I’ve noticed recently that y’all really love me when I’m being basic. Talking basic f$&%ing GMing. This ain’t the first time I’ve noticed it either. A long, long time ago, I put out an article breaking down my basic action adjudication brain process. And suddenly, I was a hot item in online GMing advice circles. The responses I’ve gotten to recent series like that Open-World Game thing and the Quick and Dirty Dungeon Thing are just more evidence that people just want to know how to create and run games. The easy way.

It makes sense when you think about it. It’s not like WotC’s gonna teach you useless crap like “how to actually just make your own fun game.” Nope, they’re too busy dancing around and saying, “look, now you can play cute-a$& turtle people in wizard college in fantasy Seattle and you can work at f$&%ing Starbucks.” Seriously. I s$&% you not. Those are actual published products. For a game called Dungeons & Dragons.

What the hell is WotC even doing?

So, now it’s my job to teach people how to just play and run games. And how to run games that include some dungeons. And maybe even some dragons.

Well, don your Ugg boots and pour yourself a pumpkin spice latte. Because I’m going basic. Again.

Getting Your (First?) Campaign On

It’s time for a whole new series of articles here at TheAngryGM.com. Or at Patreon.com/TheAngryGM if you’re one of the awesome people who keep me on the ‘net. Thanks for that.

In this series, I’m going to help you get a nice, simple homebrew TTRPG campaign up and running. If you’re not sure what that means, I’ll explain in a sec. But first, a few disclaimers…

First, this series kind of follows from my book. Because a simple, homebrew campaign’s a great next step after you’ve run your first roleplaying game adventure. If you’ve run a game before but never thought about writing or running your own campaign, I’m talking to you. But even if you have written and run campaigns before, I’m probably still talking to you. As my Quick and Dirty Dungeon and Open World Game articles have shown, it’s good for everyone to get back to basics sometimes. You never know what you’ve forgotten. Or what you never learned. So, plow through the remedial stuff even if you think you know what you’re doing. I just might change your entire perspective. I do that a lot.

Second, like everything I do, this series is focused on D&D. 5E. Because that’s what most of y’all are playing. But the advice is mostly system agnostic. It’ll work for any game of any genre. Well, any adventure-type game and genre anyway. I can’t help you with that Monsterhearts BS. And I don’t care to try.

Finally, this ain’t a quick and easy thing. I can’t bang this series out in a month. Not even if I devote every article to it. And I’m not doing that. It’s not that there’s a lot to cover — there’s not as much as you think — it’s just that you really need a full understanding of the whole, basic campaign startup process before you start doing anything. So, I don’t want any e-mails like this:

Angry, when’s the next Simple Campaign article coming? I had my character generation session like you said and I’m planning to start next week, so I really need it.

Basically, expect one or two entries in this series a month and expect you’ll be starting your homebrew campaign in the late spring of 2022. Definitely by summer. That’s the plan.

Disclaimers done. Let’s get it on!

So You Want to Run a Campaign?

So, you ran your first tabletop roleplaying game adventure and you’re over the trauma and you’re ready for the next step, huh? Well, that next step’s running a campaign. Running a campaign’s what being a Game Master is really all about. When a GM says, “I’m running a game,” they mean, “I’m running a campaign.”

What’s a campaign? Well… uh… I’ll come back to that. Let’s just say for right now that a campaign’s an ongoing tabletop roleplaying game you run week after week after week after week until you get bored or everyone dies or forever. Whichever comes first. I mean, theoretically, campaigns can actually end. But no GM in the history of gaming has ever managed the impossible feat of actually ending a campaign.

When it comes to running a campaign — whatever the heck that is — there’s basically two approaches…

Two Roads Diverged Behind the GMing Screen

As a real, honest-to-God Game Master who’s graduated to running an actual campaign, you’ve got a choice of two options. First, you can go out and buy a published campaign and run that. Confusingly, a published campaign might be called a module, an adventure path, or just an adventure. Don’t let those words fool you. If it’s published in six different numbered softback books or one big-a$& 200-page hardback book, it’s a campaign. I don’t care what it says on the cover.

The problem’s really that the companies who publish all the game materials for these roleplaying games actually don’t know much about how roleplaying games work. Which is both why I’m here explaining this crap and also why my name’s The Angry GM.

Fortunately, you don’t have to rely on those dumba$&es to make games for you. Roleplaying games let you create and run your own games. Your own, original, bespoke, scratch-made works of adventure art. Using your own amazing brain.

Of course, your actual brain may not be all that amazing. But fortunately, you can still write and run your own adventures. Just browse DriveThruRPG for proof of that.

