Campaign Creation Help

[Arith Winterfell]

I'm working on building adventures for my group, but I've hit something of a writers block and could use suggestions/ideas for building a game campaign/adventures.

The world design is still in its relatively early stages, as one of my great problems as a GM is I tend to get stuck in world design and never actually run games. So this time, I pushed forward with gaming before heavily building the setting. So far it worked in that we actually ran a test game just to introduce the players to GURPS rules. But now we are starting on a proper campaign/adventures. So I've drawn a mental blank. Here's what has been established so far.

Established Campaign Elements

Around 100 years ago or so the setting was a fairly typical fantasy setting. Then much of the world one day suddenly dissolved into mists. The people, places, and so on simply ceased to exist. So now the central hub setting of the game is a great city whose wizards foresaw the coming apocalypse and thus were able to ward against it making their great fantasy city and its surrounding farmlands and mountains into an island of stability in a vast sea of mists.

Today, the wizards of the great city have begun to construct magical portals, opening to other locations that were natural islands of stability in the mists creating a setting with exploration into strange lands and what befell them in the intervening century or so.

That said, I recognize that the setting might end up going in a very different direction, in part as I'm trying to figure out how to bring together my disparate player characters.

Player Characters

Our campaign party is relatively pretty small. Right now just two players (and myself as one additional character). The first player character is Isabella a female human thief-mage who is effectively an Assassin for the Thieves' Guild. She has a daughter Cassie noted as a Dependent on her character sheet. Isabella has mostly thief skills, with a small amount of magic centered on stealth and darkness magic to aid with assassination (including one death spell from Magic: Death Spells book, the Shadowslay spell). Her main goals in life are Greed and the Obsession to obtain wealth to insure her daughter's future.

Our second character is Paz, a fighter-woodsman. Mostly focused on general fighting skills with his handaxe, along with useful wilderness skills like stealth and traps (for hunting) and Survival (Forests). He grew up with his parents in a woodland cabin up in the wooded mountains surrounding the great city. Both he and his younger brother are now fully adults and all was well till one night their father was murdered by a mysterious assailant who then fled into the night. Paz left his family to track and kill his father's murderer.

The last party character is still in flux as I'm still building him. The only thing I know is that he will be some manner of wizard. Currently pondering playing a mind control specialist mage playing support with sleep magic, stunning, and a side of illusion magic.

The Campaign

So while I've worked hard to setup a lot of plot hooks, and started with a general portals to other worlds setting ideas, I'm struggling to organize this more clearly into a campaign in order to act as a font for adventure building for the game.

While I started with a general idea of jumping to variety of worlds, the characters themselves seem to suggest the idea of something focused more on the city itself. With Isabella tied up into the Thieves' Guild and Paz pursuing his father's murderer into the great city, they seem to point naturally to adventures within the city.

I'm struggling to figure out how to bring our separate characters together and cement them as an adventuring party. Then from there figuring out how to structure the campaign into a font for adventure ideas.

Writing this has sparked a couple of ideas, but I'd like to see what others have to say and suggest. Thank you for your help!

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

I'm struggling to figure out how to bring our separate characters together and cement them as an adventuring party. Then from there figuring out how to structure the campaign into a font for adventure ideas.

Depending on the players, having it start out as a case of mistaken identity might work. If there's any inkling that either of them might try to actually kill the other player's character, this is probably not a good idea. A bit of meta-gaming might be needed.

Another idea would be to have the mysterious assailant be from a group that are enemies of the Thieves' Guild. Then have the thief recognize some sort of identifying feature/mark that the fighter is asking someone else about. Of course, one good deed asks for another in return, which could set up future adventure seeds.

[Anaraxes]

A suggestion, the first thing that occurs to me:

Paz comes to the city because he thinks that's where his father's murderer went. Isabella lives there, as does the wizard Flux.

One of the important city mages, Opportunist, had recently returned from The Other City. He'd been sent to negotiate with Other City's wizard guild over obtaining some magical theory / artifacts that would be useful to the portal mages. He was a bit of a turncoat, though, and saw more opportunity for personal advancement in arranging a deal to leak some portal construction techniques to Other City to start a rival portal network, hopefully headed by himself, threatening Main City's monopoly. Quite a row when the local Guildmaster confronts the "unsuccessful" Opportunist on his return. They'd never really gotten along in the first place, and guild politics can be vicious. And the Guildmaster has his own network of sources and spies, so he has an inkling of what Opportunist had really been up to.

