Dungeon Master's Guide
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CHARACTER NAMES<br />
Part of your campaign style has to do with naming<br />
characters. It's a good idea to establish some ground<br />
rules with your players at the start of a new campaign.<br />
In a group consisting of Sithis, Travok, Anastrianna,<br />
and Kairon, the human fighter named Bob II sticks out,<br />
especially when he's identical to Bob I, who was killed<br />
by kobolds. If everyone takes a lighthearted approach<br />
to names, that's fine. If the group would rather take the<br />
characters and their names a little more seriously, urge<br />
Bob's player to come up with a more appropriate name.<br />
Player character names should match each other<br />
in flavor or concept, and they should also match the<br />
flavor of your campaign world-so should the non player<br />
characters' names and place names you create. Travok<br />
and Kairon don't want to undertake a quest for Lord<br />
Cupcake, visit Gumdrop Island, or take down a crazy<br />
wizard named Ray.<br />
CONTINUING OR<br />
EPISODIC CAMPAIGNS<br />
The backbone of a campaign is a connected series<br />
of adventures, but you can connect them in two<br />
different ways.<br />
In a continuing campaign, the connected adventures<br />
share a sense of a larger purpose or a recurring<br />
theme (or themes). The adventures might feature<br />
returning villains, grand conspiracies, or a single<br />
mastermind who's ultimately behind every adventure<br />
of the campaign.<br />
A continuing campaign designed with a theme and<br />
a story arc in mind can feel like a great fantasy epic.<br />
The players derive the satisfaction of knowing the<br />
actions they take during one adventure matter in the<br />
next. Plotting and running that kind of campaign can<br />
be demanding on the DM, but the payoff is a great and<br />
memorable story.<br />
An episodic campaign, in contrast, is like a television<br />
show where each week's episode is a self-contained<br />
story that doesn't play into any overarching plot. It<br />
might be built on a premise that explains its nature: the<br />
player characters are adventurers-for-hire, or explorers<br />
venturing into the unknown and facing a string of<br />
unrelated dangers. They might even be archaeologists,<br />
venturing into one ancient ruin after another in search<br />
of artifacts. An episodic game like this lets you create<br />
adventures-or buy published ones- and drop them into<br />
your campaign without worrying about how they fit with<br />
the adventures that came before and follow after.<br />
CAMPAIGN THEME<br />
A theme in a campaign, as in a work of literature,<br />
expresses the deeper meaning of a story and the<br />
fundamental elements of human experience that the<br />
story explores. Your campaign doesn't have to be a work<br />
of literature, but it can still draw on common themes<br />
that lend a distinctive flavor to its stories. Consider<br />
these examples:<br />
A campaign about confronting the inevitability of<br />
mortality, whether embodied in undead monsters or<br />
expressed through the death of loved ones.<br />
A campaign revolving around an insidious evil,<br />
whether dark gods, monstrous races such as the<br />
yuan-ti, or creatures of unknown realms far removed<br />
from mortal concerns. As heroes confront this evil,<br />
they must face the selfish, cold tendencies of their own<br />
kind as well.<br />
A campaign featuring troubled heroes who confront<br />
not only the savagery of the bestial creatures of the<br />
world, but also the beast within- the rage and fury<br />
that lies in their own hearts.<br />
A campaign exploring the insatiable thirst for power<br />
and domination, whether embodied by the hosts of the<br />
Nine Hells or by humanoid rulers bent on conquering<br />
the world.<br />
With a theme such as "confrontation with mortality,"<br />
you can craft a broad range of adventures that aren't<br />
necessarily connected by a common villain. One<br />
adventure might feature the dead bursting from their<br />
graves and threatening to overwhelm a whole town.<br />
In the next adventure, a mad wizard creates a flesh<br />
golem in an effort to revive his lost love. A villain could<br />
go to extreme lengths to achieve immortality to avoid<br />
confronting its own demise. The adventurers might<br />
help a ghost accept death and move on, or one of the<br />
adventurers might even become a ghost!<br />
VARIATIONS ON A THEME<br />
Mixing things up once in a while allows your players<br />
to enjoy a variety of adventures. Even a tightly themed<br />
campaign can stray now and then. If your campaign<br />
heavily involves intrigue, mystery, and roleplaying, your<br />
players might enjoy the occasional dungeon crawlespecially<br />
if the tangent is revealed to relate to a larger<br />
plot irr the campaign. If most of your adventures are<br />
dungeon expeditions, shift gears with a tense urban<br />
mystery that eventually leads the party into a dungeon<br />
crawl in an abandoned building or tower. If you run<br />
horror adventures week after week, try using a villain<br />
who turns out to be ordinary, perhaps even silly. Comic<br />
relief is a great variation on almost any D&D campaign,<br />
though players usually provide it themselves.<br />
TIERS OF PLAY<br />
As characters grow in power, their ability to change the<br />
world around them grows with them. It helps to think<br />
ahead when creating your campaign to account for this<br />
change. As the characters make a greater impact on the<br />
world, they face greater danger whether they want to<br />
or not. Powerful factions see them as a threat and plot<br />
against them, while friendly ones court their favor in<br />
hopes of striking a useful alliance.<br />
The tiers of play represent the ideal milestones for<br />
introducing new world-shaking events to the campaign.<br />
As the characters resolve one event, a new danger<br />
arises or the prior trouble transforms into a new threat<br />
in response to the characters' actions. Events.need to<br />
grow in magnitude and scope, increasing the stakes and<br />
drama as the characters become increasingly powerful.<br />
CHAPTER I I A WORLD OF YOUR OWN