Look, some GMs are just happy to provide their friends a few hours of gamey fun every week and then go home and not think about this D&D crap until the next session. That’s fine. But the possibility of creating your own fantastic adventures? That’s something that draws a lot of GMs into the hobby in the first place. That’s what got me back in the 1980s when I was just an irate little kid. And I’ve been doing it ever since.

Creating and running your own games? That’s the Path of the Homebrewer.

Brewing at Home for Fun and Profit

Homebrewing’s got nothing to do with making your own booze. Sorry if you thought otherwise. Booze and D&D don’t really mix. Anyone who’s ever run a game for a drunk — or played at a drunken GM’s table — can tell you that. At best, it’s fun once. And even then, usually only for the actual drunk.

Homebrewer is a general term for a GM who makes his own games. See, roleplaying games have always been written with the do-it-yourself game master in mind. That’s why TTRPG systems have all sorts of tools and advice GMs can use to make their own content. So, when I said I’d teach you how to start and run a homebrew campaign, I meant I’d teach you how to write and run your very own series of ongoing fantasy adventures. Get it?

To be clear, there’s lots of ways to homebrew. Some homebrewers rip published modules apart and stitch the pieces into a Frankensteinian horror of a game. Others scratch-make their own worlds and races and classes and lore and backstory and magic systems and kingdoms and nations and cities and rules. And they force their players to read every last page of that crap before they’re allowed to even think about creating a character.

Most homebrewers land somewhere in the middle. Which is a smart place to land. If you’re going to jump out of a plane, aim for a mattress factory. That’s what I always say.

Anyway, most homebrewers assemble their games mostly from premade bits. They use the character options in the game system and the monsters in the game’s bestiary — the Monster Manual in D&D — and the other tools the game system provides to build adventures. They might draw their own maps or repurpose others’ maps. Occasionally, they’ll make a custom monster or magic item. Most homebrewers mostly take a Lego approach and only occasionally use their basement injection molder or 3D printer to make their own Lego bricks.

Homebrew however you want. Most homebrewers are thieves. That’s fine. I steal s$&% all the time. And I use plenty of premade monsters direct from the Monster Manual. When I need something special, I’ll tweak a premade monster or create my own. I steal maps that look cool, but I draw my own often too. Because that’s fun. And, like every homebrewer GM, there is not a single character’s or place’s name in any of my games that isn’t stolen from somewhere. We GMs call that homage. Because that sounds nicer than “I can’t think of anything better, so I’ll just name all the people in this town after Star Trek extras.” Coming up with names is hard, okay?

If you want to homebrew, drop any moral objections you’ve got to stealing content for your own personal, noncommercial home use. And drop any crap in your brain about how a creation’s got to be wholly original to have merit. Steal s$&% and make it your own. In fact, start pre-stealing s$&%. Spot a cool map? Steal it. See a neat encounter? Steal it. Cool custom monster on a website? Yoink! Make a folder on your hard drive or put a shoebox on your desk for all your filthy stolen game elements. It’s called building a content library. Full of homages.

And speaking of terminology…

When is a Game a Campaign?

Now you know what homebrewing is. And, if you’re still reading, you’ve decided that’s the path for you. And also, you have a very high threshold for overly wordy snarky bulls$&%. Which will serve you well if you keep reading.

But what actually is a campaign…

Well, that’s complicated. Really, really complicated. Why? Because gamers tend to shove their heads up their butts a lot and then can’t get them out because their massive intellects won’t fit out the hole again.

Sorry. That was kind of mean. Even for me. Thing is gamers like to define things. Specifically and clearly and objectively. But a campaign is actually a really fuzzy, really vague, kind of subjective thing. Just like everything to do with games about pretend elves. Entertainment — games — are subjective things. It’s all about how they feel. And feelings defy definition. So a campaign is actually anything that feels like a campaign.

If this bothers you, there’s actually some important elements that make a game feel like a campaign. And if you’re an experienced GM and you can put aside your pedantic, nitpicky nature and need for solid, objective definitions, I can explain what they are. But not here. Because you don’t need that understanding to run a simple campaign. So, as a follow up to this article introducing the concept of campaigns in simple terms, I’m going to provide some supplemental bulls$&% about why and how the definition of campaign and adventure got so borked and how to fix it. At least in your own head.

For the rest of you, I’m going to offer up this simple definition:

A campaign is an ongoing series of contiguous, tabletop roleplaying game adventures.

That’s it.

