Welcome to Making the Campaign: my goal is to help fellow campaign designers design a successful campaign. For the purposes of this discussion “campaign design” refers to crafting a setting and series of encounters and/or adventures using the 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules which will provide a satisfying long-term gaming experience for your group. I think these tips might be useful to those who use published settings, or those who play games other than D&D 4E, but I want my frame of reference to be clear to my readers.

Campaign design requires a lot of work and nothing discourages a Dungeon Master more than seeing their design work wasted on a failed campaign. One way to avoid a failed campaign is to think about your design in terms of The Seven C’s: Comprehension, Conception, Collaboration, Construction, Consummation, Continuation and Culmination.

Comprehension means understanding the game you want to play, the group with which you’ll play and the amount of work involved in designing and running a campaign.

Conception is the development of a “big picture” for your campaign and/or setting. This idea isn’t limited to designing a classic high fantasy campaign that rides the Plot Railroad from point A to Point B: conception means defining the major ideas and game elements that will guide your work.

Collaboration has long been absent from campaign design and is establishing a strong presence in the world of RPG design. It can be as simple as making sure that your campaign doesn’t zig when anything other than zagging will ruin your group’s fun, or as complex as designing a shared game world. The important thing is to make sure that your campaign isn’t built to fail because you never talked to your players.

Construction is what most gamers think of as the core of campaign design: documenting the game world, writing the adventures and producing important player handouts are all parts of construction. The amount of work involved depends on your strengths as a DM and the expectations of your group, but Construction is all about putting the pen to paper and preparing to play.

Consummation includes creating characters, introducing players to your campaign and getting your first session off the ground. Again, the amount of work required here will vary from campaign to campaign, but campaigns that get off to a good start stand a greater chance of surviving than those that don’t.

Continuation is what you do to keep the campaign alive. It involves making adjustments to your design as the game is played, defining clear effects of player characters actions and keeping track of what happens. This is where the Dungeon Master’s skills as a  “game-runner” are tested and honed, and where players experience the satisfaction of overcoming challenges, improving their characters and immersing themselves in the game world.

Culmination is often, but not always, the end of a campaign. It can also be the major milestone that lets the players know that they’ve entered a new phase of the game. Without culmination players might always wonder about what might have happened in a campaign that was cut short, or they might just wonder why they gather around the same table every week without experiencing any major outcomes.

In the coming weeks I’ll share more thoughts on each of The Seven C’s and share notes on how this approach to campaign design effects my own ongoing work. If nothing else, I hope that I can keep Making the Campaign from resembling a season of Making the Band.