advice on building a campaign from scratch

[Tyrant314]

So I want to build a campaign from the ground up? Are their any resources on how I shoul go about doing something like this?

I have the overall idea for the plot. All of the player characters will be joining an organization, I will be creating it from scratch as well. Than after that it will be a mission based plot for moving the story and the lvls along. Basiclly as the characters complete tasks for the organization they will move up in influence and benefits the players will recive.

So actual game play will be based around first the journey, I was planning on either finding an in depth map or creating one from the organizations headquartereds to the missions objective. I would custom make random incounters for ever area along the route as well as some encounters that would be either for diversity or to equip them. Than the the second part would be the actual mission objectives, which would run from intelligence gathering, neutralization of targets, or resource gathering (I.E. artifacts or actual materials for the organization). The finale part would be some sort of internal power struggle that will happen at higher lvls, which will be woven in over time: one as fellow initiates, two rivals, three some kind of coup d'etat.

I never have done anything of the sort, and thought it would be interesting to do for when a DM next. Thank you all for the feed back.

[Kiinyan]

The best thing to do is steal and adapt. Mythology has tons of tales of heroes, of humble and not humble origins.

[Whale_Cancer]

There have been a number of Dragon articles and even a AD&D book devoted to the subject. Some DM books, including the gamemastery guide, include sections with advice for campaign and world building.

I'm not sure how useful those are, to be honest. Good DMs are born in the fires of experience. I would read modules, adventures, campaigns, adventure paths, etc., to get an idea of the styles that exist and work from there. Your storyline is, in my opinion, a nice skeleton. How you flesh it out will determine how enjoyable the campaign will be.

For your map concerns, may I recommend hexographer. Hex based maps are very easy to adjudicate, even though they may not look as pretty as the kind of maps that Paizo usually puts out.

Edit: Oh, another just practical thing that I do is come up with lots of encounters and determine their CR roughly. I then group these for various 'chapters' of the campaign so I can easily plot out level appropriate challenges.

So, for instance, I have this grouping of encounters for a site based encounter in the campaign I am currently writing:

Tiny Fire Elemental CR 1/2
Living Topiary CR 4
Phantom Armor CR 2
2 Phantom Armor CR 4
3 Phantom Armor CR 5
Stone Idol CR 3
Distorted Shadow CR 4 (w/ 3 Tiny Fire Elementals)
Charles Mounet, Cursed with Immortality CR 7

From that, I know the players should be APL 4 or 5 at that point and I can go back and readjust encounters to make sure they are within the appropriate CR range.

[Whale_Cancer]

Tyrant314 wrote:

I will definitely make sure I heist some mythology. What iam more worried about is how to make the journey as important as the goal. As well as makeing an organization that is transparent enough to keep the characters interested in rising in the ranks.

You could have tangible rewards for rising in the ranks. 3.5 had factions. PFRG has something similar, but I am not familiar with that mechanic as it appears to be meant for PFS play.

[Tyrant314]

Dose anyone know the name of the 3.5 factions book, and were I can find the pfrg information?