But even that definition’s a little heavy on pedantic, nitpicky details. And before we get to those details — they’re actually important details — let me simplify this further if you’re a complete gaming newbie.

I assume you’ve run at least one roleplaying game adventure if you’re reading this. Possibly, after being introduced to roleplaying games and game mastery by some brilliantly written, introductory book written by some sexy gaming genius, you gathered a bunch of friends and ran them through a one-shot adventure. Which maybe was also written by a sexy gaming genius. And maybe it was called The Fall of Silverpine Watch. Maybe.

Anyway, in the adventure, your player friends undertook some kind of quest or mission to do a thing. And then — assuming they didn’t get their butts killed by, say, the insane ghost of a fallen knight — they won. They completed the quest. They finished the mission. And you told them they did a good job. And everyone was happy. And then, someone said, “is that it?” And you said, “that’s it! You won! Yay!” And they said, “can we keep going?” And you said, “nope. That’s all there is.” And they said, “but what happens next?” And you said, “nothing. It’s over.”

A campaign is what happens when you say, “yes, we can keep playing” and then you figure out what happens next and give the players’ characters a new quest or mission.

You probably think I’m being funny. And I am. I’m a funny guy. That’s why people love me even though I call them names and kill their characters. A lot. But that is also literally the best way to understand what a campaign actually is. Even if you’re an experienced, expert GM, the best definition you can keep in your head and heart for the gaming term campaign is…

A campaign is what happens when you get to a place where you could stop playing but, instead, you don’t.

If you can wrap your head around that much, we can move on to the important details. And then you’ll understand enough of what it means to start and run a simple, homebrew campaign that you’ll want to actually do it. Which is the point of this introductory article. To give you enough background to know what I’m talking about when I start telling you how to actually make your campaign.

All Campaigns are Games, But Not All Games are Campaigns

You’ve probably figured out by now that there’s lots of ways to make a campaign. Lots of things can feel like campaigns. Part of starting a campaign’s just figuring out what the hell you mean when you say you’re running a campaign. What’s a campaign to you?

Thing is, though, that you can’t just string a bunch of adventures together and call it a campaign. You can invent any definition you want. But you can still be wrong. A campaign’s got to feel like a campaign or it’s not a campaign. No matter how much you scream about how you’re running your truth!

It’s all about the game’s feel. And game feel doesn’t care about your facts.

Putting aside all the other crap about what makes a campaign a campaign, there’s three things you must address when planning your campaign. Three things that, apart from everything else, can make or break a campaign. There’s continuity, narrative structure, and the gameplay loop. I know those things sound complicated and boring. Don’t worry. I’ll make them easy and fun. I’m good at this s$&%.

Now, I ain’t going to beat any of these terms to death. I just want you to know they exist. I want you to understand them enough that, with my help, you can get your first campaign off the ground. As you run campaigns — and with this s$&% in the back of your head — you’ll come to understand all this crap intuitively. That’s called experiential learning, kids. It’s called wisdom. Which is way better than intelligence.

Continuity

Running a campaign’s down to running a bunch of individual games that feel like they’re actually all part of the same game. That feel like they’re chapters in a long-running story. Or episodes in a Netflix series. Or video games in a franchise. Whatever. And a lot of that feeling comes down to continuity. You gotta have continuity.

Continuity is something — and it can be anything, really — something that’s the same from one adventure or chapter or episode or whatever to the next.

Most roleplaying campaigns are all about character continuity. The players play the same characters from session to session, adventure to adventure, and week to week. Whatever’s happening in the game, it’s always happening to the same characters. Character continuity’s so strongly built into most RPG systems that, even if you have no idea what continuity is or why it’s important, your game will have character continuity.

Great, right? So continuity’s nothing to worry about, right? Not so fast there. See, sometimes continuity breaks. And the GMs who don’t get continuity? They don’t know what to do. Most inexperienced GMs freak out, for example, when they manage to win the game and kill all the characters in one go. The dreaded total party kill. TPK.

When all the characters die — say to a beholder-dragon — all in one go, the game feels broken. It feels over. Character continuity’s why that is. But clever GMs who know a thing or two about continuity can get past it.

Say the players all make new characters. And those characters take up the fight against the beholder-dragon. Would you say that a new campaign started? Or is that part of the same campaign? Most GMs would say the campaign’s still going. And that illustrates a couple of things about continuity.

First, there’s different kinds of continuity. Obviously, the game’s not really about the characters and their many adventures. It’s about the struggle against the beholder-dragon. New characters can step in and continue the fight. If you want to get technical, you can call that narrative continuity.

