Designing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign - How I did it

A walkthrough of how I designed my own campaign world that was run successfully over twenty years with numerous D&D editions. Hopefully, it may help you when designing your own worlds.
Dark Knife art by Daniel Ljunggren: www.artofmtg.com/art/trepanat...
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Many thanks to ITS A TRAPP for cleaning up the Berserker image for me. It’s a lot cleaner and sharper now.
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[@P1nchbeck]

Many fond memories of us all being spread out around a map, laughing and drinking way too much Dr Pepper. Can confirm - this campaign was legendary! -Gid

[@becmiberserker]

Wonderful of you to stop by, Gideon!

[@0ptikGhost]

This is a perfect example of what I mean by DMs are responsible for providing setting while players are responsible for providing plot. A small setting was developed without much plot and that plot grew through the players actions in the course of play.

[@simflyer9955]

Please do go down the rabbit-hole. Would love to hear more about your campaign, reflections and ideas. This is also very inspiring - at least for me.

[@becmiberserker]

Thanks for this. I’ll see how popular that request is. Although it might be fun anyway. Thanks for watching!

[@al2642]

Love this focus on names meaning and how they define the work. Very tolkenian. Great move. Gygax 75 should have that included!

[@worstcat8489]

"...and it was at that moment he chose to 'keep it real.'"

[@Mothra-Best-Kaiju]

"I am going to stop there now before I go down a rabbit hole of what happened over all those years of play." The topic of a future video, I hope!

[@becmiberserker]

We shall see!

[@AuthorTraceRichards]

“Start small” is the same advice I’ve given anyone who has asked me for dm advice too. Great video. Btw, I like that name “Meadquaffer.” Lol

[@becmiberserker]

Thanks. Seems obvious but has to be repeated.

[@GUNDAMURX73]

I see I'm not the first person to think of that NPC name trick... good to know I'm following in time-honored footsteps. It really is crazy how handy that can be, not just for NPCs, but for all sorts of things from places to magic items and so on. I take note of neat sounding names I come upon at work, and rework them for my games all the time.

[@davidbrennan660]

Thus is a nice start, you all learn your world and the DM keeps to a set of technical/magical rules until you are prepared to get weird.

[@user-hf2ku2ev7f]

The map is from Dungeon Magazine #85, MAR/APR 2001. Thanks for the channel.

[@user-hf2ku2ev7f]

The map at 2:39.

[@becmiberserker]

Thank you so much so that. I always wondered.

[@ChuckDenomolos47]

Yes the adventure is titled “flesh to stone” about stone giants that farm chickens , the chickens happen to be cockatrice unfortunately

[@becmiberserker]

@@ChuckDenomolos47 😮

[@Madkingstow]

Wow! Imagine having the same campaign for 20 years. The longest campaign I've ever been a part of was 1 year, and that was in my early 20's. These days I can't even get a group of adults to stick with a campaign for more than a few sessions, nevermind something this long term. That's the dream though! I'm both envious and impressed. Kudos to you :)

[@becmiberserker]

Thank you. There were breaks for other games and locations, but we kept going back to it.

[@andrewtomlinson5237]

@@becmiberserker We're about 8 months into the most current iteration of the campaign we started in 1982. I've used the same setting for different games including an LRP version that ran for a few years. I love using languages and giving meaning to names. One of the most frequent things I use the internet for when writing material is Google Translate for place names that sound like they come from the same source but also have a background in the meaning. I use Latin for "Old Common" Ancient Greek for a nation that is based on that culture, a German/Russian hybrid for the "Eastern European" part of the world.

[@becmiberserker]

@@andrewtomlinson5237 love it!

[@nicklarocco4178]

This is great advise. I love the idea of using player names as a basis for naming conventions. And I love the dark knife assassins. Everyone loves a mystery, and what could be more mysterious?

[@djm.o.d.9376]

lol I like imagining stories like this ending with, "long story short, we've played for 20 years and still haven't been to Phandalin"

[@smmclaug75]

Bonus points for the proper and timely use of 'philology.' 😊

[@becmiberserker]

A consequence of admiring Tolkien.

[@smmclaug75]

@@becmiberserker I thought as much.

[@johnfielder2064]

great vid, thanks, love the naming of the clerics, my longest game was 5 years, but have had my home brew world for over 20 years, after my mate destroyed the forgotten realms, as i was running al-qadim, then moved that to my home brew world, unfortunetly lost all my stuff when my hard drive died and the back up at the same time

[@becmiberserker]

The days before cloud backups was tricky. I’ve got a hard drive of stuff somewhere that I can’t even connect to my new fangled alienware…

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

Your naming convention of the settings Clerics, reminded me of Asian Generation Names. I might have to tinker with this for my own clerics, paladins and Aasimars. 👍

[@becmiberserker]

Glad you liked it.

