As I promised last week, I’ve now run Session 0 for my new Sunday Dungeons and Dragons campaign (which I do not have a name for, yet). The group has talked through a little bit of what we’re interested in doing and while I still got the same caveats I had last week, the things I expected to fly under the radar have flown under the radar. It’s not that I’m hiding that the whole world of this game is a metaphor for climate change and any stories that take place within it must necessarily grapple with that world-defining thing, I just didn’t explicitly say it. I did talk a bit about the state of the world and how things will likely go in it, but I forgot to mention that this world isn’t really something that can be fixed as many high fantasy D&D games might expect. There’s no going back, only forward. The players might improve things for a lot of people or find a way to prevent things from getting too much worse, but the tipping point has been passed and all that remains to be see is how long it takes for the rubble to settle and who gets taken down with it. And to continue living, connecting, and building community all the while.

Which is the general framing for this campaign. As we talked through what everyone wanted to play, I tossed out a few basic suggestions for the shape of the game we’d be playing. The examples I gave were a standard adventuring game that would involve a lot of exploring the world at large and learning about what’s going on in it, a city game that would focus on factions and politics within the bounds of their warded home, and a community building game that would revolve around establishing or bettering a community in the dangerous world they’re in by linking disparate settlements together and working to protect them from outside threats. I also shared the ever-important caveat that this decision would only serve as the initial focus and that each game would include parts of the others since community building almost always includes factions and politics and any D&D game will probably include some amount of exploring. One of the players was solidly for the community building frame, another was interested in all three but listed the community building game as their number one choice, and the third was more interested in what happened within the framework than the framework itself, so we went with community building and I talked through some of the details of the first idea I had.

Technically, this isn’t an entirely new idea. I attempted to run a campaign with a similar framework once before, in a more standard fantasy world with a different set of players (well, there was one in common), but the game fell apart due to scheduling woes before it got too far, so I’m brining it back and settling it firmly in the world I’ve been putting together (which doesn’t really have a name as such, this setting, but I think of it as The Rotten so that’ll probably wind up being the name if I ever decide to pull my notes together and actually put a setting document together). An important part of this concept is that it begins with a prologue. Sometime in the world’s past (a generation or two at most), a faltering kingdom teetered on the precipice of revolution as a band of powerful adventurers returned to their home after two years away. Instead of the peaceful place they’d left behind, they find rumors of horrible crimes committed by the ruling class, a city preparing for revolution, and battle lines drawn that might now dramatically shift as the famous heroes of this city return from their travels with the items they were sent to retrieve. Will the heroes side with the commonfolk and bring down those who are abusing them, or will they side with the power and money and firmly push the commonfolk back into the place they belong? I have no idea which one my players will pick, or if they’ll toss this false dichotomy aside in favor of a different path forward, but it’ll be fun to see where things go when we start playing next month (since our next session would happen while I was on vacation, we’re skipping for the rest of the month).

It took a bit of convincing to get two of my players on board since they were worried about not being emotionally invested in this world or these people, but I reminded them that this is a prologue and that the important thing for this game is to figure out the state of this population once we start the campaign proper. Plus, they each needed to come up with some contacts their characters would have in the city, some of which wouldn’t be available as a result of the conflict between rulers and citizens, so that should help them buy in enough for this incredibly limited-run game. It’ll take maybe three to five sessions, which means we should be done with it and moving on to the main game by the end of the summer at the latest. Maybe earlier. Still, it’ll be a good way to get us all playing Dungeons and Dragons with low stakes so that everyone can settle in to our group a bit more, with the new structure and limited number of players, and adjust to the altered setting. Plus, it means I’ll have more time to work on how to run a community building game without just playing a different game more directly suited to that since this group still just wants to play Dungeons and Dragons rather than explore something else. Maybe I’ll just add a layer of another game on top of this, having it change as a result of things happening within the D&D side of things. That would be the easiest. I’ve got a good head for logistics and planning, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out. Plus, I’ve played plenty of these games on my own or listened to Friends at the Table play plenty of them, so I’ve got tons of ideas. I just have to try them out and now I’ve got a summer to work with. That should be enough time.