There’s lots of kinds of continuity. For example, what if the players make new characters and those characters say, “to hell with this beholder-dragon nonsense, we’re booking it to some other continent.” Or, what if the players make new characters who start off on some different continent. Way the hell away from any beholder-dragons. Lots of GMs would argue that’s all still part of the same campaign. It’s just down to setting continuity. The game’s about adventures in a fantastic world of mad gods who create crazy s$&% like beholder-dragons.

Which brings me to the second thing about continuity. When continuity breaks, you can just shrug and say, “game over, I guess,” or you can just switch continuities. One continuity can take over for another. And you don’t even do this s$&% consciously. You just say, “well, let’s just make new characters and keep playing in this story or in this world.” And the campaign feels like it’s still going on. It’s just lots of GMs have the idea of character continuity so ingrained in them they can’t see past it when it breaks. They don’t even realize they’ve got options.

By the way, RPGs don’t really rely on character continuity. If you want to get technical. They survive mostly on party continuity. Let’s say, for instance, you start a campaign with Alice, Bob, and Carol. Alice’s character dies and she makes a new one. Then Bob moves away. Dave joins the group. Meanwhile, Carol keeps getting bored and making new characters. It’s a whole Party of Theseus situation, right? No character currently in the game was there when the game started. But it still feels like there’s a continuity. It’s a party continuity. It’s the concept of the party — irrespective of any of its members — that survives. And the only way that breaks is if everyone dies at once or the party breaks up and everyone goes their own ways.

I could yammer on about continuity for pages. There’s lots of awesome things you can do with it if you really get it. I could probably write some article like Ten Awesome Campaign Ideas Based on Alternate Continuities. But that s$&% doesn’t belong here.

Narrative Structure

Let’s put this whole RPG-story thing to bed right freaking now. An RPG is not a collaborative storytelling game. It’s not about building a shared story. There’s no such thing as a story game. RPGs have stories because everything has stories. Every day of your life is a story in itself. And also part of a bigger story. The story of your life. Stories are the things we tell about the things that happened. An RPGs story is what we remember about playing an RPG.

Now, there’s good stories and bad. No one’s saying there ain’t. No one’s queuing up to watch a movie based on the story of your boring-a$& life. RPGs are particularly good at producing good stories. Engaging, entertaining stories. That’s a selling point.

But what really makes a story good or bad isn’t what the story’s about so much as how the story’s put together. A good storyteller can make even the story of your boring-a$& life interesting and engaging. It’s down to structure. How the story’s put together. Does it have a beginning, a middle, an end, rising action, a climax, setup, payoff, pacing, themes, tone, blah blah blahdy freaking blah?

This s$&% can get complicated. A campaign can have one, long, overarching story or it can contain a lot of little stories. Each adventure is a story. The characters have stories. Those stories can be simple or complex. And they can be distinct or interwoven. I’m not going to explain all this. It’s impossible. You can’t even enumerate the possibilities. Which is another thing gamers love to do. Enumerate things.

Fortunately, of the big three things I’m describing, narrative structure’s the least important. And it’s the easiest to simplify. Which is precisely what I’m going to do in this series. When I titled this Let’s Start a Simple Homebrew Campaign, it’s really the narrative structure that I meant by simple. You’ll see what I mean as I go on.

The Gameplay Loop

Every game’s got a gameplay loop. Basically, the gameplay loop’s just a description of how the game plays out. What you do when you’re playing the game. Technically, I should call this gameplay structure, not gameplay loop. Because there’s structures besides loops. But gameplay loops are some of the best gameplay structures. Let me stop waffling and explain.

First, when I say, “how the game plays out,” you’re probably confused. Isn’t that what the rules are for? Don’t they tell you how the game plays out? And that is precisely the problem. Gameplay structure’s not part of the game system. It’s not part of the rules. It’s about how you personally run your personal game. And it’s kind of invisible. You may not even realize it’s there. But it’s there.

Worse yet, gameplay structure can really f$&% up your game. Let’s be real, if your game’s story is kind of lame but the game itself is fun to play, people will play it. They’ll have fun. But if the game doesn’t feel good to play, no amount of William Shakesman-level narrative will save it. People will be done with it.

So what’s gameplay structure? And what’s a gameplay loop? Let’s consider the gameplay in The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim Remastered Ultimate Complete Director’s Cut Edition which was recently released for the seventeen billionth time in the last decade for every electronic device with a screen. I figure that’s a safe example.

