Welcome to the first post of Ramming the Dungeon!
After Reading other ttrpg blogs for years, I have decided to start my own blog to write about my own opinions and ideas. I don't know how much I'll actually use it, but I'll try to post at least once per month. I hope you enjoy my writing!
For many months now, my friends and I have been talking about playing a new fantasy campaign. We had a D&D campaign some years ago, but COVID and the transition from student life to working life ended up bringing it to an indefinite hiatus. For this new campaign, I’m taking what I learned from that older one to try make a better experience for our table.
This new campaign is mainly born from three main goals: less work for the DM (usually me), more flexible schedules and, above all, a more collaborative game.
When I talk about a more collaborative game, I mean a game where everyone can imput their ideas about the rules and the lore freely, and where the table structure is flexible enough to change it from one game to another if needed (not only in the number of players, but also in who wants to be the DM and things like that).
To achieve this, the campaign takes inspiration from the West Marches style of play. We will probably be the same 5 or 6 of us every time, but a West Marches style means that we can do sessions with three people and five people without it being a problem, wich helps a lot with avoiding those dreaded scheduling conflicts every ttrpg group has to face.
The system we will be using doesn’t matter too much. You can take these ideas to use with any game, but if you're curious let's say it’s a mix of Cairn and Mausritter with some extra rules sprinkled here and there (the actual system has even more house rules added). Into the Odd-like systems help add a lot of flexibility, since new characters can be made with little effort and the lack of a leveling system means players can have more than one PC and play with them freely without worrying about level unbalance.
Having covered the bases now, here’s how I’m building the session zero:
THE LAWS OF THE CAMPAIGN
First, I explain the "Laws" of the campaign: the rules we will adhere to, beyond the game’s ruleset: West marches style, sandbox world, episodic sessions, three people (one DM and two players) minimum; everyone can DM, we play once or twice a month, we can change PCs whenever we want... These rules are agreed upon by all of us, written down and kept in a “campaign box” where we will keep all the character sheets, system rules, maps, notes, etc. for easy transport.
SAFETY TOOLS
After the rules have been explained, we will talk about the safety tools we will use in this campaign. I understand that not every tool works with every group and every system, so the first safety rule is that ttrpgs are a conversation and we are all adults who trust each other and want to have a good time playing together. If at any point someone has any kind of objection or suggestion for the game fiction, they are free to share it and we will adapt the game accordingly.
This rule is probably insufficient, and is so tied to the group mechanic my table has that I don’t expect it to translate to any other group of players, but I think that’s the thing with safety rules: you have to actively look for what works best with your group and your game.
Additionally, we will be using Lines and Veils to know what things we do and don’t want to add to our campaign, and probably an X-card for good measure, just in case we need it. The campaign vibe I’m envisioning is pretty chill, heavily inspired by Adventure Time and The Legend of Zelda, so the setting itself shouldn’t really have any strong trigger warnings. Still, I will discuss this with the group just to make sure we all agree on it.
Okay, so we’ve covered the basics, the Laws the campaign will have and the safety tools we’ll be using. Now that’s out of the way, we get to the fun part.
Artwork for our last campaign, made by the amazing Criser_mc. That campaign was more "serious" in tone, but I want the new one to match the whimsical vibes of this piece.
BUILDING THE SETTING
A big problem I had with our previous campaign (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) was the excessive worldbuilding. I spent hours creating a complex kingdom with its map, its cities, its governing clans and important NPCs, only to have the story tying to one city and one clan in a tiny bit of the kingdom due to time constraints. Complete regions of my map went completely unexplored, despite having put hours thinking about them. It’s not that I regret it: I don’t; worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding is also a great creative exercise, but it can get out of hands easily. I’d prefer this setting to be smaller in scope and have it be meaningful without adding information worth a trilogy of fantasy books. I don’t know if we’ll play more than three sessions of this campaign, so I don’t want to spend hours working for nothing. Besides, I also want players to feel engaged in the world, and I think the coolest way to do it is asking them to build the map with me.
The Prismatic Wasteland blog has a fantastic entry called Worldbuilding as a Team Sport. It shows a way to build the setting together with your players, taking turns to add a location, a religion, a piece of lore to the world. I think it's a really cool concept, and I want to try it and see how different the world I build with my friends is from the world I would build alone. Besides, this campaign is also theirs! They should have as much of a say in what lore to add and the things they want to see as me, the DM. It might be a bit unorthodox, but I'm very curious to see the world that emerges from it. After all, five heads think better than one.
This Prismatic Wasteland article is not the only one I’ll be using: I also want to try Eldritchmouse’s World Anchors, and I’ll likely use Riseupcomus’ Pointcrawling Character Creation too. Worldbuilding as a Team Sport has a step where players point at locations in the map and share something that happened to their character there. I think mixing it with Josh’s idea of giving characters a magic item based on a location they visited before starting the campaign is a perfect addition to it (also, starting with magic items is fun!).
I hope to play this session in a few days, and I hope this post can inspire you for your next session zero! You can let me know in the comments what do you think about this idea and what would you add besides the usual things a session zero entails. I hope to also share here the things I learn with this new campaign!
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