With your campaign journal in hand and the basic premise of your campaign (characters, conflicts, and setting) in mind, it’s time to consider how to begin the campaign.
At the start of a campaign, you and your players can run a special session—called session zero because it comes before the first session of play—to establish expectations, share ideas, and discuss house rules, with the goal of ensuring the game is a fun experience for everyone involved. The “Ensuring Fun for All” section in chapter 1 covers some of the most important groundwork you need to establish at the start of a new campaign.
Often session zero includes building characters together. As the DM, you can help players during character creation by advising them on which options best suit the campaign.
When players are choosing their characters’ classes and origins, you can restrict options that are unsuitable for the campaign.
Encourage the players to choose different classes so that the adventuring party has a range of abilities. It’s less important that the party include multiple backgrounds or species; sometimes it’s fun to play an all-Dwarf party or a troupe of adventuring Entertainers.
The origins the players choose define who their characters were before becoming adventurers. Think about how the characters’ backgrounds might inform adventures in your campaign. For example, if a player chooses the Criminal background, help the player flesh out their character’s criminal past, and use that information when building relevant storylines into the larger campaign.
Starting Level.What level are the characters when they start? Many D&D campaigns start the characters at level 1. If you want the characters to be a bit more resilient and your players are experienced, start the campaign at level 3 instead. (See the Player’s Handbook for rules on starting at higher levels.)
During session zero, help the players come up with explanations for how their characters know each other and have some sort of history together, however brief that history might be. To get a sense of the party’s relationships, here are some questions you can ask the players as they create characters:
If the players are having trouble coming up with a story for how their characters met, you can suggest the following options.
Bonding Event. Some bonding event (such as a wedding, a festival, or a funeral) brings the characters together, whereupon they quickly discover a shared sense of purpose.
Happenstance. Someone puts out a call for adventurers to complete a quest, and the characters answer the call. Alternatively, all the characters could meet by accident, only to discover they’re headed to the same place, or they could find themselves trapped together.
Mutual Acquaintance. The characters are introduced to one another by a mutual NPC acquaintance whom they all trust. This shared acquaintance could serve as a patron for the party—perhaps a representative of an organization (an academy, a criminal syndicate, a guild, a military force, or a religious order), a politically powerful person (an aristocrat or even a sovereign), or a magical creature like a sphinx or a dragon.
Shared History. The characters grew up in the same place and have known one another for years. Despite their different backgrounds and training, they’re already good friends.
Tavern Gathering. The characters meet in a tavern over mugs of ale and decide to embark on a life of adventure together—a tried and true trope!
Session zero is a great time to share basic information about the campaign with your players. Such information typically includes the following:
Starting Location Details. Your players need basic information about the place where the characters are starting, such as the name of the settlement, important locations in and around it, and prominent NPCs they’d know about (see “Starting Location”).
Key Events. Describe any current or past events that help frame the campaign. For example, the campaign might start on the heels of a great war or on the day of a festival. Describing key events helps set the mood and prepare players for upcoming adventures.
House Rules. If you’re using any house rules (as discussed in chapter 2), or adopting any of the variant rules presented in this or any other book, let your players know about them.
Remember, you’ll always know more about your campaign world than the players do. Having spent all their lives in this world, though, the characters also know more than their players do. Fill in the basics of what the characters should know anytime that information matters to their adventures.
Begin your campaign in a location you can detail, such as a village, a neighborhood in a larger city, an outpost, or a roadside tavern. Be prepared to give players enough information about that location to help them figure out what ties, if any, their characters have to it. Once you have this campaign hub fleshed out, create one or two local attractions that might serve as adventure locations, such as a haunted house on the outskirts of town or a dungeon complex tucked in the nearby hills.
If you’re using a published campaign setting, pick any location in that setting and develop it as you like. A published setting or adventure might give you all the details you need. The Free City of Greyhawk, described later in this chapter, is an ideal starting location and illustrates the kinds of things to consider as you detail a starting location.
If you’re building your own setting, start small by detailing only this starting area. The rest of your setting can remain undeveloped for now. Don’t spend too much time fleshing out the geopolitical landscape of your world or locations the adventurers aren’t likely to visit right away; save those fun tasks for when you and your players have a better sense of where the campaign is headed.
A time of sorrow can bring people together and even launch an adventuring party.
If you’re using a published adventure to launch your campaign, use the character hooks in that adventure to bring the characters from their starting location to the adventure’s action. Many campaigns begin with a published adventure and then develop organically as the characters explore beyond the scope of the adventure.
If you’re creating your own adventure for the start of your campaign, refer to the advice in chapter 4. Keep the first adventure relatively short and simple, allowing plenty of time for the characters to get to know each other as the players roleplay. What’s most important is that they begin to feel like an adventuring party and get comfortable with their abilities. The full scope of the campaign can unfold to them later.