Organic Campaign Development in Dungeons and Dragons

Traditionally, I don’t do the “big things happening in the background that drive the campaign” kind of game. The party are adventurers, they do stuff, the environment reacts, and the campaign builds from there. I run what you might call a pure sandbox games. Sure, there are machinations in the background but for the most party the party bumps up against mid level stuff, they run afoul of the Theives Guild and then have to watch their backs, they stop a sorcerer from conjuring a demon so the sorcerer has it out for them, they get between two rival druid covens and negotiate a truce. That sort of thing. They don’t generally get involved in “world threatening” plot events.

In my home game however, I experiment a bit, as it’s my son and his friends, so I feel I have a bit more room to maneuver. I decided to link the campaign to a 'big event", but not in the traditional way (e.g. they start the campaign learning of the big world threatening event). Instead, I would have them adventure and the news would drop organically. I didn't even know when. Basically I would wait until the player's actions prompted the information to drop, however long that might take. I wouldn't contrive to make them find out, they would discover it on their own.

So in my campaign universe, there are what you could call the “pre-life” gods, gods that existed long, long before living beings appeared in the universe, perhaps even before the “big bang”. The gods that most of the players know are like the Greek gods, they are shaped (in appearance) and in general disposition to be like people, but exaggerated. The pre-life gods are horrific, in my campaign they are the Cthulhu gods, and they represent pure chaos. Let’s call them the “chaos” gods. They are slowly taking over planets, worshippers on planets channel their power and slay innocents, their souls feed the power of the chaos gods and hasten their arrival on the planet. When they arrive there, the population goes insane and the planet is given over to the forces of chaos. 

They are slowly taking over planets over billions of years. It’s a long game.

The populations of most planets don’t get to the chaos end of civilization madness stage until very far in the future, when my D&D game is set. In this case worshippers of the chaos gods have started the process of expanding on the game world of the party, Xiombal. There is an unpopulated continent there that no humanoid group has explored until recently. It is overrun with dinosaurs and “chimerical” monsters, like perytons, owlbears, chimera, etc. These are the outward manifestations of the fact that miles beneath the continent is an underworld of the chaos beasts, the creatures that work to sow madness and consume souls to hasten the arrival of the chaos gods. They create these chimerical creatures and their chaotic magic swells the ranks of the dinosaurs as well.

So in the “underdark” of Xiombal are grell (they are the leaders), mind flayers, intellect devourers, gibbering mouthers, and other assorted monsters. They stay beneath the ground, cranking out chimerical creatures in vats, but they knew one day the humanoids from the rest of the planet (aarakocra, frog-men, yuan-ti, lizard men, humans and rakasta) would arrive. So they built temples run by a priesthood of psionic cultists, they have housed these temples (that look like a cluster of tentacles stretching from the ground to the sky, about 100’ tall made of cold green stone) for 100’s of years waiting for the first arrivals. 

Our campaign started with the party joining a new settlement on the coast of the new continent to protect it and explore the wilderness. They knew nothing of any of this when they arrived, they knew nothing of the chaos gods or their priests. 

Their first encounter was with a chimera, but they wrote that one off to a sorcerer, as sorcerers can also make chimerical creatures. Then they fought a vodyani, a corrupted creature, again writing that off to sorcerers. Then they dealt with bandit raids, bandits who drove dinosaurs to stampede the Fort. At this point I had decided to have the bandits funded by a distant figure that wasn't in the campaign area. I didn't know the motivation, it was just an unformed idea. When the party beat the bandits they asked if they could see any sort of signifiers or symbols that might tell who they were working for. 

One of the PCs had heraldry as a skill, and they found documents on the bandit leader (a sorcerer) with a crest. I had the PC roll to see if they recognized the crest, and they did, so they now knew who the bandits were involved with, a distant Lord, a high ranking retired military official from a distant city state (the game world is dominated by an empire made up of city states, mostly run by lizard men). 

