cults and another modified monster (an intelligent skeleton with extra abilities).
At the end, the players should be well and truly connected as a group :p at least I hope so!
...I feel the start is so hard to do because you need to give an exciting adventure, tie the characters together somehow, and at level 1 there's only really 5 groups of monsters available (goblins, kobolds, humans, zombies, skeletons) all of which are a bit dull....
Oh, wow, I missed that the first time around!
That hits a nerve with me, because goblins, kobolds, and basic undead are some of my favorite monsters to work with, and humans can be fairly effective monsters, too.
If they're even a bit dull, you're doing something wrong. Put in a suitably eerie setting and plot, combined with some great storytelling and description, Goblins can be terrifying monsters, particularly if you never mention the word "Goblin". WotC has been using Kobolds very effectively as comic relief in some of the animations it has used to promote 4E, and I found the results to be very entertaining and memorable. And zombie movies have been enjoying more popularity now than ever! The excellent fantasy TV show Game of Thrones has hinted at the threat of creatures that sound like zombies or vampires, but aside from those occasional hints, most of the first season has focused on human heroes and villains, and has been better for it. The Lord of the Rings films and books have been incredibly popular and hardly dull, in spite of most of the villains being Goblins and Men (Tolkien used the words "Orcs" and "Goblins" interchangably.)
In any event, what the Monster Manual gives you are some well-balanced stat blocks, combined with names and fluff descriptions. The stat blocks are all the PCs are actually fighting with - the names and fluff descriptions are only there to put a name and a face to the stats.
That is important to remember, because you can easily replace the description with anything you can imagine (and the name is often best left out of the equation - monsters tend to lose some of their power when given names.)
So, for example, one of the monsters my first-level party encountered was when they confronted a creepy necromancer that double-crossed them on a deal; the necromancer retreated from the attack to open a strange antique wooden box, which contained a levitating severed head with glowing eyes and tentacles emerging from its neck. I never did give the monster a name; it simply used a lightly modified Goblin stat block. In another example, a low-level party found a heavy iron door in the basement of an evil wizard's house, with boxes and furniture piled up in front of it; clearing the stuff away from the door revealed dents beaten into the door from the other side; opening the door revealed a magically-chilled freezer containing frozen bodies in samurai armor laying among some smashed-open shipping crates; the bodies woke up while the party were examining the crates, and began relentlessly attacking the party... these "frozen samurai" were basically "reskinned" zombies.
In fact, pretty much every adventure I've ever run has included some sort of unique home-brew description from a nightmare or other unofficial source, tacked onto a familiar monster's stat block, and my players have always seemed to love the variety of descriptions, without realizing just how few monsters they've really been fighting.
So, even if you can't find any way to get excited over standard, iconic monsters, you can at least borrow their stat blocks and paint descriptions of monsters that do hold your interest over that framework.
Just like what Whakapapa was saying, you can use monsters whose abilities the players might just have no means to contend with, but that doesn't mean there aren't story ways around dealing with an encounter, maybe the ghost in Whakapapa's example is just being mean spirited because he died, so perhaps the PCs track down family members of the ghosts', find some personal belonging that was important to the ghost, and viola now any player holding that item can affect the ghost as if he were real.
Another example I'd like to throw out is a werewolf adventure I have upcoming for my PCs at level 2. Instead of worrying about templates and stat blocks and blah blah blah for the encounter. A small lumber village deep in a forest has been haunted by a vicous wolf spirit for centuries, sometimes it goes away for a generation or two, but it always comes back, causing havoc attack the town's livestock, killing lone woodsmen, and the like. Reality is that a family was cursed long ago with a genetic disease that in essence makes the females of a certain family a werewolf. And they're uncontrolled, they can't pass it on except through reproduction to the next female in line, and usually the older female protects the younger female from attack and such.
Anyways, like I said instead of actually making them werewolves and worrying about templates and hybrid forms (which I never really liked anyway) or making them some sort of shifter variant. I just simply said, when they are in wolf form, they're dire wolves with dr 5/silver and the shapechanger type. Fudge the hp, defense, attack and damage numbers to make a weaker one and a more powerful one. And there you go; werewolves.
