The Campaign Builder's Guild

We run a cooperative campaign of 3-4 DM's in the ADMC world, so we design things in several Wikis - one is public to the players, one is for rules work, and a third for plot. Many ideas spring up during a phone conversation or chat, and we immediately jot it down to a "new ideas" section in the Wiki. These are later elaborated on together.

More than tools, I think the sharing of ideas and designing things together has added immense depth to the ADMC world and made the campaigns memorable.

ADMC Setting

I wouldn't say success is just about some general "ggodness" of the DM or players, it's about the match. One way to achieve this, as LordVreeg suggested, is to find suitable players. The other way (if there is no extra supply of players) is to suit the players you have. Of course there may not be a match and the players like different style than the DM, in which case you have to either dump the players and find new ones, or change your style. In longer-running groups I suppose the styles may become compatible over time (I have experience of 18 years with the same group, and there are still big differences so don't hold your breath...)

There seems to be no universal, objective criteria for a successful setting - anything can be a success as long as it matches the group's tastes. That's what makes it so hard to create a universally successful published setting, it needs to fit very different styles of play.

What makes a series of sessions a campaign is indeed the plot. The separate elements are not that tightly related: you have the setting, the encounters, and the plot. The encounters can be memorable (as tactical challenges, for example) even without any underlying setting or plot, but the plot seems to me to be the main defining element of a campaign.

In my experience the issue of who maintains the plot is somewhat a shared issue. The best two campaigns our group has played both started as very loosely (if at all) connected encounters, but the DM(s) gradually collected the loose ends of those encounters and gathered comments and revelations the players had made about their characters and started feeding them back into the plot. This started to work wonderfully after the slightly slow start and made the events be very personal to the characters (and players).

So, what this in essence means is that it may be very difficult to plan a good campaign entirely in advance. The only case where I see it possible is if the same party of characters continues from a previous campaign, so the "adhesive surface", so to speak, towards the characters already exists. It's close to the advice of avoiding railroading, but not entirely that simple - it's not letting the players do whatever they want, but to provide a plot rich with personal tie-ins for the characters.

Ooo... Lovecraft... one of my favorite subjects. Jürgen has a good point in allowing inconsistency, since when you look at real world history it is full of such - and as much as I like consistent background, many made-up worlds end up being too consistent and too organized. While this may be good from the gaming and rules perspective it does make the setting look less organic and remind that is is not "real".

Another thing about the Cthulhu Mythos that I like to use in world-building even more than inconsistency is the idea that there is something strange and sinister hidden just out of sight in a seemingly normal world. When the players find out that there is a monster mastermind behind the secret society that is controlling the king behind the scenes, it makes for a more satisfying revelation than just throwing in an evil neighboring nation of the same monsters.

[ic=Sparkletwist:]...they are able to think like a person from that world, and not be lacking basic facts about that world that anyone born and raised there would absolutely know.[/ic]

This is an excellent summary of how the setting can support immersion! I'd still like to add one point: there is (often a big) a difference in what is unfamiliar for the player and what is unfamiliar for the character. If you consider a truly alien world, everything is unfamiliar to the player, but for the character there should be nothing special about it. This makes is much harder to play such character, at least if one wants to portray the character as "realistic". It is also much more difficult for the DM to surprise the players, since everything is new an unfamiliar.

[ic=]DM in ominous voice: "You notice that the flagh'args eyes gleam red..."

Players: "That was the big klingon-like thing, right? So? Aren't they supposed to?"

...the mood the DM wants to set is ruined.[/ic]

The opposite is of course also true, if the player is very familiar with the setting it may be hard to play a character who is an outsider - but in that case it's more of a roleplaying challenge and could be also fun (a simple farmer's son comes to the big city for the first time)

There is a point there somewhere, and it's the same which I briefly touched in my earlier post: while it is fairly easy to make a world where the wow-factor comes from everything being different, it might be much more satisfying to make the setting familiar on the surface (which satisfies Sparkle's point of player immersion) and build the wow-factor slightly deeper so when the players uncover the strange things they will be equally strange to their characters. When done like this, the players don't have to do a lot of pre-study to appreciate the setting but can learn as they play.

Some more stuff added to Wiki

Also my ideas on mythology, these are things not generally known by player characters but interesting background info for the DM.

Any ideas how to mix the Egyptian pantheon in this structure? Egyptians and Sumerians developed writing and religion about at the same time and independently from each other. The Christian belief system is based on the Sumerian/Babylonian one, and the Egyptian is mostly forgotten.

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Mythology in ADMC

The early stone age hunters worshiped the Master of the Hunt, the Great Father with the power of a bull and responsible for the success of hunting. He was symbolized by the horns or entire head of an auroch bull. As man tamed animals and learned agriculture, Mother Earth as the goddess of fertility became more and more important, even replacing the Great Father in some places. The invention of metal and writing brought more deities to the picture. The Sumerians had four major gods, who were eventually spread to the entire Middle East with different names:

An (Any, Baal, Asmodai)

* Originally the Master of the Hunt
* Patron god of Erech
* Lord of the Sky and Fire
* Great general and judge, the sender of storms
* Symbolized by bull horns

Ki (Ninhursag, Asherah, Gaia)

* Originally Mother Earth
* Patron god of Kish
* Creator of vegetation, nurse of Kings
* Sister of An, spouse of Enlil
* Symbolized by the greek letter omega

