Planning a Campaign: Premise and Setting

Welcome to my new series, Planning a Campaign. My next big campaign--which I'm planning to run for a year or more--is set to start in January. This means that the past few weeks has been spent actually trying to get the basic premise sketched out and set up. I figured that a glimpse into my process and how I actually put all of the various history things that I've written about into practice would be a good topic for an article series, and hopefully offer some practical recommendations for putting these sorts of things into your campaigns more directly.

Without further ado, let's get the ball rolling – we're starting essentially from scratch with a wholly new campaign.

The Premise & System

I did slightly lie when I said we're going entirely from scratch: I've had a very, very vague idea for a while now to run a campaign with a frame story of the party as journalists. Anything more complex than that has not really been developed. But I knew that running "journalism game" (as it has been drifting in and out of my notes) was on the table for... some point. Particularly given our current media landscape, the ideas of censorship, sensationalism, and partisanship all feel interesting to explore in RPG form.

Still, I never really knew how I was going to make that happen. I knew from past campaigns that D&D was not going to be the system that I would use – there's too much of a focus on combat in D&D, which my journalists hopefully should rarely be getting involved with. I wanted some rules for investigation and support for "social combat," which led me to read and explore systems like Swords of the Serpentine (a GUMSHOE, urban fantasy game), Spire: the City Must Fall (less investigation-focused, but urban fantasy like Swords of the Serpentine), Dangerous Times (exactly what I wanted in vibe but which didn't feel mechanically deep enough for the scale of campaign I wanted), and Vaesen (more investigation-oriented, less urban). For a time, I was convinced that the system was going to be Vaesen--I ran a one-shot using the system, loved it, wrote some homebrew for it as practice. But ultimately, never pulled the trigger on running the game because this wasn't supposed to be a campaign about investigating creatures in the woods; it was about being early muckraking journalists. Vaesen just never quite fit.

Finally, I stumbled upon Honor + Intrigue by Basic Action Games, an adaptation of Barbarians of Lemuria. While the emphasis on swashbuckling and dueling wasn't really a fit for my low-combat plans, I did think that the core parts of the system would work well. Careers rather than skills would keep a high level of versatility, while also encouraging my players to "be normal people" – this was a campaign about average commoners doing their jobs, not adventurers, and the system needed to support that. From Honor + Intrigue, I got into reading Barbarians of Lemuria proper, and by hacking off parts of the Honor + Intrigue that didn't really fit my vision and recombining it with elements of Barbarians of Lemuria, I have a hack of the system that I think will work and which should get polished as we play.

So, that's the system and the basic premise. Journalism game started feeling plausible. Next up: finding the history.

The History

I run nearly all my campaigns in the same world. Having this persistent world lets me feel comfortable as a DM – I know my world like the back of my hand. I know the regional cuisines. I know the political landscape. I know the fashions of each country. It is a level of familiarity that I think would be almost impossible to build for a pre-existing setting like the Forgotten Realms or if I was tailoring a setting each time I wanted to run a campaign. It gives my world depth, because I've been living in it since it was an incredibly barebones world back in 2014. Over 200 years of in-world history have occurred since then, and cultures and everything have gotten wildly more nuanced over the years. It gives my players, when they return for a second or third or fourth campaign, a built-in familiarity with the world. But needless to say, this world is my baby, and I want to make sure that adding a new campaign to the ever-evolving world won't feel drastically "wrong" or out-of-sync with what has come before.

My world is rooted in parallels to a smattering of influences from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries (or even early 19th century, in the case of my Wild West hexcrawl campaign). It is pre-industrial, but seemingly poised for industrialization. There's been some successful revolutions.

So what did newspaper culture look like in those 16th/17th/18th centuries in the real world, so that I avoid bringing 20th/21st century newspaper ethics or muckraking practices into my solidly earlier world? I had no idea. That meant that it was time for the best part of integrating history into a TTRPG: reading boring and dense history books.

The foundational text for this campaign was Inky Business by Matthew Shaw, which is a history of newspapers from the English Civil War (1640s) to the American Civil War (1865--later than my world is, certainly). Focusing on the earlier parts of the book, I took a few key takeaways for my campaign:

• Newspaper culture requires the printing press (no problem, I've established that printing presses do exist in my world in previous games).
• Newspaper culture historically evolved in Italy and Germany, where politics was highly fractured, and so it was important to know what your rival cities or principalities were up to. It spreads from there. (No problem, as there's a very disunited and chaotic peninsula in my world – newspapers start there, in the Tiefling lands, and then spread).
• Newspapers largely started as news about politics and financial market conditions. Over time, to offset printing costs (especially in places with more newspapers / a freer press culture), things like advertisements start making their way in. Still, advertisements would be an important part of the press culture by the time of my world.
• Provincial presses often plagiarized extensively, copying and excerpting articles from presses from the capital without permission. This was not only allowed, it was even encouraged: attribution that "this article is reprinted from _____" would increase the prestige of that newspaper, and it was at least one guaranteed subscription where the capital's paper might otherwise not reach.
• Censorship tended towards one of three models: loose censorship, requiring a license that if you were printing anything too hostile to the Crown, you'd lose your license; tight censorship, where only a few papers are authorized to print original works and others are only allowed to reprint news that they found relevant; and a free press, where anyone can found a newspaper and print, even being critical of the regime (the case in America, a lot of chaotic Italy, etc).

