So It Begins

While I am fortunate in having plenty of ideas for posts to write, I nevertheless do appreciate it when readers make suggestions to me of topics they'd like to see discussed. Last week, in a comment to a previous post, I was asked the following: 

James, have you ever written about how you start your campaigns? What do you expect your players to know about the setting, going in? And what does the first session look like?  

I am thinking in particular about the House of Worms, but also your campaigns in the Third Imperium. During character creation was there discussion about what they were going to pursue or did you provide a lot more direction at first? And given that the PCs were citizens of those empires, did you feed the players a lot of background knowledge during the initial sessions or have them do a little reading beforehand?

That's a very good question and one I can't recall specifically addressing in a previous post. The closest I've come to doing so, at least in recent years, was this post from earlier this year about my Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign. What I note in that post is that I generally have what's come to be known as "Session Zero," which is to say, an introductory session where the players and referee all get together and talk about the nature and scope of the campaign, the kinds of characters the players wish to create, etc. etc. 

There are lots of reasons why this is the case – perhaps fodder for another post – but my usual approach to starting a new campaign is fairly laissez-faire. I prefer to lay out a very broad concept for a campaign with a few ground rules and then let all the players go off and make their characters independently of one another. There might be some discussion between the players beforehand or between the players and myself, but not a lot. I'm a firm believer that the best campaigns are not planned but simply occur organically through the unexpected creativity of everyone involved.

To demonstrate a bit what I mean by this, allow me to use my ongoing House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign to illustrate my manner of starting a campaign. Initially, my only idea for the campaign, if you can call it that, was to run a Tékumel campaign. I'd previously refereed two campaigns in the setting, neither of which lasted more than a few months. I wanted to give it another go, this time in the hope that it might endure for at least a year or more. With very few exceptions, I always go into a new campaign in the hope of its being a long one. I'm not a fan of "mini-campaigns," let alone "one-shots," so, after a couple of failed attempts to create a stable Tékumel campaign, I wanted to give it another go.

Once I'd committed to a new Tékumel campaign (using EPT, because it's a fairly simple game and rather similar to Dungeons & Dragons, thereby eliminating one possible barrier to new players), I decided on two other details beforehand. The first was that the game would begin not in the city of Jakálla, as so many Tékumel games do, but in a different city. I chose Sokátis specifically because there wasn't a lot of information about it and because its location on the far eastern border of Tsolyánu made it a great "home base" for adventures outside the titular Empire of the Petal Throne. The second detail I decided was that all the characters would belong to the same clan in Sokátis, thus giving them a ready-made reason for why they all adventured together. This approach deviates from the "classical" one in which all new EPT characters are barbarians newly arrived in Tsolyánu looking to make a name for themselves and acquire imperial citizenship.

I then set about finding players through the late, lamented Google Plus. To my surprise, I found eight players interested in joining the campaign. I made it clear that the campaign was open to players of any level of familiarity with Tékumel. The result was a handful of complete neophytes, a couple of veterans, and the rest in between. I am well aware of Tékumel reputation – undeserved in my opinion – as an "impenetrable" setting. To dispel that notion, I assured neophytes that they'd need know nothing about the setting in advance; all they needed to know would be "taught" through play. 

That said, at the start, before characters were made, I explained to all the players the differences between the pantheons of Stability and Change and their places within Tsolyáni society. This was important, because the first question I put to the players was about the nature of the clan to which their characters would belong. Did they want to belong to a Stability-aligned clan, a Change-aligned clan, or an ecumenical one whose members worshiped a wider range of deities? I offered several examples of each clan, complete with their names and business. Eventually, the Change-aligned, Sárku-worshiping House of Worms clan was selected, which caused one of the players to drop out, as he couldn't countenance the idea of playing a character whose clan was devoted to Change god of death. (Another of the original eight players dropped out before we played due to scheduling conflicts.)

Having settled on the House of Worms clan, I then asked the players to create their own characters and to send them to me before the start of the first session a couple of weeks hence. If a player had any questions about the rules or the setting, I happily obliged them, but I did not direct their decisions nor did I encourage them to check with the other players. Instead, I asked them to make whatever character most appealed to them within the context of being a member of the House of Worms clan in the city of Sokátis. The results were an eclectic bunch but, over the years, they've managed to become an effective group, bound by both common ancestry and interests. 

I had absolutely no "grand plan" for the campaign whatsoever. I had elements of Tékumel that interested me, but I had learned long ago that the best campaigns were those whose development was shaped more by player interest than by that of the referee. Certainly, I dangled NPCs, locales, rumors, and mysteries in front of the characters in the hope that they might take them up and, in some cases, they did. In others, though, they went their own way and I contented myself with the fact that their strong drive to do this or that probably provided more sustainable forward momentum than anything I could impart. Still, I often held on to certain ideas and would repurpose or recontexualize them later so that I might get the chance to use things that interested me. After all, the referee is a player too and should get to a little bit of fun.

I kicked the campaign off with an open-ended mystery that gave the characters the opportunity to explore Sokátis, meet some significant NPCs, and learn a little more about Tsolyánu and the larger setting of Tékumel. I didn't specifically intend it to be didactic, since that's rarely fun, but I had hoped that, by showing the setting in action, the players would pick up on its details and come to understand them more. This worked beautifully, though it took time and patience, as most good things do. And the rest, as they say, is history. 

Please let me know in the comments if you'd like me to expand upon anything I've written here or if you'd like me to devote a similar post to one of my other campaigns to show you how I try to do things. I could probably do a more generic post in which I lay out broad principles for setting up a new campaign, but I think showing what I specifically did in the case of a single campaign might be more helpful, hence this post.