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Humpty Dumpty Conundrum: Article
Humpty Dumpty Conundrum: Article
ARTICLE
HUMPTY DUMPTY CONUNDRUM
This regular column is for Dungeon Masters who like to build worlds and
campaigns as much as I do. Here I share my experiences as a DM through
the lens of Iomandra, my Dungeons & Dragons campaign world. Even
though the campaign uses the 4th Edition rules, the topics covered here
often transcend editions. Hopefully this series of articles will give you
inspiration, ideas, and awesome new ways to menace your players in
your home campaigns.
MONDAY NIGHT. The heroes are trapped inside a military stronghold in Io'calioth,
capital of the Dragovar Empire. A dragonborn villainess named Zarkhrysa is
determined to annihilate them for their constant meddling in her plans. The
characters know she's part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government, but how
exactly remains a mystery.
There you have it: one plot, one NPC, and one secret. If this represented the entirety
of my campaign, my job as the DM would be relatively easy. Alas, that's not the case.
Over the past five years, I've littered the campaign with a plethora of plots, myriad
NPCs with dreams and desires, and scores of secrets scattered everywhere in little
fragments. All the king's horses and all the king's men, indeed!
Every time I run an adventure for my Monday and Wednesday night group, I'm
adding complexity to the campaign new plot details to sort through, new NPCs to
throw in the party's path, and new revelations to uncover. The longer a campaign
runs, the more pieces there are to pick up and put together into something . . .
whole. I could make the campaign shorter, include fewer NPCs, and reduce the
number of fiendish plots, but then the campaign world wouldn't feel as big, and the
players might one day find themselves out of things to do. It's a conundrum.
The three biggest contributors to campaign complexity are plots, NPCs, and secrets.
Every new plot that brews, every new NPC who shows up with an agenda, and every
secret I plant in the world has the potential to sweep the player characters away on
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12/20/2015 Humpty Dumpty Conundrum | Dungeons & Dragons
secret I plant in the world has the potential to sweep the player characters away on
an adventure that lasts for hours, days, weeks, or months. The Iomandra campaign
has scores of plots, hundreds of important NPCs, and too many secrets to count. The
adventurers are not only dealing with the quest-of-the-day but also dealing with the
consequences of leaving other quests unfinished, and here I am, the not-so-
blameless DM, trying to make the most of it.
The only things that keep me sane are my notes. As I've mentioned before, I go into
every game session with a one-page printout that summarizes key beats from
previous sessions, lists the names of NPCs likely to be of importance, and spells out
what I think might happen over the course of the session. Throughout the game, I'm
scribbling notes on this page the name of an NPC who makes an unexpected
appearance, names of things I'm forced to create on the fly, reminders to myself,
strange things that happen during an encounter that might have bearing on future
events, and the occasional funny quote. Once in a while, a character will do
something crazy but memorable; I'll jot that down, too. At the end of the session, the
page goes in the back of my campaign binder, which has, over the past five years,
become a chronicle of the party's shenanigans (albeit an unpublishable one).
Plots. NPCs. Secrets. These are the things I'm most interested in keeping track of.
Why? Because in order to pull the campaign together and turn it into something
more than just a string of adventures, I need to keep bringing old plots, NPCs, and
secrets back into play and finding ways to pay them off. If I can't remember them,
then I'm just littering the campaign with bits of debris plots that are never thwarted,
NPCs without destinies or arcs, and secrets lost forever. That's not the campaign I'm
trying to build.
I don't need horses or men to gather up the bits of my campaign and start piecing
things together. My campaign binder contains everything I need to assemble my
campaign: one-sheets from every single game session, in chronological order. Some
barely have a mark on them; others are covered with notes, scrawls, and half-baked
thoughts that don't really amount to much but serve to jog my memory of events
from Way Back When. When I'm worried that my campaign might be falling apart, I
open my campaign binder and start leafing through past episodes, sometimes going
all the way back to the beginning. Look! Here's a quest the characters abandoned . . .
what are the consequences of their negligence? Here's an NPC with some unfinished
business . . . I wonder if there's a way to bring her back into the story? And behold,
here's a little secret the players never figured out . . . maybe it's time they learned the
truth!
concerned because I didn't know quite where to take the campaign from there . . . or
how to make the next few game sessions just as thrilling. After all, once the campaign
hits a dizzying high, the natural tendency is to go down from there. It takes a lot of
thought and effort or pure delirium to keep going up. I had a few ideas (odds and
ends rattling about in my brain), but I needed to go back to my campaign binder to
find inspiration . . . or, more precisely, to find things that would resonate with my
players. As it happens, I found several.