Enki (Ea, Oannes, Dagon)

* Patron god of Eridu
* Lord of water and the Deep
* Holder of wisdom and knowledge, inventor of magic
* Resides in Abzu, the subterranean ocean
* Symbolized by a fish and a goat (the opposite ends of the Zodiac)

Enlil (El, Jahveh)

* Patron god of Nippur
* Lord of Wind (the middle heights between Heaven and Earth)
* Defeated the monster Tiamat and made the World out of her carcass
* Invented tools and civilization ('me' in sumerian), but gave them to Enki

Later, Enlil under the name of El told Abraham of Ur that he is the only God and other but demons. Enlil's wily plan was eventually successful and gradually Enki and An noticed that their worshipers had been marginalized - only aquatic and subterranean monsters worshiped Enki/Dagon and witches demanded services from An/Asmodai. Ki/Gaia let the men argue, because most women respected the Great Mother anyway, even if under the guise of Mary Mother of God.

I totally agree with Jürgen's point of identifying with the world! If the setting is too alien, the players often try to come up with real-world analogies (days of week are still called Monday and Tuesday instead of something else, a race of blue winged elves is called "blue winged elves" instead of the nice name with lots of apostrophes the DM came up with, etc). A totally strange world works in fantasy novels where the author can keep every detail under control, but seems often to require too much from the players for them to really enjoy it.

So, why bother? The players become frustrated because there is nothing familiar and the DM becomes frustrated because the players don't get it. I see a win-win situation as something that instantly looks familiar - usually the real world, but this of course depends on the players - but has some twist that makes it slightly different (not too much). The Cthulhu mythos is a good example of a twist, it dovetails nicely to the real world but present more than enough strangeness when one digs deep enough.

That actually is a good point: the strange stuff should be below the surface, the immediate surroundings of the setting should be familiar to the players.

MAK
admc.pbwiki.com

Good to hear all these positive comments! Like I mentioned in my first post a huge depth of detail is easy to come by with a pseudo-historical setting - with a few hours in Wikipedia you can get amazing stuff together. I've been surprised what kind of adventure hooks one can find from real history. Another advantage is that the players can do this too. All too often the campaign world is the DM's baby with the players blissfully ignorant on its geography and cultures. In ADMC we've seen some very cool character backgrounds with campaign wide tie-ins, all without DM input.

The rules are another matter altogether, they started with just the standard D&D with an idea something like: "Let's play in real history, and nobody can play a wizard, because they are heretics." That was something like 6 years ago and I wouldn't lie too much to say that since then the rules used in any game session have not been exactly the same as those in the one before.

Well, we've got this huge Excel character generator that is the official storage place of the latest rules. I could add it to the Wiki, but I'm afraid it may take some time to understand... Let's try that anyway, if (when) something is totally incomprehensible, post a question.

MAK

Wiki updated (at  admc.pbwiki.com) with more info on philosophies, spells, and a map.

What else would you be interested to see?

MAK

Yeah, I know. We've run into this "historically accurate vs. useful as a rule or interesting as background" question several times, and usually the latter view has won...

We've already finished our first campaign, where the PC's started as witch-hunters for the church and eventually got mixed in founding the Templars and ended up in high positions in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The crusade was over already when they started... (we ended up making a 500-page book out of the chronicles, but unfortunately for you guys it's in Finnish). Our second campaign is well under way, a total departure from the first, as most party members are under threat of being burned at the stake for real or imagined heresies.

When we started, the rule was indeed that all wizards were heretics, and no PC wizards were allowed. That got softened a bit, so that the Church allows it's own flavor of priestly magic and does offer "licenses" to hermetic wizards, mainly so they can offer their services to the Church. Chaldeans are considered evil heretics by everyone.

Currently we have a class-independent magic system where the character's philosophy defines the spell selection but in other aspects the casters are equal (no distinction between arcane and divine, there are spell points and everyone needs to learn spells). Kabbalists are actually rolled into the hermetic philosophy, or more precisely they have the Jewish philosophy with hermetic learning feat.

If there is interest, I can add more details into the wiki (I need to translate the stuff from our Finnish wiki) - the character creation page is not complete as for now, all the cultures, philosophies, and classes have similar descriptions as the examples currently listed.

MAK

ADMC - Anno Domini 1100
by MAK
Setting wiki

The First Crusade has given Christian lords a tenuous foothold on the Holy Land and survivors spread the news of unbelievable splendors and riches of the East. Strange, ancient magic has been uncovered and traveling previously unthinkable distances has become commonplace. The feudal rulers scheme against each other even more furiously as before, so the time is right for building one's fortune.

Starting as a setting for only slightly house ruled D&D, ADMC has evolved over 5 years to a d20-system of its own.

CBG thread

http://admc.pbwiki.com/

Our gaming group eventually got fed up with all the elves, dwarves, gods,  and unpronouncable place names that only the DM understood. So we moved into semi-real history and started gaming in Europe of about AD 1100 (hence the name ADMC). We have a matching d20 ruleset as well, partly shown on in the Wiki.

Being able to mine the Wikipedia for background and plot ideas is an enormous relief for the DM's (most of our group takes turns), and the world keeps reasonably consistent because everyone has some basic understanding of real-world history and geography.

MAK

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Edit: a snippet of character creation rules can now be found from the Wiki page