A dojo for players of fantasy role-playing games
by Graham Robert Scott · April 23, 2016
The file embedded below was originally created as a guide for members of our Facebook Group, Dungeons & Dragons Round Table.
As such, all of its links — I’m afraid — route through Facebook. If you’re not logged into Facebook when you click on those links, your browser may ask you whether you trust Facebook. Which is a tough question. Regrettably, this is a decision that every human being must make for himself or herself at some point.
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When I started running my Homebrew I had no idea what I was doing, and also I never ran a session 0, so I had some players making up their own gods and some pulling from the Faerun pantheon, it was a mess.
Starting a campaign is a moment of great potential, both for good and ill. I’ve often found myself wanting to retcon something that I put into the campaign world early on but that I find later on makes issues or just doesn’t work with the particular feel or ethos of the game I’m going for. If that happens, I now try to talk to the characters that would be affected by a revision, and most times we can come to a happy consensus. IF those deities really don’t make sense, perhaps talk to the players and see if there is an alternative they might prefer. I even sometimes let the players retcon their characters a bit if they’ve changed their conception of them with time, and as long as it’s a collaborative process that everyone can agree to, there’s nothing wrong with deciding that first session was actually a session zero retroactively.
It occurs to me that a mess of a campaign is often a missed opportunity for world-shaking current events. I’m reminded of the backstory behind Stephen King’s “The Stand.” King is a “pantser,” in that he comes up with stuff as he goes. And part way through the novel, he realized he had a bunch of stagnant, major characters who were holding the story back. So there was an explosion, and a bunch of them died. It’s this shocking scene for the reader, but it was a tidy solution for the author. And I think this can sometimes happen with a messy campaign. Events happen. In mythology, wars happen among gods, or between titans and gods, or between gods and giants. Countries get erased, going the way of Tigana or Atlantis or Troy. Countries experience upheaval, overthrows, conquest. Plagues ravage countrysides. And, interestingly, it’s not “too much” to do several of these at once. Wars and pestilence are old friends, tag-teaming throughout history to wipe out populations. And in a world where gods are both real and active, a war among the gods or between dragons and gods or between Lovecraftian elder gods and the greater elemental lords or whatever, you can expect that to trigger wars and earthquakes and tsunamis and plagues among mortals. Not only can you change your world to allow for a different kind of adventure, you can also brew adventures in the middle of that upheaval, letting the PCs try to navigate the mercurial and capricious tides of fate.