The Nine Emblems was the first campaign I ran, a million years ago in early 2004. Like most of my early campaigns, it was timed to wrap up by the end of the semester, and it must have been shortly after D&D 3.5 came out, because I think I ran it in “3.25”, or a hybrid while I got used to the 3.5 rules changes. The party is hired by the temple of Pelor to track down nine minor artifacts, which they can use to seal a gate that leads to a world with a different pantheon before too many representatives of those gods come through.
Here’s what I learned from this campaign:
- A D&D campaign is not the DM’s story, it the PC’s story. This was one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn, and I’ve seen a lot of DMs who never quite get it. I still remember the session before I learned it as the worst session I’ve ever run, and the session after I learned it as one of the best. Basically, the DM is there as a designer and a moderator, and he or she determines the challenges and builds the world and so forth, but ultimately the point of a campaign is to tell the story of the main characters. It’s not to tell the story the DM has in mind. Leading players through a story like that is railroading, and no matter how good the track is, there’s still no fun in going through every station at the time and in the order the DM first envisioned. For me, most of the fun in a game is running things on the fly as four or five people throw out their ideas and see that they make a difference in how things develop.
- Be careful when asking people to join. The short version is that, due to events at and around the table, I’m still not on speaking terms with one of the players. At this point, I try to have a few people I know and trust in every campaign, so that I have some sort of buffer in case things go horribly wrong.
- Be aware of your time constraints. I had nine artifacts and only twelve weeks to get the players to them, so most sessions were monster-of-the-week style jaunts to new and foreign lands without a lot of consistent NPC or villain interactions (aside from the horses of Pelor: Inkius, Blinkian, Pinknominus, and Clydesdale). More advanced storytelling techniques, like having another group collecting the emblems so the players could get a few at once, hadn’t occurred to me. We ended up missing a week or two, and I just barely got the finale run during exam week.
- Don’t draw a complicated map, because the players don’t care. I never delete a file, so I know exactly what I was thinking when I designed the maps for the sessions, including drawing a grid in MS Paint and filling in terrain square by square. The only thing more tedious than creating them was drawing them while players were waiting for the game to continue, and by the last session I had abandoned detailed maps in favor of drawing roughly the size and shape I wanted and just winging it. Turns out players didn’t care whether a platform was ten feet wide or fifteen, unless they had to fight on it.
Given the chance, here’s what I would do differently:
- Don’t overbook the campaign so hard. I wish I’d broken up the formula some, allowing us to spend two weeks on one artifact while getting another in some quick way. It would have allowed me to build NPC interactions or let the players explore the week’s setting at their own pace.
- Introduce the villain early. The final boss of the campaign didn’t show up until the last session, nor were there any allusions to him before that. He just wandered in like a giant space flea from nowhere, attacked the party, then showed up later as an elemental ghost or something for some dialogue. There was no anticipation and no emotion when the players fought, killed, and talked to him (in that order), and the end of a campaign was a bit of a narrative letdown. I’ve learned a whole lot about effective villains since then, and I’d love a chance to build that into the character.
- Commit to D&D 3.5. I see now that the rules are vastly improved over 3.0, but at the time I saw them as new and scary, so I only allowed part of them and it ended up taking me a lot longer to learn the changes. It was also confusing for the players, because we came into it with three different expectations of the rules (3.0, 3.5, and my hybrid), which helped nobody. And after it all, sticking with 3.0 didn’t improve the campaign or the players in any way, nor did it really make it easier for me to design. It was just an extra headache born of my resistance to change.
Overall, I’m willing to overlook a lot of the bad decisions I made in this campaign because it was my first campaign, before I started figuring out what I was doing. It was the only campaign I’ve done without some sort of theming (Hyrule, monster, dragon, Tower, Victorian), and it suffered a little for a lack of focus and a lot for my inexperience, but nobody really seemed to hate it, and it gave me a chance to try out a lot of things that I’ve been able to refine over time into good ideas.
I guess if I had to give this campaign a snarky nickname, it was the rogue campaign. The party started as a rogue, a multiclass rogue/fighter, a multiclass rogue/wizard, and a cleric of the god of rogues. This is an impressive amount of specialization for a 5th-level party.