Guildmaster contracts to have Opportunist killed before he can do any actual damage to the portal monopoly. Isabella gets the job, naturally. Opportunist has his own friends in the circles of Guild politics, though. Learning that something's up, he flees through one of the portals.

(Possibly this assassination attempt could be the first adventure / fight, if you can come up with a way to get Pax involved. But let's assume it's backstory for now.)

Isabella's bound to fulfill her contract on the escaped Opportunist. The Big Man won't be happy to have his Guild's reputation besmirched by failure, and he's bound to fulfill the contract, having already accepted the payment. Isabella gets ordered by the Big Man to purse -- come back with the scalp or don't come back at all. (This is a bit of a challenge for Isabella, since she's going to have to leave her daughter, at least for a little bit.) Cassie serves as a hostage for the Big Man. He doesn't even have to make that an overt threat; it'll probably occur to Isabella's player on their own. The Guildmaster will get the assassin through the portal. Flux gets tasked by the Guildmaster to aid and support Isabella, responsible for operating the portal and overcoming any magical defenses, as well as having a loyal observer on the other side. Since the portal Opportunist chose happens to lead to a forested area, Pax gets hired as a scout and third hunter to round out the pair. His assignment from the portal Guildmaster is simply to scout, observe, and report back on the area so the Guild has some idea of how to deal with it. He might not even be informed of Isabella's mission. And of course, if you like, Opportunist can turn out to be his father's murderer, or at least Pax has reason to think that might be the case -- particularly if you need to strengthen Pax's motivation for going on this "side quest" instead of single-mindedly pursuing his father's bane.

If Opportunist develops into a long-running Big Bad, then Pax and Isabella could be chasing him for quite a while. Or if they nail him right away, at least they've got a common cause under their belts and have learned something about each other, hopefully that they can trust each other in typical meta PC fashion for further adventures. The party can bop back and forth through portals to various adventures, sometimes at the behest of the Guildmaster, sometimes on their own hook, sometimes discovering more clues to the location of Opportunist. A lot of adventures can take place at home as well; they need not all be on the other side of some portal. Cassie's still at home, Opportunist has to come back at some point to found his rival portal guild, and Pax still has that murderer to investigate if it's not Opportunist.

[coronatiger]

Inspired suggestion from Anaraxes, if I may say so. I just think it's a bit of a stretch for Paz to be picked for this quest. How would anyone in the city know of his abilities at woodcraft unless he goes around advertising them? If I were picking a crew for an important job, I'd be highly suspicious of anyone who just happened to put themselves forward at the time I needed someone like them.

What if Isabella and her boss have this dialog?

"Hey, Isabella, since you just bungled an important contract and allowed the target to escape, in the interest of your own well-being, you might want to go on a little trip to bring back the head you failed to collect the last time. Talk to this guy Flux at the wizard's guild. He'll set you up for portal travel and he might even shore up some of your weaknesses in your next encounter with the target. I understand the target fled to some heavily forested region, so recruiting a local guide once you reach your destination might be prudent."

"Actually, I know someone who could help. Paz saved my daughter from a runaway cart a few days ago and we got talking. He seems trustworthy enough and has the skills I'll need."

"That should do. And speaking of your daughter... We'll move her into one of the guest rooms above the HQ while you're gone. It wouldn't do for her to run around in the streets unsupervised. You know, not many people would risk their own necks to help a stranger's child, like this Paz did."

[Donny Brook]

Keep it simple.
The Main City mages guild need people to go through their portals and scout out the other cities and their regions. Maybe even after a portal is created it is not obvious where the other city is geographically. Anyway, Isabella is the urban specialist, Paz is the hinterland specialist, and Flux supports their scouting while doing assessments of magic/mist conditions. Each new city could be the seed for a story arc.

Edit: If you go this route, you could build Flux as an Intel/Diplomat mage looking for ways to make friends or deter enemies in the other cities.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by coronatiger

I just think it's a bit of a stretch for Paz to be picked for this quest.

Thanks for the compliment -- and I agree that Paz is the hardest one to connect in that scenario. And inventing some PC connections to keep the party together is generally good. (That's one of the things that "Session Zero" is good for. Get all the players together and work out some of those details of the character concepts.)

