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The day feels oppressively hot, the sun baking all of L'Trel as the heat wave continues for at least one more day in the northern port-city. You hear a cry from nearby, and a rumbling far away. You turn to see, and you observe a cloud of flame rise and reach for the sky, as a mushroom from the wet, spring soil. People young and old alike cry out in unison around you, just now you hear the first of many wails of disbelief and screams of terror, and people begin to run for their lives from this flaming menace. You look ahead of you, and you see a woman trapped under the wheel of a now-abandoned wagon, and just then, as you move to help, it begins to rain. This rain brings no relief however, as it is not water but fire falling from the emerald and azure summer sky.

A formless form, a design that both guides the characters and is shaped by them, a fluid model of sewn-together adventures, exploits, and grand quests; a great campaign is something very Zen-like. Just enough but not too much, living in the moment yet responding to the PC's whims, a great campaign is a very tricky thing to design. I hope through this series of articles to, at least, illustrate one way in which campaigns might be made, and give a general idea about the components that make a campaign truly rise above the normal and the everyday.

Part I, Inspiration:

There is a real difference between the everyday sort of adventure and/or campaign, and one that rises to truly mythic status. Ordinary adventures get the job done - they slake our thirst for fantasy but they do not give us a story to tell, they do not make us grow or change; for this to happen the campaign must truly be legendary. Some legends are forged of heroism, some of conflict and character development, and others of slaying grand beasts and casting down foul sorcerers from their equally foul places of residence. These legends are legends precisely because they are tailored to their audience. Though the line between player and storyteller is often blurred in role-playing, there is a definite audience in mind when a Dungeon Master, Storyteller, or Game Master decides to write an adventure or a campaign, and that audience is the players. Players are the ones who respond to the world the storyteller crafts in their imaginations, they are the ones who defeat the great wyrm, or run from it; they are the ones who kill the exiled technocrat or take him in; it is their destiny they are writing in the sand, and it is your task as a storyteller to give them something legendary to write about. The methods set before us to accomplish this task have been covered in great detail, and the most common (nigh obligatory) tool in use to tell stories to our players is the adventure.

Designing an adventure is easy enough. Set up an antagonist, give him motivations to run counter to those of the PCs, and then set obstacles between the PCs and the antagonist. This is really quite simple, at most entailing an evening or two of inspired work or a week's hard labor. Adventures, though - like campaigns - begin with an idea. A necromancer doing dark things in a dark tower, for example, makes an adequate kernel for an adventure. That same idea isn't nearly sufficient to build a campaign around, however. To be clear, it isn't the scope of the idea that is lacking. A very powerful necromancer with lots of guards around his tower planning on doing something on a massive scale (but still dark, of course) makes for a wonderful high-level adventure, but still is poor fare for a campaign and cannot be called legendary. It does nothing to stretch the player's imaginations; it does nothing to change how they see their characters and the world around them; in short, while it is fun to play through, it is also meaningless in the end. To make your players rethink their world and their characters, to really affect them, the campaigns you craft must have a bit of myth in them, they must reveal something about the world through the experiences the characters engage in, something that could not be understood without the experiences, threats, challenges, and often mortal danger involved.

The myth and the legend are both tools of old, tools used by men and women when the written word was neither popular nor widely available. In role-playing, we hearken back to these times, and it is from those days we draw the techniques necessary to make our campaigns truly sparkle. To that end, the seed of a campaign must be far-reaching and meaningful to the players, it must speak to them on more than a narrative level, it must draw them in as people, and make them feel as though the place to which they have been transported could really exist, and that their characters are real people, of depth and spirit, struggling to find meaning and keep their wits about them in a world of danger and intrigue. Characters must struggle for more than imaginary land, gold, or a few magical items; they must struggle for those things real people would fight to the death for. Very few people in this world would consistently put themselves in mortal danger for the sake of one, one hundred, or even one hundred thousand gold. Those same people, given a fight worth fighting, would gladly lay down their lives for the sake of something worthwhile. To save those they love, to discover the truth about their past, to take hold of the power and influence that they have worked their whole lives for; these are the aims of real men and women, and these are the things they would lay down their lives for.

Knowing a necromancer is doing dark things far away is poor motivation to defeat his fell hordes and cast him down from his seat of power. Seeing a colleague and a friend slowly fall to a darkness consuming him from the inside out however, and knowing this necromancer is responsible, drives men to become heroes. Seeing your brother, once a bright, happy, and kind man turned to darkness by this foul sorcerer, drives men into mortal danger time and time again. It isn't for love of money that legends are made; those who love money are mere mercenaries. In role-playing, storytellers seek to craft true heroes from committed men and women, to elevate them - and the legends they struggle through - to mythic status, to be told for generations to come.

Campaigns shouldn't focus solely on narrative, drama, and awesome fight scenes, though these are fabulous complements to the rhetorical objective of a campaign. It is this rhetorical objective that drives the meaning of the campaign into the hearts of the players, and will have them coming back for more. It is the questions a campaign provokes, rather than the answers, which will hold the players' interest, and motivate them to role-play to the best of their ability. If nothing else, it is this questioning of the self that makes humans special, and it is often lack of these questions that makes characters incomplete and unrealistic. The storyteller must attend to and inspire these questions in his players if he wishes them to expand their style and their skill as role-players. The kernel of a campaign must begin thusly, with something that players, as human beings, can connect with. To do this in game, the storyteller must attend to the meaning of the campaign.

This is not the sole component of a legendary campaign, however. Apart from the rhetoric of a campaign there is narration, drama, and the ultimate conclusion. As integral to a legendary campaign as an effective rhetorical objective, the narrative of the campaign and the story goals will be focused upon in the next segment of "The Zen of Campaign Design."