1. When last we left the PCs, they were nearly out of resources. Our sly villainess,
Zarkhrysa, allowed them 10 minutes to craft a teleportation circle, but with no
intention of letting them escape. She and her wizards have been secretly
scrying on the party and casting a ritual to disrupt their circle once activated. It
seemed like a surefire way to get rid of the whole party at once, once and for
all.
2. The players suspected something was amiss when Zarkhrysa held her forces
back instead of steamrolling over them. Only one of the characters (a
warforged artificer named Triage, played by Nick DiPetrillo) actually ended up
using the teleportation circle, and now he's separated from the rest of the
group. The party's attempt to reach him via sending stone didn't work,
suggesting that he might be dead. (Triage's sending stone is embedded in his
brain, making it unlikely that the item was simply lost.)
though he sided with them against the Vost Miraj multiple times. When
Zarkhrysa realized he'd gone rogue, she separated Baharoosh from the other
PCs and promptly made him disappear. The other characters, unaware of the
risks he'd taken to help them, weren't sad to see him go.
The Dragovar Empire's missing emperor: Having just killed the last of Hahrzan's
clones, Jeremy hit upon the idea of using Hahrzan's research to create a clone of the
imprisoned purple dragon. If he's successful, he'll get the heart he needs for his ritual
from the purple dragon's clone, and the real purple dragon can be set free. Were this
to happen, the characters might suddenly learn the whereabouts of Emperor
Azunkhan IX. I won't divulge that secret here, for the sake of keeping the Monday
night group in suspense, but as a point of fact, it is the single oldest unresolved
secret in the entire campaign. The question then becomes: what happens if the
characters return the real emperor to the throne before Zarkhrysa can install Menes
Narakhty in his place? There we have the makings of a campaign-ender, don't you
think?
The other missing party members: Poor Triage. Zapped into oblivion by a
sabotaged teleportation circle! What the heck do I do with him? Is there some way I
can connect his latest misfortune to some other unresolved piece of the campaign?
Why yes, there is: The prison of Zardkarath. Interestingly, the location has never been
explored but has come up many times in the campaign (the name first appears on
page 5 in my campaign binder, which must be at least 500 pages thick). It occurred to
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explored but has come up manyHumpty
12/20/2015 times in the
Dumpty campaign
Conundrum | Dungeons &(the
Dragonsname first appears on
page 5 in my campaign binder, which must be at least 500 pages thick). It occurred to
me that the Vost Miraj would probably have a secret level of the prison where they
keep captives who are too important to kill and too dangerous to mingle with the
"rank and file." No doubt the level would be scry-proof and sending-proof, its cells
teleportation-proof. If you want to dispose of an epic-level party without the risk of
them being brought back from the dead, there's no better place than prison,
particularly if they show up sans gear. (Naturally their precious stuff would be
teleported elsewhere. Thank you, Tomb of Horrors, for teaching me that old trick!) The
only good news is that Triage is not alone he has Stan!'s former character,
Baharoosh, to keep him company. Two characters who never really liked each other .
. . reunited at last! Surely it doesn't get any sweeter than that.
Au contraire.
LESSONS LEARNED
Obviously, I can't have Triage locked up in an escape-proof penitentiary for the rest of
the campaign. As a player, poor Nick would be bored to tears! (And based on the
party's track record, there's a 97.1 percent chance that Triage's companions wouldn't
bother mounting a rescue.) However, it stands to reason that the Vost Miraj would
keep other important prisoners there as well, including Andraste's aunt, Alethia. It
doesn't take a genius to imagine what might happen next.
In the end, managing a D&D campaign is about knowing what you have to play with
and fitting the pieces together as best you can. That's where the campaign binder (or
whatever device you need to capture your notes) comes in. If you can't see all the
pieces, you can't put the campaign back together again.
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