In general, I find it more difficult to connect characters with that sort of drive to a campaign. It's great that the players are coming up with reasons for their character to adventure; in my mind, that's the single most important thing you have to decide about a character. But the second-order problem is what motivations adapt themselves to different story lines? You need a character with interesting possibilities for adventure, while still remaining wary of concepts that dictate the storyline. If the campaign happens to be "hunt down Paz's father's murderer", great. But if it's not? If Paz is really wandering off doing all these other things, in game it's not going to look like he's very driven by the desire to find his father's murderer. If the player -- and the group -- willing to have the character just depart the party, abandoning the current plot thread the first time (every time) a possible lead comes up? Can the GM actually let Paz find the killer and satisfactorily resolve that story without cutting off the reason for the character to adventure?

Traits that don't actually come up in play aren't really traits, just notes on the character sheet. It's more satisfying (to me as a player and GM both, at least) to enable the GM to connect their characters to the campaign and arrange scenes where those traits can be on display. But there's a narrow line before you fall off the precipice of characters so strong that the story can only be about them -- or else the elaborate backstory starts to feel like a sham or pose. One of things I find challenging about RPG character creation is getting that balance of story potential without so much specific detail that it becomes story dictation.

There are, of course, possible answers. One is that the drive isn't really all that strong. It's a goal, and it's the thing that got him off the farm or out of the forest, away from home. But it's been a while, and Paz is now more mature. The trail's long since run cold, and it's actually not the first thing on his mind any more. New clues will certainly grab his attention, but he doesn't get out of bed every morning thinking "time to get back on that search; today's the day!" That gives the player more wiggle room than a totally obsessed character would.

Even Inigo Montoya was doing things not directly related to finding the six-fingered man, and Dr. Richard Kimble managed 120 episodes of doing something interesting without actually finding the one-armed man. Paz's personal quest could be a long-running story arc that touches upon the campaign every so often, with some adventures being based entirely upon it, without being the single core plot driving the campaign. And during all those "side quests", there's the opportunity for the group to make some other connections to motivate Paz to continue after he does get his man. (If, of course, that's what the group wants. One of those Session Zero discussions would be "do you actually want Paz to find the killer?")

[Varyon]

Integrating the characters into a cohesive party would actually be pretty easy, given the wizard is as-yet largely-undefined - you can simply have the wizard be the bridge that connects the other two. He (or she) lives in the same city as Isabella and could easily be an acquaintance - they're both mages of some flavor, the mage could be an associate member of the same Thieves' Guild, the mage could be a former client of Isabella's, whatever. For Paz, the mage may have been friends with Paz's father in the past (maybe they were both adventurers in the same party at some point prior to Paz's father settling down, maybe they met at a marketplace and hit it off, maybe the mage was actually a regular visitor to their home), and thus both have an idea of Paz's capabilities ("If he's even half the woodsman his father was...") and an interest in helping to track down the killer. He introduces Isabella and Paz, as Isabella may be of use figuring out who the mysterious killer was and Paz's skills will be of use to her on missions that go outside city limits.

As for handling Paz's father's killer, you could actually have the killer be tracked down and taken care of relatively early on - only for it to be revealed the killer was only a pawn in a grander scheme, with Paz's focus changing to bringing those who were ultimately behind his father's death to justice. Why would there be some big conspiracy to kill a simple woodsman? If he was an adventurer in the past, it may be someone who was out for revenge. Or maybe he had some secret artifact that it was the killer's purpose to acquire, and the killer slew him when said killer was discovered (and now Paz also needs to recover the artifact before Bad Things are done with it, and/or is driven to unlock its mysteries). Maybe there is something special about the forest Paz grew up in and his father wound up dead because of some attempts by a shady organization to exploit whatever is special about it. Maybe it's all just part of some morbid murder game by a group of sadistic nobles, with Paz's father being a random victim.

[Arith Winterfell]

Wow! Thank you for these continued suggestions. Okay, time for a setting/character update! :)

Isabella's Thieves' Guild has now been updated to be a full on Order of Assassins called Marfour. This idea is loosely borrowed from the Elder Scrolls game Morrowind which had a group called the Morag Tong. In the Morrowind setting the Morag Tong existed in part because noble houses in that setting would often setup assassinations instead of the great houses going to all out war against each other, with kills being a legal part of the setting.