Here’s how Skyrim generally plays out:

After you finish the tutorial adventure, you go to a town. In the town, you talk to a bunch of people. Some of them ask you to do little favors around town. A couple of them ask you to do big quest-like things outside town. Once you get bored poking around the town, you pick one of the big quest-like things. You go do it. Then, you return to town and get your reward. You sell your loot, use the money and any materials you found to upgrade your equipment, and restock your supplies. Then, you pick another big, quest-like thing and go do it. Once you’re out of big things to do in one town, you move on to the next. And the cycle repeats.

Now, that’s just a description. It’s not a straightjacket. It’s not forced. It’s just how most people play the game. And, consequently, the game’s designed so that if you play it like that, you’ll have a good experience. Quests are strung together to carry you away from and then back to town. But eventually, quests specifically direct you to new towns, helping you move on as you run out of s$&% to do.

The reason it’s called a loop, by the way, is because you’re generally doing the same things over and over. The gameplay loops through different phases or modes of play and then back onto itself. Good gameplay loops lead to games that are fun to play. The gameplay’s varied enough to stay fresh but consistent enough that players usually know what to do next. And what to expect. Running a game with a solid loop is a lot easier. You don’t have to spend as much time guiding the players. And the players are less likely to catch you by surprise with their crazy-a$& choices. And because loops establish expectations, you — the GM — can occasionally subvert or undermine those expectations to create reversals and ratchet up the tension and all sorts of crap like that.

Most TTRPGs don’t explain this whole loop thing. Most TTRPGs do have implied or assumed gameplay loops. But, for reasons I’m not going to get into, most modern RPGs — D&D 5E being especially egregious in this regard — don’t have the mechanics that support the loops like they used to. Maybe I’ll explain this if someone asks nicely. Dancey dancey.

The problem is lots of GMs end up running what I call The Never-Ending Adventure instead of running campaigns. Basically, they run everything the same way. Whether the players are exploring dungeons or traveling the wilderness or dicking around town, the game plays the same. It feels the same. Turn by turn, moment by moment, die roll by die roll. Players explore towns one street at a time. They’re expected to poke their heads into each shop, looking for the interesting s$&%. Hell, this is why most GMs can’t even figure out how to run town and wilderness adventures. They can’t get around the moment-by-moment dungeon exploration thing.

That’s why I’m wasting time on this gameplay loop thing. And why you should know about them. So that you know that it’s actually on you to figure out how your game’s going to play out. What are the modes of play? And how do the players move between them?

Does that sound complicated? Well, it is. But, again, you’ve got me. I’m going to help you build your simple, homebrew campaign around a simple gameplay loop.

Speaking of that, let’s actually talk about starting your simple homebrew campaign. Finally.

Defining Your Campaign Without Really Defining It

At this point, I just want to help you wrap your skull around what makes a campaign a campaign. I’m just setting the stage so you can start planning — and running — your own homebrew campaign. With my help. You don’t have to understand everything yet. And I won’t ask you to figure out any of this high-level crap for yourself.

When you plan a campaign, you don’t say things like, “character continuity, I choose you!” You don’t say, “the game’s narrative will primarily consist of the interwoven narratives of the individual characters and no overarching campaign narrative aside from occasional, non-sequential adventure arcs.” No one says s$&% like that. I don’t even say s$&% like that. And I know what it all means.

What I do — what everyone does and what you’re going to do — is write a premise for my campaign. And that’s what I’m going to help you do next time. That’s the first actual step toward starting and running your own homebrew campaign. Writing a premise.

But when you invent a premise, you’re making all sorts of decisions about the game’s continuity and its structures. Wittingly or not wittingly. See, one way or another, this crap’s going to find its way into your campaign. Otherwise, your campaign won’t feel like a campaign. If you understand how your premise determines your campaign’s continuity and structure, you can choose those things deliberately. You can build a better game.

Or, in this case, you can build a simpler game. Remember, I’m helping you build a simple homebrew campaign. One you can get off the ground quickly and easily. With a minimum of effort. And one that doesn’t require much experience to run. But one that’ll be a crap ton of fun, however much experience you’ve got with roleplaying games. I recently showed a lot of people how easy it is to build really amazingly fun games from simple tools and systems. More fun, often, than really complicated overwrought games. And a lot less stressful.

It turns out that some structures and some continuities are way simpler to deal with than others. When I help you come up with your premise, I’m going to assume — dictate, really — a few things about your campaign’s continuity and narrative structure and gameplay loop. That’s how I’m going to keep things simple.

But we’ll cover that next time. The real homebrewering begins here.

There.

Next article.

Whatever.