So I’m still not at 100%, which puts a bit of pressure to my plan of outlining the campaign until end of november. Makes me glad that I didn’t promise more, because so I might be still able to meet the deadline.

I’ve already talked about my participation in John Four’s adventure design workshop and while I still have to work on that adventure I wanted to do then, I can also use what I learned there to work on my campaign for the RPG Blog carnival. At least it will add a bit of structure to what I’m doing and that can never be a bad thing. I’m probably not going through the whole process, as I want to get finished by the end of the month at least with an outline of the campaign, but as I can still use the work done afterwards, I try to stay at least close to what John suggested in his course.

So the starting point would be my First Move, which normally would be a map of the starting village or a backdrop detailing the location and its inhabitants. This time though, I think I made my First Move with deciding to participate in the Carnival and chosing the article I want to follow up. And as the First Move mainly serves to get the brain juices flowing, I think that I can let it stand this way at least for the time being (I might have to go back to that step when I actually start with the design of the adventures). Does not mean that I won’t start working on that location this month if time allows for it.

The second thing to consider is the Razor of my campaign, which is a tool to define the basic ideas behind it, so that the designers have an easy way to decide if a new idea fits into the project or if it doesn’t. Now it’s no secret that the movie Dragonheart became a huge inspiration for my campaign when I recognized certain similarities between my ideas and what happens in that film. It has the evil king, it has a dragon whose fate is bound to that of that king, it has a rebellion, it has even a lot of forest scenes. It also has a low-magic approach, that I really appreciate, and while I won’t go sooo low magic, it is certainly something I’m having in my mind regarding my own setting.

(As an aside: I still have to fiddle with a lot of things mechanically so for this exercise I’m just using the normal Pathfinder approach, but I’ll probably scale back to a lower power level in the actual design.)

The campaign will also contain a certain amount of kingdom building and (h)exploration, so I keep coming back to Paizos Kingmaker AP, especially as it also has fey and yes, those will play a role as well.

Part of the AP will also be the Rebels trying to forge alliances against the evil king, and as I’m a bit at a loss for a good reference on that, I’ll just use the penultimate adventure from Paizo’s Savage Tide AP back then in Dungeon, “Enemies of my Enemy” by Wolfgang Baur, where the PCs traveled through the planes to find allies against Demogorgon. Now there won’t be any planeshopping in my campaign (my brain cries immediately that that might not be true completely), but I like the evocative title of that adventure, so I’ll just use it nonetheless, so my Razor in the end looks like:

Dragonheart meets Kingmaker meets “Enemies of my Enemy”.

And the third thing I add today is the What If, the premise of my campaign. And with all I’ve already said about the campaign, it seems clear what it will be about: What if the king turns evil and starts to suppress his people to a point where this suppression becomes unbearable?

Now let’s end this post with talking about the structure of my campaign. I’m a big fan of the Pathfinder Adventure path format, so this is what I plan to go for for starters. This said, that would make the single parts of my campaign into really big adventures themselves, with big wordcount and all, so maybe I’ll separate those big parts into 2 (or three) smaller adventures which would probably make it easier for me to actually finish some stuff. Thinking about it, I could also use the old format from the pages of the old Dungeon magazine, where one AP would be printed over the course of 12 issues (11 in the case of Shackled City, though in the hardcover, a 12^th part would be added later on). I might actually prefer that approach, as I want to use the full level range up to 20 and it might be just that bit easier to do if I don’t have to cram all the stuff into 6 adventures like with the Paizo APs.