Likewise, Marfour exists as part of Valen (the great city) culture because with most people and numerous noble houses all crammed into the one city of Valen all out war among the nobles would be disastrous. Instead a culture of conflict resolution has evolved where the Marfour and legal assassination jobs replaced the military conflicts of the "civilized" peoples and noble houses of Valen.

Isabella's daughter Cassie is thirteen as is now a new apprentice in the Marfour (following her mother Isabella's footsteps who in turn had followed her parents into the Marfour as well). This means Cassie is busy and watched allowing Isabella to pursue her work/adventuring while still allowing us to keep her as a risk plot hook in the future.

The in flux wizard is now named Arith, who's ancestry is fiendish, but further down the line then the Half-Spirit Infernal in Dungeon Fantasy: The Next Level. Meaning he has a few elements from the template, but lacks overt demonic appearance aside from glowing red eyes when angry or trying to intimidate foes. Though he does have the Weakness to Holy Places disadvantage from the template (1d6 per minute). Arith is a fiend summoner (a normal wizard focused on demon summoning, seek gate, control gate, necromancy spells involving spirits, and banish rather than the demonologist template from Dungeon Fantasy: Summoners) as he is naturally good at fiend summoning (Close to Hell talent), though he likes illusions as a side hobby (just has Simple Illusion). This ties back around to the noble houses as follows.

Demon Summoning is actually legal in the setting (with a permit from the Mage's Guild to those talented and responsible enough) and is tied in with how the mages of the city saved Valen in the past. Two hundred years ago (extended from the earlier 100 years to allow for slightly more generations, but not so much language drift as to make interaction difficult with cut off regions) when the events of the Mists happening were foreseen, the wizards bound numerous fiend spirits to power various rituals in various sites in order to maintain planar stability in the region and prevent the lands from dissolving into the Mists. While dissolving into the Mists is no longer a threat (appearing to have been only part of the first appearance of the Mists) the Mists do leak into the lands around and sometimes into Valen itself, bringing monsters with it, indicating the wards are imperfect even now.

The side effects of all the demon binding was that occasionally, children of normal parents sometimes simply produced Half-Spirit Infernal children due to ambient fiendish energies in these lands. This is notable among the nobility who ended up with mixed feelings toward the issue, as some abhorred such children and others embraced the children as still being of noble blood. The result of all of this is a scattering of half-spirit infernals and teifling equivalents in the population, and more enlightened folks realizing that like ordinary humans such people can be good or bad people as their own morals dictate. Though this has left prickly moral debate as Good aligned churches and the like still harm them and they still detect as Evil with magic. Raising real moral questions about what "Good" and "Evil" really are.

Historical Side Note: So the ancient civilization that was the equivalent of Old English in this setting was the Aethian (Aeth) civilization, which eventually gave rise to the Alinian (Alinia) civilization before the Mists happened. Valen and its surrounding lands would still consider themselves culturally Alinia as would many other regions they will contact through the portals. However, they are all starting to diverge into their own cultural identities with just enough language drift that it would be comparable to a modern American speaking to someone from the American Revolutionary War period (Or a modern English speaker talking to a pre-Victorian Era speaker). So that will be interesting adventures through the portals.

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Arith Winterfell

Wow! Thank you for these continued suggestions. Okay, time for a setting/character update! :)

Isabella's Thieves' Guild has now been updated to be a full on Order of Assassins called Marfour. This idea is loosely borrowed from the Elder Scrolls game Morrowind which had a group called the Morag Tong. In the Morrowind setting the Morag Tong existed in part because noble houses in that setting would often setup assassinations instead of the great houses going to all out war against each other, with kills being a legal part of the setting.

This might even make it even easier for Isabella and Paz to join forces. Have Paz inquire the guild about the mystery assailant, with them finding out there was no contract and it wasn't a member. Isabella is then tasked with finding (and executing) this criminal and since Paz is the only witness they'll need to team up. To get the wizard involved, you could either have a lead that requires his assistance (it turns out some sort of fiendish magic is involved) or have the two encounter him while needing to use a gate to track the assailant.

[Arith Winterfell]

Thank you for all your feedback! It's been a big help! All of you are a really great GURPS community!


Please feel free to close/lock the thread Mods if you so desire :D