How to WRITE a D&D Campaign

Summary

Crafting a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) campaign can be daunting, yet exciting. Shiny Gold Dice offers an insightful guide for beginners, emphasizing the importance of TLC - tone, length, and composition - in creating cohesive and engaging stories. Highlighting the pitfalls of over-scripting, the video stresses the freedom and creativity D&D offers, encouraging Dungeon Masters (DMs) to draft a flexible narrative with inciting incidents, hooks, and conclusive endings. Throughout, it suggests balancing combat, role-playing, and exploration to satisfy both dramatic and whimsical players, making campaigns enjoyable and unique.

Highlights

• TLC stands for tone, length, and composition, essential for a coherent campaign. 📏
• Scripting too much can hinder the fluid nature of D&D; leave room for player influence. 🎨
• The three narrative essentials: inciting incident, hook, and ending. 🔄
• Player-driven decisions are fundamental; create open-ended scenarios. 🔄
• Balancing role-play, combat, and exploration enhances player engagement. ⚖️

Key Takeaways

• Begin with TLC: Determine tone, length, and composition to align player expectations and avoid disconnect. 🎭
• Avoid detailed scripting; embrace collaborative storytelling by allowing players' actions to drive the narrative. 📜
• Focus on creating a fun journey with a clear inciting incident, engaging hook, and satisfying ending. 🌟
• Balance gameplay elements to cater to diverse player styles like combat enthusiasts and role-players. ⚔️
• Improvisation is key—allow unexpected player decisions to shape and enrich the adventure. 🎲

Overview

Embarking on your D&D campaign writing journey can feel intimidating, but Shiny Gold Dice cuts through the clutter with practical advice. This guide starts with understanding the TLC of your campaign—tone, length, and composition—to create a world that resonates with your players' expectations, ensuring everyone remains engaged and invested from start to finish.

Writing a D&D campaign isn't about scripting every detail but allowing flexibility for player interaction to shape the storyline. Shiny Gold Dice advises focusing on broad plots with key events and outcomes, such as inciting incidents, hooks, and climactic endings. Let your players drive the narrative, surprising you with their choices and improvisation, which brings the game to life beyond the playbook.

Balancing gameplay elements is crucial in making campaigns enjoyable for every player. By mixing combat, role-playing, and exploration, you cater to different player preferences, keeping sessions exciting and dynamic. Shiny Gold Dice emphasizes crafting memorable experiences by starting small, improvising along the way, and having fun with the creative process. After all, that's what D&D is all about!

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Writing a D&D Campaign The chapter titled 'Introduction to Writing a D&D Campaign' delves into the initial challenges and apprehensions one might face when beginning to write a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It contrasts the varied quality of officially published D&D campaigns and acknowledges the added difficulty of crafting your own story without professional resources like a focus group or writer's room. The narrator empathizes with this struggle, drawing from personal experience accumulated over thousands of hours in the tabletop gaming space.
• 01:00 - 03:30: Understanding TLC: Tone, Length, and Composition This chapter focuses on an important aspect of writing a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign: understanding the concept of TLC, which stands for Tone, Length, and Composition. The author shares personal insights from past failures, emphasizing the idea that valuable lessons often come from mistakes. The chapter aims to guide readers through the initial stages of developing a campaign, encouraging them to apply the TLC approach for crafting a successful narrative.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Components of a D&D Story This chapter discusses the key elements of creating a D&D story, particularly focusing on the importance of tone. It highlights the need to consider player expectations and choose an appropriate tone for your game, whether it be light-hearted or dark. Maintaining a consistent tone is crucial to prevent player disconnection and maintain engagement.
• 04:00 - 05:30: Inciting Incident In this chapter titled 'Inciting Incident', the focus is on the importance of character and story alignment. It discusses how a serious character may not fit well in a light-hearted adventure, whereas a humorous character might feel out of place in a darker, more intense storyline. Similarly, the length of a story influences the complexity of the characters involved. Short stories benefit from simpler characters, as this allows for easy absorption and connection by the audience within the limited timeframe. Overall, finding harmony between tone, length, and character depth is critical for story cohesion and engagement.
• 05:30 - 08:00: Creating the Hook Creating the Hook: The chapter explores the importance of building compelling narratives and character arcs within personal stories and epic games. It highlights how different characters, such as Brimble the fartman, might fit within various storytelling formats. The narrative discusses the expectations of players in lengthy games, emphasizing that epic characters require space to evolve. It cautions against limiting character development to short spans, as this can lead to player dissatisfaction. Overall, the chapter underscores the balance needed between character development and storytelling across varying game lengths.
• 08:00 - 09:00: Crafting the Ending The chapter titled 'Crafting the Ending' focuses on the concept of composition in the context of running a game for friends. It emphasizes that composition refers not to game mechanics like party composition, but to the preferences and styles of the players themselves. The chapter provides an example scenario where two players enjoy roleplaying and forming realistic relationships with NPCs, but a third player only appreciates the combat aspect and views roleplay as unnecessary. The chapter suggests that if one player's approach conflicts with others, it might be necessary to address the issue directly.
• 09:00 - 15:30: Story Elements and Examples The chapter discusses the importance of aligning the tone and play style of a game with the players' understanding and character creation. It emphasizes the value of ensuring players are aware of the game's story focus to minimize conflict. For game designers, especially those writing for clubs or publication, the chapter suggests maintaining a balanced composition of combat, role-play, and exploration. This balance should cater to both power gamers and role-players, with complex bosses but weak minions for varied combat experiences and concise role-playing sequences.
• 15:30 - 20:00: Conclusion and Final Thoughts The final chapter discusses the importance of purposeful exploration in campaign creation, emphasizing that it should provide clear benefits for players and contribute to overall satisfaction. The author encourages creativity and practical design considerations, urging creators to proceed with writing after thorough preparation. There is a stark reminder to avoid over-scripting campaigns with predetermined plot points and NPC interactions, suggesting those who prefer a tight narrative consider writing a novel instead.