[@paavohirn3728]

This is truly an inspiring angle into campaign design! I also dig tools for randomly generating ideas of all kinds as well as starting with NPC's with goals that have potential to draw the characters into some manner of conflict. Anyway, I appreciate the concrete example illustrating the emergence of adventure.

[@becmiberserker]

Glad it was helpful!

[@SapphireCrook]

That map at 15:30... that's the Burgomeister's Mansion in Vellaki in the Curse of Strahd book. Combined with the fact the coffin shop re-uses the map from Red Hand of Doom, I wonder if it's just COS (and if so, what else) or WOTC's general operandus to re-use assets like that. More on topic, this has been a nice thing. I've often heard the advice "Start small" but never a proper show of what that means, looks like, or how to build from it. Always just "Yea just start with a tiny thing" in classical "now draw the rest of the owl" style.

[@becmiberserker]

Thanks for that. I think it’s been a thing over the years to reuse artwork, in both TSR and WotC products. Having it all available on the Map-a-Week page was awesome back then. I wish they’d bring it back, but now everything is monetised…*sigh* As for campaign design, I didn’t say this but basically it’s all about winging it. 🙂

[@davidmc8478]

One thing it has taken me decades to learn is to not map out towns. I draw a circle and one market square for each 3000 people. There is a central square with the main citadel or temple and then each square has a blacksmith, inn and tavern. Places of interest are adjacent to the squares so the PCs just have to go the magic shop at the square bay the eastern gate or the store by the square by the wharf. It’s a point crawl and much better than trying to imitate a dungeon crawl

[@madmaxine75]

Great stuff! Loved the note idea.

[@johntuck77]

Amazing video - I think you should do a series on the mechanics of BECMI. Such as combat and what to do in between campaigns. Also which VTT to use with BECMI would be fun. As always what an amazing videos.

[@becmiberserker]

Combat is coming soon. Going to try and include some level of weapon mastery as well. Thanks for the kind comment.

[@paavohirn3728]

​@@becmiberserker very cool! I'm actually most interested in your thoughts on the basic combat mechanics, such as the round structure and initiative.

[@steveyoungwork]

Great advice for New GM's!

[@engbama]

Great video and good reminder to keep it focused.

[@becmiberserker]

Thanks for watching!

[@admiralsnackbar2811]

I used a homebrew island to start my campaign and slapped it in the Dread Sea. I later discovered that my "small island" actually rivaled Karemeikos in size and didn't really fit on the map where I intended it to be. The players had no idea though.

[@becmiberserker]

I don’t know why, but I got vibes of Cook discovering Australia when I read this. You think you’ve found a small island and then… 🙂

[@admiralsnackbar2811]

@BECMI Berserker lol. It's okay though since the players didn't even explore 1/4th of the island, so it's still small in their minds eye at least. It's completely broken and makes no sense on my side of the screen, however.

[@anarionelendili8961]

I certainly didn't take this advice when I designed my own homebrew world, the Seven Kingdoms. It predated The Song of Ice and Fire, and made me a bit miffed to know that the name would forever be connected to that book series. All the more ironically two of the seven kingdoms had already been destroyed in a magical cataclysm a hundred years prior, and there was an expansionist empire to the south, too. So it really could have been called Five Kingdoms and an Empire, instead. I started big, and then filled in what was going on. But having a reasonably good grounding in ancient and medieval history, it was easy enough for me to wing the details on the fly, and I got the highest accolades from one of my players: that the world felt real. Still feeling mighty chuffed about that. I don't think it is necessarily a bad idea to have the top-level idea of the game world ready, as well as some idea of the religions and the trade routes and the like. But you certainly don't need to map every little village or even a town and populate them with NPCs that the players are never going to meet. I had a lot of fun with the Seven Gods: Gods of Light: Light/Sun, Life/Healing Gods of Nature: Earth/Nature, Sea/Weather Gods of Darkness: War/Strength, Darkness/Death And the Seventh one was The Smith. (Again, predating the Seven of Westeros, but I mean, a smith/maker god is a staple, especially in a fantasy world that has dwarves...) Each of the gods had also their local aspects, based on the kingdom/region, meaning that while there were only Seven Gods (well, there was the Big Bad One lurking in the background, but we don't talk about him here), there were dozens of different cults, with slightly differing tenets and available powers/prayers for the clergy. And i definitely acknowledge a host of fantasy influences: The kingdoms each having their preferred style of warfare (specialty) was definitely an Eddings thing to do. Big Bad God trapped and seeking to escape was Wheel of Time. The Goddess of Death being an accepted part of the culture, feared and respected but not cackling evil: Krondor/Riftwar. Kingdoms ruined by a magical cataclysm, leaving a host of dangerous ruins for the adventures to explore and loot: Praedor comics. The said cataclysm turned its victims to undead, and yes, they could spread the PlagueTM: every zombie apocalypse movie. The steppe horsefolk were definitely a mix of Rohan and Mongols. I was liberally stealing from history as well: I obviously had Romans, Vikings, Bedouins, High Medieval Western Europe,... The Empire had plenty of other ethnicities as well, as befits an empire.

