A D&D campaign is like a garden. Each new adventure plants new seeds in the garden, which requires regular tending lest it run wild. Over time, your campaign will grow and flourish in ways you expected and in ways that will surprise you. You might need to weed out elements that aren’t resonating with your players while planting new elements to tantalize them.
Most D&D campaigns grow organically, rather than having all their elements set in stone from the get-go. From time to time, the characters’ decisions will require you to improvise and create new campaign elements on the fly. For example, a new location might need to be developed to address the needs of the unfolding story, or certain NPCs might need fleshing out at a moment’s notice. Other parts of this book, such as the “Nonplayer Characters” and “Settlements” sections in chapter 3, can help you expand your campaign quickly.
There are two basic ways to think about how adventures fit together in your campaign: as distinct episodes or as a serialized story. If you’re not sure which type of campaign to run, ask your players what they prefer. If your players have different preferences, you can intersperse episodic, stand-alone adventures among serialized adventures to break up the bigger story.
An episodic campaign is a campaign in which the component adventures don’t combine to form an overarching story. Episodic adventures are stand-alone quests, and the villains who appear in one adventure rarely resurface to trouble the characters again. If your game group plays infrequently, an episodic campaign might be ideal because the players can enjoy the current adventure even if they’ve forgotten the details of earlier adventures.
Starting a New Episode. In an episodic campaign, the start of a new adventure doesn’t necessarily have any connection to the end of the last one. The action might pick up immediately after the end of the previous adventure, but it might instead begin weeks, months, or years after the last adventure, allowing interim events to unfold while the characters take a break from adventuring.
A serialized campaign is one continuous story broken up into smaller parts that flow naturally from one to the next. It often has one or more overarching threats, and the outcome of one adventure can affect how the rest of the campaign unfolds. If your game group meets regularly and often, a serialized campaign allows you to keep your players guessing what will come next as the campaign builds toward a satisfying conclusion.
Linking Adventures. In a serialized campaign, make connections between the end of one adventure and the start of the next to help it feel like a connected story. Sometimes you can simply continue the current storyline with new locations to explore and new threats to overcome. Alternatively, you can use the Adventure Connections table to inspire a link from one adventure to the next. The table suggests things you can do near the end of one adventure to lead characters into the next one.
| 1d6 | Adventure Connection |
|---|---|
| 1 | Introduce a person, an object, or information that the characters need to transport safely to a location involved in the new adventure. |
| 2 | Have a major villain flee to a location that features in the new adventure. The characters might be able to pursue the villain, or they might have to search for clues about where the villain has gone. |
| 3 | Introduce clues suggesting that a villain or another NPC in this adventure is part of a larger group—a group that features prominently in the new adventure. |
| 4 | Introduce a villainous group that’s featured in the new adventure by having its agents spy on or interfere with the characters’ activities. |
| 5 | Have travelers bring news of events transpiring elsewhere, leading characters toward the new adventure. |
| 6 | Give the characters a treasure that’s wrapped in mystery they’ll need to unravel in the new adventure. |
To get your players excited about and invested in your campaign, create a setting that features people and places they recognize and where their characters’ choices matter.
The following sections suggest ways to help you create a world your players will be excited to explore.
When characters form relationships—friendships, business arrangements, or even lasting antagonism—with the people and places of your setting, those people and places stick in the players’ minds. Introduce opportunities to forge these lasting relationships early and often.
Consider featuring recurring elements such as these in your game:
Community. Introduce a small group or community the characters can think of as their people, like a village, neighborhood, guild, or crew.
Home Base. Give the characters a place to call home, such as a tavern, a hideout, or a ship. Bastions, as presented in chapter 8, are ideal home bases for characters.
Prominent Friend. Create a supportive NPC whom the characters can trust and turn to when they need help, such as a local leader, an innkeeper, a patron, a retired adventurer, or a family member.
Friendly Resources. Provide experts or institutions that can assist the characters, like a temple that can provide healing or a learned sage who can help solve mysteries.
Likable Villain. Craft a villain who has at least one likable or redeeming quality the characters can appreciate—ideally a villain who isn’t preoccupied with killing or harming the characters.