How to WRITE a D&D Campaign Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I don't blame you for looking for a guide for this. The concept of writing your first D and D campaign is a paralyzing one. Even the officially published D&D campaigns are a mixed bag with some being excellent and others being not that. Writing your D&D story, be it for publishing or for your group of friends, is even harder, as you likely don't have access to a focus group or a writer's room. And I would know that struggle as over my thousands of hours in the tabletop space, I have
• 00:30 - 01:00 written some real garbage. However, you do learn more from failure than from success. So, if you want to write your own D and D campaign, then let this failure give you some advice. [Music] Before we even begin to write our narrative, we need to give our fledgling idea for a campaign some TLC. Despite what you may think it means, the acronym actually stands for tone, length, and
• 01:00 - 01:30 composition. Consider your players and their expectations for what they're getting in for, and then apply these steps. Firstly, tone. What is the tone of the game you want to run? D and D as well as many role-play systems allow for a diverse selection of tones a story can have. These can range from silly and light-hearted to edgy and featuring guns. The story should keep a general consistent tone. Otherwise, you risk player apathy and disconnection. What I mean is, if a player doesn't understand your story's tone and therefore makes a
• 01:30 - 02:00 serious and cold-blooded veteran character for your silly adventure about politics and romance, they're not going to connect with the story very well. Similarly, a bard who only makes goofy puns and shags everything they meet won't be finding fulfillment in a hardcore dungeon crawler featuring evil liches and dragons. You know, unless secondly, length. How long is your story? For similar reasons to tone, length determines what kind of characters will be playing your adventure. A short 4 session long rompt benefits simple characters whose
• 02:00 - 02:30 personal narrative doesn't require a long game and lots of time to reach a conclusion. However, the short and sweet Brimble the fartman character might grow old and stale in a dramatic epic surrounded by more serious characters. Consider that in a long story, you'll likely want to leave some space for player backstory influences, as they'll naturally expect such things from a lengthy game. If your player's epic veteran character only has three sessions to work out all their personal trauma, you've probably misled your player, and they'll likely leave the game with a sense of frustration. And
• 02:30 - 03:00 then lastly, composition. This is the hard one and applies mostly to those of you running a game for your friends. In this case, composition does not mean party comp and classes and races. It means your players themselves. If two of your players love roleplay and having a realistic relationship with NPCs, but your third player loves only violence and considers roleplay over skill checks as pointless fluff, the game is a very noticeable drag. If one player acts counter to how the other members do, consider being direct with them about
• 03:00 - 03:30 their tone and play style of your game. Ensuring that they understand what this story is going to center around and making sure they make a fitting character will make everything run a whole lot smoother. It's going to lead to much less conflict at your table. If you're writing a game for a local club or for publishing, ensure you've got a consistent balance of combat, role-play, and exploration with room for both the power gamers and the role players to get their moment in the sun. Complex bosses, but with weak minions to allow for a whole range of combatants. Role-play that doesn't go on for too long. An
• 03:30 - 04:00 exploration that provides benefit for completion instead of merely thematic reasons will hopefully keep everyone happy. And now that we've done our TLC, we can actually write the bloody thing. Now, I'm going to say something that might be hard for some of you to hear, so I apologize for that in advance. If you want to script your campaign beat forbeat with important and awesome NPCs and really dramatic moments that are crucial to the narrative of the game, you should stop now and go write a
• 04:00 - 04:30 novel. That is not what Dn D is about. It's far more collaborative. What a D&D campaign actually consists of is loosely planned winding paths that go from your start to your ending. And the road there should be paved with fun things for your players to do. Now, your NPCs might be awesome and plot significant, and your dramatic reels might be exciting and shocking. But if your players don't latch on to them, then your whole game gets derailed like that. And if you've only watched online D&D shows, consider that these are made with express intent to be watched and are made by
• 04:30 - 05:00 professionals. Your game likely is just for your friends or for your local gaming club, and therefore things will be a bit messier, and that's fine. Things won't play out as scripted, so don't try to force it to be. Your players actually have a whole lot more control over your story than you might think. Sure, you built the road and provided the wagon, but your players are the ones driving the horse, and sometimes that's right into a brick wall. So, save yourself trying to anticipate their every move by writing 7 billion chapters of world building, and