Same fear in the term, I just didn't bother with all the bulky mechanics. In my eyes it's still a werewolf. Human that transforms into a wolf, yup werewolf.
That's just my take on it. D&D is all about customization, and always has been, to get the story that you want to tell across. Not be stuck to published parts to try to tell a story in a way the official pieces fit together. It's all in how you use it. It is very easy to fudge the numbers even on the fly. If you want to randomly use a monster say your party is level 5 and you want them to fight a level ten solo creature because you like it's fluff and descriptions, then find the solo creature, lessen it's stats, and use it. No one is fact checking your work, and even if someone is, you have full creative rights to your own story and game. Hope this helps, and happy DMing.
Here's how I am seeing it break down in my head as I write this, and I am just going to throw silly names on pronouns as I come across them. (The PCs will fill the roles of Dwarfy, the player who actually wants to play that character, someone can play Dwarfbro who is Dwarfy's brother, Dwarfking king of the dwarves and Dwarfy's father.) The dwarf fighter we shall call Dwarfy was the prince to a mighty dwarven kingdom deep in the heart of Mounting mountains. The kingdom was constantly at war with the duergar of the underdark. Recently the duergar have become more bold and strategic in their attacks, the king; Dwarfking has intelligence that one of the higher ups of his army could possibly be supplying the duergar with important military knowledge. Dwarfy is a high ranking officer within the army and vows to find the traitor for his father. After some roleplaying questioning of the army officials. Dwarfy goes right to the source of the issue Dwarfbro, Dwarfy's brother who supplied the intelligence to the king that someone is a spy. Dwarfy finds out that Dwarfbro really has no idea if there has been a leak in information and just used it as an excuse to increase raids on the duergar, where they get into an argument until it's interrupted by a military official telling the brothers that their older brother and heir to the kingdom has been killed in battle. Dwarfy now the eldest brother must take on the responsibility of ruling the kingdom when their father abdicates the throne. Dwarfy rushes to Dwarfking's side telling him of the dreadful news of his older brother. When Dwarfbro barges into the audience hall claiming Dwarfy to be the traitor. Then you can set up an exile or something.
That was just an example, I have no idea what characters your PCs are playing or what their back stories are, but having the PCs play characters within each others back stories can bring the group together by making them feel involved with each others characters in a way that will bring them closer as a team. Just a fun idea I had about how to integrate further team dynamics, ways to play out a back story, all the while keeping the whole group involved in the story. Good luck.
To those who responded to my small rage on the five groups; I do actually like most of those, my issue with them is more that I used to run D&D encounters at my FLGS and a number of myy players played there, and so we're all getting a little bored of the kobolds, goblins and to a lesser extent the basic undead. I don't think that it's that there's anything wrong with those monsters, it's that we're all hankering for some variety. (It probably doen't help that my last campaign we started with the slaying stone and the players kept trying to explore the goblin town without using stealth, nor goign to any key locations so I had to keep throwing basic goblin encounters at them (adding wolfs and other things in to spice it up includding a pet owl bear)).
In your example, if the players keep going back to the same town and keep avoiding the key locations, either just swap up the key locations, or add something that guides the players where you want them. Or thirdly; mix it up completely and create a miniscale adventure inside the Goblin town involving goblins.
To elaborate on guiding the players; goblins usually love traps and trickery to win, have them setup a bunch of traps that your players might not figure out at first, but then after 1-2 traps, they should be able to identify a trapped alley. Then just add traps to the alleys so the players avoid them and go where you need them
This could lead to interesting fights if the players want to counter-trick the goblins into their own traps etc. Anothe way is to have some alleys blocked by debris or something so the players either have to climb or clear it out to get past. Just describe it rather matter of fact and not like there is something to hide.
If you need some miniscale adventure for the players when they keep going back, try adding a few terrified goblins that try to flee the players or contact them. Then when they investigate or something, you provide them with a wandering monster that has taken upon itself to feed on the goblins. Or maybe there is a serial-killer goblin killing his own kind and the players could become more accepted by finding that killer and getting rid of him. Or maybe a dying goblin uttered a curse upon the town which can only be broken by xyz