[@becmiberserker]

Sounds amazing! The sheer scale of effort that exists with worldbuilding across the hobby is mind blowing.

[@chiblast100x]

That is very much what I've always done for an initial fantasy world build. I rough in a world map and figure out vague cultural zones and big geographic features on it. Then I figure out where the initial setting fits into one of the cultural zones and give it the same treatment on the scale of kingdoms. Then again on the scale of counties and duchies. Finally once I'm at the scale of cities, towns, and villages in the local county or duchy then I operate in the manner described in this video. The typical adventuring campaign almost never needs more than a kingdom and rarely needs to detail out the kingdom's ruling class (outside maybe their names) even if the PCs get themselves into political machinations. Even the full story of LOTR takes place in an area at most between the size of the Carolingian Empire and the Roman Empire, and that's pushing the manageable upper scale of a TTRPG campaign.

[@dartanionbrallk9805]

Somehow I missed this video upon its initial release.

[@earlkriewall7251]

Absolutely wonderful. Thank you for some very good advice.

[@becmiberserker]

You are so welcome!

[@geofftottenperthcoys9944]

Still have a copy of CC2 around somewhere!

[@justinblocker730]

Short answer: Do not. Long answer: Do not do it alone.

[@davidnixon5792]

Good stuff!

[@northofvalhalla5087]

Great content as always.

[@becmiberserker]

Much appreciated!

[@oz_jones]

I am at roughly 2 minutes so take that into consideration: Building a whole world "with everything" from the outset is probably a mistake, but what I would do (and am currently doing) is that I build the starting area a bit, and make the whole world but leave most things vague, as in: this country is allegory for Senkogu Jidai -era Japan, this is an amalgamation of Ancient Greece and Rome, this is my equivalent of the Aztec Empire etc. But then again I am not a DM (yet, anyway) so there's that too.

[@becmiberserker]

Hopefully you enjoyed the rest of the video.

[@oz_jones]

@@becmiberserker I did! Here's hoping 20 more years of exploring your world!

[@raff3486]

great video!

[@becmiberserker]

Thank you!

[@adamb8154]

Great advice!

[@PhilipDudley3]

Were your players focused on trying to level up as fast as possible and getting more intrinsic abilities or what kept your campaign running that long? Did you make new characters every so often? Did your players NEED to reach level 36 (20 these days) or were they satisfied with the narrative?

[@becmiberserker]

Good question. What I neglected to mention in the video was that over the twenty years, numerous storylines took place involving various parties of characters. It was all about progressing the story. So, at the beginning as shown in the video, with two clerics and the spontaneous healing rules of 3e they were fairly resistant. They ended up being just 13th level when they completed the main plot of the first campaign. The second part, which was with the Pathfinder rules, was set about a hundred years later, with a new set of characters but with the Heart of Moradin still a central plot device. The entire campaign culminated in a third act with 5e, where the next generation of characters eventually destroyed the main antagonist and secured the safety of the Heart. What was great about the third act was how I set up a sect of cultists that worshipped the original four characters as deities. That was fun! 🙂

[@PhilipDudley3]

@@becmiberserker That's so cool! I use slightly different terminology such as Adventures building Campaigns. Sounds like the story furthered the world mor so than just the individual characters drives? Or did you make the world change based on their actions after each adventure/campaign?

[@becmiberserker]

@@PhilipDudley3 I guess it was a symbiotic relationship, where each fed the other. The story shaped the characters and the characters pushed the story. I always say that, in my opinion, a good DM let’s the players ‘write’ the campaign. The DM just moves the pieces round the board. Of course, there’s more to it than that, but hopefully you get my point.

[@al2642]

Amazing vid with lots of tips and inspiration! Queation: ho long and how many sessions and sungeons was the "firs" adventure? And did pcs level up by completing it?

[@becmiberserker]

The first adventure was just one session, which was probably 6 hours. And they went up 1 level.

[@al2642]

Maps are nice, but I would ditch the softwares. Print out an hex grid and let your brain and hand do the craft.

[@becmiberserker]

It was the next bright and shiny thing! I learned quickly that it also wasn’t the best…