I’ve still got one last game to go before I wrap up my rebuilt version of Dragons of Icespire Peak, but it’s a good opportunity to talk about a problem I keep running into:
Wizards of the Coast really doesn’t do much to support DMs.
It’s easier than ever for new players to get into the game, especially with online tools like D&D Beyond, or even just the ability to Google rules or save character PDFs on your phone. But for DMs? Not so much. WotC will sell you pages and pages of villain motivation tables or whatever… but the tables seem to focus more on literary elements, and are far removed from the crunch needed to actually make an adventure work. Rivalry and betrayal don’t really work if there still isn’t a thing for the players to actually be doing. The DMG is also lacking when it comes to advice on building your own homebrew setting, which would also be invaluable for fixing any of their published material. I get that WotC cares more about players since they generally outnumber DMs at least four to one and it’s easy to playtest more options to sell to players… but the logic of it is kind of backwards when you consider that more DMs would mean more games overall.
I’ve really had more luck looking at stuff like this big list of RPG plots on 1d4Chan and combing through books for Pathfinder and the OSR D&D clone Labyrinth Lord. So presently, what I aim for is to start with sort of a sandbox. First, you draw a regional map using 6-mile hexes and then in each hex, you draw a symbol representing what biome is there. Stuff like grasslands, mountains, hills, swamps, etc. The biomes are important because they can influence how long it takes players to travel through that hex or what kinds of monsters the payers might encounter there. Then you throw in different landmarks or label whole areas like “The Hagwood” or “The Haunted Straits.” Already, you can start brainstorming some of the lore that will go with these places. Following that, you can start working on the pantheon and the different factions that shape the history of the place. The plot of the campaign here should ideally spring forth from those groups and the history of the region.
Then what I plan to do along with that, is to use milestone leveling, with one adventure for each level. That way, I’ll have adventures (or at least chuncks of adventures) that flow smoothely from the start to the campaign’s level cap, with adventures balanced for the players’ level way in advance. Hopefully, this shoud let me outline things pretty far ahead.
For my next campaign, I’m incorporating some of those ideas with a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign. With most of the published D&D books, I’ve run into frustrating problems with them being pretty much unusable straight from the book. But with Ghosts of Saltmarsh, there’s enough attention turned toward making it more of a sandbox that you can replace wonky adventures or build your own off the existing lore. So for example, I plan to heavily rewrite the second adventure from the book (“Danger at Dunwater”), as well as it’s follow up a few sessions later (“The Final Enemy”). The “Isle of the Abbey” is getting cut entirely because while the encounters might work, the story of it hasn’t been tied into Saltmarsh and there’s maybe a bit too much of a reliance on “evil cults” throughout the book. Evil cults work, but you can only do it so many times before players get wise to it and start to question why anyone would even live near Saltmarsh. It that adventure’s place, I intend to use a modified and expanded version of the optional “Wreck of the Marshal” found in the back of the book.
To fill in some of the gaps, and to give the players more of a chance to put the ship combat rules to use, I want to throw in a few more adventures. So far, ideas include reworking the lore about the ship “The Pale Prow,” so that it’s captained by a vampire who’s hunting down the pirate captain that killed her family… only her bloody campaign has her kidnapping more crew as replacements. Another idea involves a friendly island tribe of Tortles, who had an artifact stolen from them that may or may not control the weather. Maybe rumors of strange magic storms (in the book’s appendix) leads the party to investigate, before they get caught up in such a storm… only to come out of it at the Tortle’s island. To bring in more pirates and more ship combat, the artifact might’ve been stolen by the crew of “The Gnasher,” mentioned earlier in the book.
Just Dragon Things 