• 05:00 - 05:30 instead focus on these three elements. And yeah, we do things in threes around here. It's good for my ADHD. What a story truly needs is your inciting incident, your hook, and your ending. For the sake of example, I'm going to use my recently written module, Kon's Kingdom, to frame this part of the guide. So, let's start with this inciting incident. A story can only happen because something changes about the world, as a world at peace generally doesn't make for a good adventure. That is, unless you're doing a like a tavern building campaign where you start a little tavern and hunt monsters for
• 05:30 - 06:00 supplies. You know, you could kill slimes for drink ingredients. You can corral and raise orox for meat. And you Oh my god, this is really good. Write this down. Your inciting incident should be the catalyst for what the party needs to go out into the world and do. And it's the foundation for why this story needs heroes. In my story, the titular cloud giant Kon has come down from his heavenly domain to dominate and enslave the disorganized nation of Asperia, a nation of many species and cultures. He quickly becomes king of the land due to his size, intellect, and ability to solve people's problems. But once in
• 06:00 - 06:30 power, he quickly straightens out the disorganized and independent peoples of his kingdom by instilling himself as a dictator and leads an army of powerful legionaries to conquer every corner of the nation before they have the chance to retaliate. Ooh, you're odd. Yeah, that seems like a big enough act of evil to set an adventure rolling. One where the world probably needs some heroes. Always make sure your party is needed and not just there because they'll feel useless if they don't have a reason to act. Next would be the hook. How does
• 06:30 - 07:00 your game start and how does it drag your players into the narrative to get them invested? You can't always expect your players to immediately invest themselves, so you should always give them a reason. It could be that a dragon attacks their home, a friend of the party gets murdered, or a wealthy businessman hires them to solve a mystery in exchange for countless gold pieces. I'll pay you. Pay me what? Money. Done. For my party, they started off in a remote village far from the conquered city capital in a place mostly untouched by the king's dictatorship. As such, people don't leave the safety of
• 07:00 - 07:30 the village for fear of the dark legionaries beyond their borders. In my brief, to add some motivation, I suggested party members should have loved ones or mentors who have died in Kiron's bloody war. The party are currently living a life of peace, but they're isolated and unable to live freely, and the rest of the world is still under the thumb of the giant. Once every few years, the village elder allows a group of people to leave the remote hideway if he deems them suitably prepared for the hardships beyond their walls. And when they succeed and a fire has been lit under them, they embark out to hopefully put an end to this vile dictatorship. Some hooks, like this one,
• 07:30 - 08:00 work best if you've done your TLC and informed your players that there are some ideal archetypes that you could be playing. For this example, they were people who were idealists, people with ambition, someone who wants to make a difference. You know, classic hero types. And the last part is the ending, which is honestly the simplest part. If you've got a big bad evil guy, the ending is most likely kill that guy. If your story is a great mystery, then the ending is probably to solve it and prove it to the world at large. Silent green
• 08:00 - 08:30 is people. And if your cozy tavern really needs to purchase the land they operate on to become fully independent, then the ending is likely when they gather 10,000 gold pieces from their revenue. And with that preparation out of the way, it's time to actually do the story. Here we plan the things for your player to do, the people they might meet, and the hardships they might endure. Remember to not go into too much detail about what must happen. Instead, try making things that have happened or that
• 08:30 - 09:00 could happen. This gives players a lot more agency and means that if they go down a track that you've not prepared, you're not just sitting there with your thumb up your ass. To show you exactly how this works, I'm going to keep using Kon's Kingdom and I'm going to guide you through it every step of the way. So, my TLC for my game is that I want a 20 session long story with dark but optimistic tones for a group of role-play and combat loving players who like playing classic hero types. Since we already know my inciting incident, how's that going to affect this generic fantasy world and create stories the players are going to enjoy doing? Well,
• 09:00 - 09:30 let's start with a combat ccentric section. Let's make a mini boss and some challenges to get to him. Perhaps an evil legionary general was humiliated by some proud forest elves. In response, he burned down their sacred woodland and took prisoners deep inside the grove. One of these prisoners could be an NPC with some vital information the party wants if they need some motive to kill this prick. Or perhaps he's even an adversary from one of the players backstories. The party must then brave the burning woodland to bring him down, perhaps fending off confused and angry nature spirits, crafting some equipment
