Defining the Campaign

Once you know what RPG you’re going to play, you might think that it’s time to start creating characters. Unless the game’s premise is very narrowly-defined, however, you still need to set the parameters of the campaign (ongoing storyline within the game world) that you’ll be playing. You also have to decide whether your group will ignore, alter, or add to specific campaign elements.

The first step in defining your campaign is deciding where (and in some cases when) the game will take place. Most games provide a very broad setting like “modern-day America” or “Middle Earth.” It’s up to you to decide on the specific location of your campaign (Seattle or Gondor, for example). Even if the campaign will span the world, most player groups will have a base of operations, and every campaign has to have a starting point. The “when” of a campaign is usually defined by the game, but in some cases there are multiple possibilities. For example, if you’re planning a game based on Star Trek, you’ll need to decide whether the game occurs during the time of the original series, in the 24th Century of The Next Generation, or in the splinter universe of the recent movie reboot.

Once you’ve pinned down the setting of the campaign, it’s time to decide how the character group fits into the world, and what keeps them together. Despite the popularity (at least in RPGs) of the “random strangers who met in a bar” group origin, it’s incredibly contrived and rarely makes sense. In order for the story to make sense, the characters need some reason to work together, whether it’s a common goal or just safety in numbers. If you’re playing a Harry Potter game, now is the time to decide whether the characters will be Hogwart’s students, a group of aurors hunting down dark wizards,  members of the Chudley Cannons quidditch team who spend their time between matches solving mysteries, or muggles who have somehow gotten mixed up in events of the wizarding world.

The last step in defining the campaign is deciding what sorts of adventures the players want their characters to have. The broad scope of the party’s adventures will be determined by the game and group set-up, but it’s important to know what elements of the genre the players want to explore. For example, you know a super-hero team is going to fight bad guys, but it’s important to know whether the players are more interested in fighting street crime, killing Nazis, battling cosmic threats, or dealing with the soap operatic events of their civilian lives.

Now that you’ve got a solid grasp on the type of campaign you’ll be playing, you can start making characters. We’ll talk about that next time.