As your campaign continues, introduce new people and locations, and bring back favorites from earlier in the campaign for the occasional cameo.
In the Dragonlance setting, Tanis and Tika call their local inn home: a place to see familiar faces like Fizban the Fabulous.
It’s often easier to describe people and places that are hostile or frightening than it is to detail a feature you want characters to love. How can you know what rustic scene will make a character associate a place with home or what personality quirk will remind a character of their favorite mentor? You can ask a character’s player directly, but instead consider handing over your narrative reins and letting a player describe the perfect detail.
For example, say you have a peaceful village you plan to feature across several adventures. You hope the characters will connect with the place and treat it as home. As the characters enter the community, they smell something amazing. At this point, you could describe something you think smells good or something you think a character would like. Or you can ask a player, “The smell of something amazing drifts from around the corner. What is it?” Whatever the player’s answer—cinnamon rolls from a nearby baker, firework charges being prepared for a celebration, or anything else—becomes part of the village, and the player has added an important detail to the location.
You can use player input whenever you want to pinpoint something meaningful to the characters and their players. Consider asking players questions like these whenever you want to describe something in an impactful way:
Questions such as these don’t need to draw on warm memories. Having players describe what unsettles or disgusts their characters can make menacing encounters more impactful as well. In any case, take note of interesting character details that your players share, and record them in your campaign journal, as these details might be useful inspiration for later adventures.
Adventurers are, by their nature, remarkable. Even at level 1, they perform miraculous deeds and possess qualities that set them apart from common folk. Reinforce this in your game. NPCs don’t need to gush over the characters, but the characters’ reputations as heroes, problem-solvers, or wonderworkers should be cemented early and develop throughout a campaign.
During every session, look for opportunities to make the characters feel like the stars of the story, and try to answer one or more of the following questions:
It’s easy to get caught up in a story with dramatic stakes, pitting characters against mounting threats. But every so often, at least once every three to five levels, give the characters a break—a low-stakes session or adventure that has nothing to do with the overarching plot or broader perils.
A break episode can be an opportunity for the characters to reflect on the events of the ongoing campaign, explore the nuances of the world, and further develop the relationships between them in a more relaxed setting. Give the group space to breathe, note developments you want to highlight later, then continue with your adventures.
Consider these ideas for a break episode.
Bastions Episode. The characters take a break from adventuring to tend to their Bastions (see chapter 8), with players taking one or more Bastion turns and describing what happens.
Carnival Episode. A carnival tempts the characters with magical attractions, games, and prizes. The Witchlight Carnival, described in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, is one such carnival.
Creature Comedy. The characters encounter monsters with a comedic flavor—such as flumphs, pixies, faerie dragons, or chatty mimics—in a situation that leads to mischief and humor rather than combat.
Missing Pet Episode. Someone’s pet is missing. The characters must search a settlement and connect with locals to help find it.
Shopping Episode. A friendly NPC asks the characters to help shop for someone’s birthday.
Special Event Episode. The characters are invited to a sporting event, holiday celebration, fancy dinner, or ball.
Vacation Getaway. The characters relax on a quiet beach, enjoy the comforts of a grateful noble’s villa, withdraw to a serene monastery, or while away the hours in a fairy hot spring.
Most conflicts in a D&D campaign take weeks or months of in-world time to resolve. A typical campaign concludes within a year of in-world time unless you allow the characters to enjoy lengthy periods of quiet time between adventures.
If you don’t want to track the passage of days, weeks, and months, you might instead track the passage of time using seasons and seasonal festivals. The answer to the question “When does this adventure take place?” can be as simple as “in the winter” or “during the fall harvest festival.”
Extraordinary events coinciding with certain times of year make for great adventure opportunities. Perhaps a ghostly castle appears on a certain hill on the winter solstice every year, or every thirteenth full moon is blood red and fills werewolves with a particularly strong bloodlust. The appearance of a comet in the sky might portend all manner of significant events. The festivals of the gods can serve as opportunities to launch adventures, especially if the gods themselves are involved.