• 09:30 - 10:00 to help them breathe the smog, and saving some woodland creatures from death along the way. Also, with these characters that you know are going to be fought and killed, make them as evil as you like. Make them the kind of person that spits at kids and kicks cats. You know, if he's going to die, you might as well make him an evil bastard. Next, something more role-play heavy. A mining town with attacks levied against them by the giant king have rendered the town a miserable place. The town's mayor promises liberation from the iron grip of the legionaries if his people all
• 10:00 - 10:30 obey him unquestioningly. And although he claims it is for the greater good, his methods become extremely cruel. Perhaps there's a rebel faction fighting against him and some misguided loyalists on his side. The party has the opportunity to make some money if they choose one side or the other. To throw a spanner in the works or add some extra depth, consider making a backstory character or favorite NPC one of the rebels fighting against his tyranny or even a shocking sympathizer. Then an adventure section. Now, I really like dragons, so let's do that. A Frosty
• 10:30 - 11:00 Mountain region is home to a white dragon's lair. You are allowed to write things just cuz you think they're cool and you enjoy them, as long as you make it fun for your players. Speaking of my players, they're like level four right now, so a fully grown dragon is going to eat them alive. So perhaps this dragon's in a turf war with a hag or a scheming vampire. And as such, the dragon would likely leave the party alone to focus on its actual adversary. The party now must not only survive a cold and inhumane wilderness, but also avoid this constant
• 11:00 - 11:30 turf war raging throughout the mountains. These three examples are very basic, but that's by design. If you overprep for your game, you leave less room for that most brilliant part of Dn D. Improvisation. Your players should have the freedom to think of their own ways to tackle the obstacles you've put in front of them. A riddle may have only one correct answer, but smashing the door with a hammer, teleporting through the keyhole, or intimidating the sentient doorway should always be options that are unspoken but available. Allowing yourself to be surprised as the
• 11:30 - 12:00 players advance your campaign in ways that you never expected is a joy and a privilege. Do not deprive yourself of it. All right, so far what we've prepared should last us about 10 sessions. Perhaps more of the players like to yap a lot. So to reach those sweet 20 sessions, we can add things such as a town that turned to necromancy to survive tries to recruit the players. A festival of peace has been infiltrated by a spy seeking to kill a village elder. And a former general of the army seek redemption in a town that does not forgive him. And eventually the party
• 12:00 - 12:30 will infiltrate the lair of and do battle with the BBEG. Win or lose, the story ends and they come out of it as either martyrs who sparked a rebellion or as heroes who slew the giant king. We improvise an epilogue together showing how their actions have impacted the world. And then the story just kind of ends. Notice how in this whole plan so far, I have included no specific D&D lore or exact monster stat blocks because to start writing a campaign, you don't actually need any of that. You can absolutely write a campaign because you
• 12:30 - 13:00 think the new animal lord stat blocks are awesome. But to start writing a campaign, all you need to know is where you start and where you're going. There's much less you need to write than you'd think. A D and D campaign really is half the bits you write and half the bits you leave blank. Open-ended ideas the DM and the players can tackle together on the fly often lead to the best experiences. Give them a story, absolutely, but let them choose the path. So, this entire guide boils down
• 13:00 - 13:30 to this. Do your TLC, plan your inciting incident, hook, and ending. and then build a fun journey from the start to the finish. Learning how to properly utilize monsters, when to ask for skill checks, how to manage XP, merchants, lore, and balancing all your sheets are all things that just come with time. No matter if it's a big boss to fight, an intriguing mystery to solve, or a calamity to prevent, you just need to make your foundation and then slowly build it up until it's complete. Like building a tavern or a lasagna. To leave
• 13:30 - 14:00 you on a final note, here's something important to remember. You're probably not one of these famous internet DMs and you're also probably not Watsy, though. Hi, if you're watching. Don't write to try and be like them. Write your story and then let your players infuse it with parts of themselves and create something unique. The best way to learn is just to start. At the end of the day, Dn D is just a [ __ ] game, right? Games are meant to be fun. So, don't concern yourself with writing the next 10 out of 10 certified, fresh, overwhelmingly
• 14:00 - 14:30 positive, reviewed story for the ages. As long as you commit to the idea of writing something that's going to be fun to let you and the people that play with you have a good time, you don't need anyone to tell you how to write a good D&D campaign. Ah, [ __ ] That makes this video pointless. Uh, fine. Mechanics video soon. Goodbye.