Lizard men are the dominant group on the planet, and aarakocra and humans were settling the new continent in an attempt to create their own home nation. The players figured that the distant lizard man noble was trying to snuff out the settlements without appearing to do so in any obvious way. It fit, it made sense, and they decided to do something about it. So they boarded a ship and sailed to the distant city-state of the Lizard man lord to confront her. They saw a seer beforehand and had their fortune told, and on the basis of that reading decided to confront the lord directly. She was the regis of the city of Reit, which means that once a week petitioners can show up to the courtyard of her castle and make requests of her.

The party showed up, told her they were there to confront her about why she was attacking their settlement (and others, they had extended a trade and diplomatic mission to a nearby settlement and discovered that they were also being raided). Now, when I use divination, and it comes out “good” then all I need to do is ensure that SOMETHING GOOD comes out of the decision, to validate the divination. I usually just wait around until something good happens and then point to it and say, “see everyone, the divination was accurate”. 

Well, the dice gods gave me my “something good”, when the party “confronted” the lord, I rolled an encounter reaction and it came up high. So she had the party summoned to her, congratulated them on making the connections and finding her (it was a good piece of detective work on their part actually), and offered them a job! Essentially, I interpreted the positive roll as her being impressed enough to want to get them to work for her, e.g. rather than have the party as enemies, bring them on as allies. 

So I needed to determine why she was interested in scaring away the settlements. Because I hadn’t gotten that far, the players had decided to go after her, which I wasn’t expecting to happen so fast, and they actually got to talk with her rather than fighting. So I needed to give her a motivation for resisting the spread of the new settlements. 

That’s when I connected my own dots. The chaos priests had been set up so when humanoids came to the new continent they could be slain and their souls harvested to hasten the arrival of the chaos gods. I decided that this particular Lord, Regis Vissa Mahr, along with a select few other Lords, had learned of the Chaos priests and their mission. So they needed to dissuade new settlements on the continent as they would provide the chaos priests with new souls to hasten the arrival of the chaos gods. 

However, they couldn’t work overtly against the new settlements, as allowing the aarakocra, humans and others to settle the new continent was a safety valve to prevent rebellion against the lizard man empire. If they told them to stop because of the threat of “chaos priests” and such it would be seen as a lie to prevent them gaining a homeland. 

Politics.

So she let them in on the truth, and without expecting to the party gleaned the first piece of “lore” about the larger plot in the campaign world. They agreed to go back to the settlements with a mercenary force that she would provide to beef up the settlement’s safety and see if they can resist the chaos priests by saving the settlers' lives. They are committed to exploring the interior to find a temple of these chaos priests and try to wipe them out, hopefully allowing the settlements to continue, putting off the arrival of the chaos gods, and avoiding rebellion on the part of settlers by allowing the settlements to continue. The players suggested sending in an army, but Vissa feared  this might lead to them using dark magic, leading to MANY deaths and speeding up their project considerably. Protecting the expanding settlements and sending out a small team to try and destroy or gain information about the temples seemed the best course of action. That gave the party a role, not a “save the world by killing the big bad guy” role, but a “contribute to holding back the chaos” role. 

They were stoked to find this all out.

I love this as it was spontaneous, and it was as unexpected to me as it was to the party, I knew the lore, but I had no idea when they were going to discover it. I took the opportunity when it arose. Rather than planning this out, or attempting to “maximize” the dramatic value of a “reveal”, I instead dropped it in when it suggested itself to me in play. By doing so, but not telegraphing it or planning it, it was a genuine surprise, the players couldn’t guess it from what we had done so far, the couldn’t “see it coming” or predict that something big was about to happen due to the “needs of the story”, it surprised them as it surprised me, and that made it all the more powerful. We have been playing since January, so it took about 40 (3 hour) sessions to get to the "big reveal" of this campaign scaled threat to the players. 

So now, everything that has happened up until now takes on a new, more sinister meaning, seemingly random encounters that pointed to the threat of a sorcerer now point to a much bigger threat, a much bigger set of events. The good news is that someone has caught on to what the chaos priests are up to early on, so hopefully they can prevent too many souls from being harvested.

So far this campaign has been very different, they started with domain play, building settlements in a hostile area, moved on to politics forming alliances with nearby settlements, shifted to intrigue searching for the distant Lord who was working against them, and now have settled into investigating a “big mystery” on behalf of a distant patron.

D&D, it’s an adventure!