Stealing Liberally For My New Campaign

There are quite a few things going on right now that are preventing me from turning this into a full length post. One of those things is the construction of this, which you can see if you’re coming to Charm City Gameday on June 9th. Then there’s the Two Page Mini Delve I’m prepping for (hopefully) Friday.

I’m also planning a summer long campaign for the guys in my D&D group. They’re home from college, so I’m hoping to do a tight story arc that will wrap up by the time they go back to school. Just this past Sunday, we had a character creation session where we rolled some dice to determine inter-party relationships. I stole the ideas for inter-party and NPC relationships from Sly Flourish and Rob Donoghue, respectively.

Below is the result of all the dice rolling and table referencing; making a relationship web was the best way we could think of to make sense of it all. (Click for big…)

This is a great web, and I think it doesn’t even need to be this intertwined. Just a few relationships to tie the party together would be great. If I were to do this again, I might have everyone roll on the “Fiasco” table, and then CHOOSE one or two relationships to keep. Also, if I wanted to simplify the NPC relationships, I’d probably do one player-created NPC, and then two more relationships that the players have to choose out of the pool.

I’m also stealing, almost wholesale, the campaign idea from DMG 42. I’m having each player design their own island, and even gave them the option to DM for the group when the party goes to their island. This relieves me of lots of prep, and will even give me the chance to play! Unheard of!

The internet is probably the best thing to happen to RPGs ever. I know there’s a lot of trolling and vitriol that happens, but there are also lots and lots of resources and ideas at our fingertips that would have been unheard of 20 years ago. And that’s an awesome thing. So here is my encouragement to you – steal those ideas, unabashedly. Make your campaign awesome by crowdsourcing the creation and running of your game. We’ll all have better games for it.