Anatomy of a D&D Campaign: Building a World Without Overbuilding

Anatomy of a D&D Campaign is a week-by-week look at the planning of Dungeons & Dragons sessions. While D&D 101 looks at broader topics, Anatomy of a D&D Campaign will dig a little deeper into technical elements, with discussions about encounter design, crafting unique monsters, and handling unique challenges that come up at the table.

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When I was a kid, I loved drawing maps of lost continents and strange cities. As an adult, I still do the same thing – only this time I build those worlds with the purpose of intriguing and entertaining my players. When I build a campaign, I like to think about why cities rise and fall, how countries gain their identity and why certain parts of the world are "wild and unexplored" and why others are civilized. I could spend all day weaving mystery into a map, filling it with ruins and hidden dungeons, and carefully placing little surprises for my players. But while I enjoy worldbuilding, it's also very time consuming and a bit indulgent. After all, the campaign setting is the foundation of a D&D campaign setting – the stage upon which the story takes place. Theaters are often beautiful places, but no one pays attention to the architecture once a play starts.

When one of my D&D campaigns is about ready to enter a new region or city, I like to sit down and write a brief summary of that place in addition to my typical session notes. At first, these summaries contained backstories of key NPCs that the players might encounter along with a deep and detailed history about that place and its people. However, as I grew more experienced and learned how to better manage my time, I learned how to simplify these summaries so that they include only the most relevant details – which not only decreased my planning time but also provided me with a lot more room to improvise when it comes to building a story with my players, no matter what direction they choose.

Last week, I explained the basic premise of my next D&D campaign, which will be set on the island nation of Orobos. I made Orobos an island to trap both myself and my players – there's only so much worldbuilding and history that can be put into a small-ish island, and my players can only get so distracted on such a relatively small place. The basic details of Orobos were spontaneously created during my group's Zero Session. Orobos is basically a tiny city-state, a decaying city on a tropical island, surrounded by jungles and mountains. However, Orobos needed a bit more detail for the purposes of the campaign, and my thoughts mostly turned to how such a country came to be and why it was starting to crumble.

I decided that Orobos should be a former colony of some fallen kingdom and sits between two continents. Placing it on a major trade route would allow me to incorporate the backstories of all of my player's characters no matter what they threw at me and would explain why the city lingered instead of falling into total disarray. It also gave me an out should the campaign continue beyond its initial story arc. This campaign is only meant to last 10-20 weeks, but if the players like their characters and everyone survives the initial arc, I want to have options for later.

My next questions were why Orobos thrived after it separated from its former parent state and how did eventually fall into a state of decay. The answers to both those questions were easy enough to answer, thanks to the volcano my players insisted on placing on the island. I decided that Orobos would be the only place in the world where earthfire rubies could be found. These precious stones glow a bright orange and have some sort of spark of magic that made them both valuable to collectors and to arcane magic users. For centuries, Orobos profited from the mining of earthfire rubies, to the point that they built a second city called Orobile that housed the bulk of the mining operations and its workers. But when the mines delved too deeply into the volcano, a vein of magma was tapped and unleashed a horrible series of events.

Not only did Orobos's mining operating go up in flames, the resulting eruption destroyed Orobile, killing thousands of people and wiping out Orobos's most expensive civil project in one foul swoop. With one defining historical incident, I was able to explain why Orobos fell into decline, added two distinctive geographical features (the ruins of Orobile, and the Wound – the festering crack on the side of the mountain that still spurts lava and spews ash and smoke decades later), and also gives some background on the city's current political and religious climate.

One other thing I wanted to do in this campaign is make the players feel like bad guys. While I pushed back on this actually being an "evil" campaign, I did want the players to feel a bit like criminals even as they try to save the world. Early on, I decided that Orobos would have one prominent religion and that a holy order of knights would try to snuff out any other religions or cults that popped up in the city, thus making the characters criminals simply because they followed the wrong god. I used the volcano eruption and its aftermath as the backdrop for the rise of this an authoritarian religious movement. After losing its main source of income and thousands of citizens, the city of Orobos turned to a long-neglected god, a deity known simply as the Tharntir the Stone that represents endurance, perseverance...and stagnation. Under the directions of this obscure god and its priests, the Unflinching Knights were formed, an elite band of heavily armored knights whose swords have a penchant for cutting down cultists. The Unflinching Knights will likely be a recurring problem for my players, especially if the first session goes according to plan….(but, we'll get into that topic next week.)

The other details were set up pretty quickly afterwards. Using the big island of Hawaii as a rough model, I quickly laid out a basic map of my new world using my son's crayons. In addition to Orobos and a small secondary port located further up on the same coast, I added plenty of thick jungle and three large mountains, one of which is our active volcano which already seems like a good place for a "boss fight" of some kind. After picking out a few location names from a Fantasy Name Generator, I have a small campaign setting that I'm pretty happy with.

So, now we have the basic foundation of our campaign, with answers to why the world is the way that it is. While Orobos still has a lot more details that need to be filled, we'll add to the city and its backstory as necessary, depending on the demands of the story and what holds the players' interest. The key to creating a good campaign setting is to give yourself room to build and places where you can easily add more secrets and stories later.

Next week, we'll talk about planning out the first session of the campaign and see how the players like the surprises I've cooked up for them. Let us know what you design and planning elements you want to see discussed in the comment section or find me on Twitter at @CHofferCBus to talk all things D&D!