That last point is going to be pretty key for the campaign, and helped me pick a setting. I knew that I wanted my party to be able to pick and choose what they want to print, what stories they want to pursue, so tight censorship is out. And ultimately, while loose censorship would be interesting, it is also a bit of a "game over" state that I didn't want to necessarily have as an implied threat to the campaign. So free press it is.

The Setting

I knew that I wanted a free press culture, which automatically ruled out certain countries in my world. My Hex Crawl--my most recent long-form campaign--was set in pseudo-America, and so I didn't want to repeat which part of the world we were operating in. The country of "Iberawa," which I last ran a campaign in back in 2020, was the obvious choice of setting for the campaign as a result.

Iberawa recently went through a revolution, where the monarchy was deposed and a new republic was established. The immediate aftermath of that revolution was the setting for that 2020 campaign, as the party dealt with the various power players trying to shape the post-revolution national order, deal with restoration threats, etc. But now, through other campaigns, we've jumped forward to the aftermath of the cataclysmic war whose first front was the third act of that 2020 campaign. In that war, one side used zombies to devastate huge swaths of land and fight on their behalf--"the Zombie War," it is aptly named in my world notes. That war is over, but Iberawa and much of the rest of the world is dealing with the fallout, the trauma and war scars.

Iberawa, particularly, saw the loss of its leading General, and important figure in the republic--not due to the war itself, but due to a coup attempt in the aftermath of the war (a one shot that I ran). Meanwhile, bread is scarce, as half the country has been devastated by the sequence of revolution-small war-Zombie War – there's simply not enough grain. So we've got political tension over bread, a government shaken by the recent coup attempt, people dealing with the fallout of war, all of which provide fodder for journalistic explorations.

As for a more specific setting: most newspapers are local. I don't want this game to be world-spanning or even country-spanning. I want to keep this campaign local, to really flesh out the relationships between the party and the city. It was part of what drove me to look at urban fantasy games, early on, as I mentioned in the System section. On the other hand, I didn't want to set the campaign in the capital – the capital is too deep into the country to be directly affected by the bread shortages, as the farms near the capital are still intact, which removes some of the tensions I want to have as fodder for the story. Still, I wanted a big city--big enough to support the party, but also a couple other rival presses.

The result is the city of Jetsam, which I'd never fleshed out and no party has ever visited before, but which stands where the two major rivers of Iberawa meet the sea – it is the country's biggest port, the "second city" of the country. It is ruled over by a powerful and rich Count. That's pretty much all I knew about it.

Building Jetsam

I'm not going to say too much about the city as it evolved in detail, in part because I want my players (many of whom are blog subscribers) to discover the city through play rather than reading about it here. But the important part for this series is the process, and there's a clear winner in my city-building process: Ex Novo.

Ex Novo is a city-building solo RPG, where you build a map and a history of the city. It is one of my favorite solo games, and I use it a lot to flesh out the cities of my world (even just on the backend, for cities that are not likely to see the table any time soon! It is just fun to flesh out the world with more detailed and unique cities). I find that, through the emergent storytelling of the system, my cities come away not just with a map and history, but with a deep sense of culture. There's a "vibe" that I get for each city I build with the system, and I also get neighborhoods that might have distinct cultures of their own. It is really a wonderful, powerful system: I wrote a whole review of it here, and I'm thrilled to also promote that they just released a second edition with more advice on how to play and a much-improved faction system (even if it still less tied to "form of government" than I want). The second edition is the one now live on DriveThruRPG, so if you pick it up through the review--or you bought the first edition on my recommendation already--you also have access to the second edition.

Ex Novo gave me a map of Jetsam and a rich history for the city. The history I'm not going to share – it is far too long and not polished up in any pretty way, since it is my live notes from my play-through of the game. But the finished map is below. The darker neighborhoods are more densely populated.

Conclusion

With my city built, my premise laid out, my system chosen, and my historical research done, it is time to move on to actually populating that city and laying the groundwork for the conflicts that the campaign will feature. More on that in part 2 of the series, so make sure you subscribe to be sure that you don't miss it! I hope you all find this series interesting and helpful, to see me walk through my own thought process for building out a campaign.

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