After more missed than played sessions, we’ve finally moved into the preparation process for the full campaign I’m still tentatively calling “The Rotten.” Given that we wound up focusing the game on building and protecting a community rather than far-flung adventures or something like that, the name feels less apt than it would for pretty much any other campaign idea I had. This still takes place in the world I’m calling “The Rotten,” so I won’t change the name or tags until I come up with something better, in which case I’ll go back and fix all my other posts. Gotta keep your tags organized! Other than settling on a general idea, I rolled stats with the two players who were available, talked through character ideas, made some modifications and flavorful tweaks to existing classes, and then ran through the Heroic Chronicle with both players. If you don’t know, the Heroic Chronicle is a system included in the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount Dungeons and Dragons book that is designed to help settle characters into the world of Exandria, of Critical Role. I mostly use it to give my player characters a few built-in hooks in the homebrewed world we’re using, a few extra tidbits of power, and some interesting secrets since rolling on a table is a great way to prompt that kind of thinking in people who maybe aren’t as practiced at it as I am (and that absolutely helps even if they ARE as practiced as I am). I also do a lot of soliciting my players’ opinions, offering ideas, and tweaking the results until we’re all happy, rather than rely entirely on rolls because the players often have at least a concept that they want to stick with and some of those results have VERY specific implications for characters. At the end of the process, I get some built-in hooks, my players get some fun secrets to keep from each other in order to build drama, and everyone gets at least a few interesting little power-ups. Everybody wins.

The main reason I use the tool is to help my players get some kind of thematic placement in the world we’ll be playing in. I’m mostly interested in creating a story that at least somewhat circles around my players. After all, they ARE the main characters. There’s a reason we, the players, are focusing our cameras on them. If they weren’t somehow tied into the major goings-on of the world around them, we’d instead be focused on people who were. Having all of that groundwork laid also helps me move my worldbuilding work from the general “large scale details” to the much more focused “immediate surroundings.” Placing my players somewhere in the world, with relationships to people and places beyond the scope of the place we’ve chosen to start, gives me anchor points to build the world around. It gives me ideas for who else might be out there, what those people might be doing, and what other people in the world care about. Sure, I can come up with a lot of that stuff myself, but involving my players in it gives the end result a greater depth and a wider variety, which coincidentally makes it much less likely that I’ll accidentally make something my players (myself included) won’t enjoy.

For this group, since we did a prologue before starting the campaign proper, I already had a bunch of stuff to build the world around. Doing the Heroic Chronicle for this group built on that, adding a different flavor of detail to mix in and giving me extra fixed points to work from. Sure, only one player character is tied back to the prologue in any way right now, but there’s still plenty of room to develop or even discover ties. That work won’t end once all the characters are created and session one starts. It’ll only be just beginning, then. Especially because I made it clear that, even with our game’s map centered on this little community they’ll be developing, that Rotten Haven is still somewhere within our maps’ borders. It will be a problem for sure, just not an immediate one. There will be some protection due to distance, but it is still entirely conceivable that problems might leave The Rotten Haven and work their southward and eastward to where our new player characters find themselves. Plenty of opportunity for further complication, especially given some of the stuff people wound up with after we finished the Heroic Chronicle. I’m VERY excited to explore it.

One of the difficulties with all this, though, is that I’m starting them all at level one. Sure, I plan to quickly move them through the early levels, but it is incredibly possible that one or more of them will die before they get to level five. This is a dangerous place, this world of The Rot, and there’s only going to be three of them unless they make friends with a bunch of adventurer-type NPCs. While most of my experience is in altering Dungeons and Dragons to work for much larger groups, I’ve had a bit of practice running for smaller ones by now. I think I’ll be able to pull it off pretty well, but that’ll depend a lot on my players. If they have the right distribution of abilities and no obvious lacks, then I should at least be able to stumble through the worst of my mistakes. If there’s major gaps, though, then I might need to recalibrate with a useful NPC companion or two. This will also shift if they wind up focusing on exploration or roleplaying rather than looking for combat every single session. Knowing this group, though, I expect there’ll be a lot of “yeah, attacking me is a reasonable response to the question I just asked you” from at least one of the player characters–not in a rude, transgressive, or unpleasant way, just in a this-world-will-fight-you kind of way. It’ll be interesting to see how this stuff all shakes out.

For our next session, in just under a week as you’re reading this, we’ll be playing a game of the Quiet Year to insert another fixed point in this game’s timeline. I’ve already started to get a feel for the Sylum (the type of community they’ll be protecting in this world setting), thanks to character creation, so I’m inserting a bit of a wrench into the system by having us play through this community’s first year after fleeing the ritual of Lord Besk so we can see where the community was after its first year and then figure out how it must have changed to get from that to the place described by my players’ characters. Before then, I still need to work with my final player so we can get their character figured out in some way or another. And I also need to consider whether or not I want to add a fourth player to the game, if only to help balance things given that this is going to be much more of a “resources” type game than I originally planned and I’ve seen just how bad those kinds of games can go when you don’t have enough players to help fill the warehouses. It can get really rough, through no fault of my players, if there just aren’t enough people to roll for resources or carry things back to the Sylum… If my players die or their community falls apart, I want it to be a result of their choices and actions rather than some sad pre-determined outcome because there’s no way for the math to work out positively.