I can’t quite believe that nearly two years after I first started tinkering, The Campaign Handbook is almost out in the wild. It’s due next Tuesday, 5 November, and there’ll be a launch-day discount announced on the blog. If you want a reminder, sign up to the newsletter here.
I also never shared the back cover from pootlings! Here it is.
Isn’t it great? I particularly love the homunculus-like creature in the tree at the bottom, and the monstrous tail in the sea cave to the left.
Like many DMs, I broadly follow Mike Shea’s eight steps in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and the Campaign Handbook is built on a similar skeleton. (You should absolutely buy Shea’s book if you don’t have it already, but the gist of it is laid out here in the Lazy GM’s Resource Document, which is Creative Commons.)
Step 1 is review the characters. My party has just levelled up to 7th, so I turn to ‘7th level’ in the Handbook. I’ve written some general tips here for what to look out for at this level, like 4th-level spells and the noticeable ‘power shift’ from here on in.
From there I diverge a touch: I include quick advice for encounter building, treasure, and improvising damage. I won’t use all of it every session, obviously, but it’s good to have in your session notes. The Handbook assumes four players; I have eight, so I simply double encounter and treasure figures. (Incidentally, for my current campaign, I’ve been challenging myself to keep my session notes to one page of A4. We’re 19 sessions in, and so far, I’ve managed it.)
For the next steps, I’m going to need to turn to the environment that best fits. The party are currently on a ruined island city: think a blend of Drakkenheim, Minas Morgul, Final Fantasy VII‘s Midgar, and The Last of Us. I’ll pull from from ‘Sea,’ ‘Town and City,’ and ‘Underworld.’ Nothing limits you to a single category!
For my strong start, I’m combining:
- Market mayhem. A massive explosion rocks the central marketplace.
- Rift revealed. A powerful earthquake opens a fissure leading into unknown passages below.
The party is currently at a kind of ‘rats’ bazaar’ (don’t ask), so a quake causing chaos feels right.
Next, settings. Generally speaking, I need three or four for my sessions, so let’s go with:
- Arcane academy: scholarly, inscrutable, pulsating
- Spawning pool: eerie, luminescent, mind-bending
- Heart of the Storm: swirling, powerful, unfathomable
I want some NPCs! These are my favourites:
- Lilith Nightshade, necromancer (mage)
- Uthrak the Unseen, goblin scavenger (goblin, but I’ll make him one of the ratfolk for my campaign)
- Finn Darkwater, smuggler (spy—this one’s from the ‘Marsh’ section)
- Thalassan, sahuagin baron (if the party ends up leaving the island and going by sea somewhere).
I didn’t do this in the Handbook—it might have accidentally impinged on copyright somewhere and draws quite heavily on personal taste—but I like to have a character from popular fiction as a touchstone for each of my NPCs. How about the following:
- Lilith Nightshade: Melisandre from Game of Thrones or Yennefer from The Witcher
- Uthrak the Unseen: Nicholas Hoult’s character from Mad Max: Fury Road
- Finn Darkwater: Han Solo (obviously)
- Thalassan: maybe Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean.
I find I generally need five scenes for three sessions of play. I call these ‘situations’ in the Handbook to emphasize Justin Alexander’s philosophy that it is not our place to prep plots. Here are a few I might use:
- Being chased by a predator
- A poisonous miasma (similar effect to a cloudkill spell)
- Wyverns fly overhead
- A beacon shines in the darkness
- A fierce storm
- A strange telepathic voice
At the heart of my prep are my ten secrets and clues, some of which will pertain to characters and campaign events—and, given my players read this blog (or some of them do, I hope), it might be best if I keep these to myself! Here, too, though, the Handbook can offer some inspiration. For example:
- Hidden teleportation circles link key locations in …
- Spore clouds are causing strange and horriffic mutations.
- A powerful psionic entity is corrupting the minds of those who venture too
close. - A hivemind of oozes is gathering information on …
- An underwater volcano is showing signs of an imminent eruption.
- The Heart of the Storm contains a gateway to another world.
Now I just need a few monsters. Something I’ve noticed recently is that I rarely get through more than two encounters in a session, so it’s often better to think carefully about those two encounters and not worry too much about having a range of options ready to go. Looking through the monster lists, I like the following:
- five wyverns or young black dragons (can stand in for ‘fell beasts’ which I have foreshadowed in previous sessions)
- two or three fomorians
- maybe a dozen merrow
- maybe four or five giant sharks
I think all of these could be cool encounters for a large 7th-level party.
This prep took maybe ten minutes of thinking, daydreaming, and flicking through the Handbook, but I now feel pretty ready to improvise the rest at my table. The Handbook is more than 200 pages, and there’s even more than what I’ve shown here: advice for mapping, character arcs, boss fights, and more!
But that’s it for today. The book goes live next Tuesday, so stay tuned for the discount code. Thanks as always for reading and for all the encouragement along the way. It means a lot.
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