Building a Campaign with Nested Plots

Today I talk about the beginnings of making a campaign. The campaign is what ties a group together, and brings players back each session. Simply put, a campaign is a series of adventures tied together, much like an adventure is a series of encounters tied together. For this article, we'll build a simple example campaign.

There are several ways you can start off your campaign design. If you're like me, you start with the world; draw a map, add some countries, some cities, and let the players choose how they want to play. You could also start with a story you want to tell; the lawful good deity decides the world is not worthy, and is attempting to destroy it to start again, and the players must stop the agents of this "righteousness" and prevent the world from being destroyed. If you're really ballsy, you can take the PC's backstories and weave them into a complex web of seemingly disjointed adventures. For this article, we'll focus on a method of plot-tracking I use to create complex plots and sub-plots.

Nested Plots

What are they? For any programmers, nesting plots is just like nesting if-statements in a program. For non-programmers, imagine those dolls where each doll fits inside an identical, if not larger, doll. That's what this is like. Each story point, quest, plot and goal fits within a larger story point, quest, plot, or goal.

This lets you start with the outer most plot, the biggest goal like "defeat mega-lich and stop his army", and then plan inward, creating smaller sub-goals like "destroy phylactery" or "find the ancient artifact." This is nice, but perhaps the single most important part of planning plots like this, is the ability to leave blank holes. You don't need to plan from A to Z. You just need to know where the players start, and where they end, and maybe a few points in between.

These holes can then be filled dynamically as the story evolves, based on player decision and luck. This gives you crucial time to think up better ideas than you would have normally. For example, when I started my campaign, all I had down was "dragons come back and take over the planet." I knew where the players started ("Players are contacted and taken by a hidden group who's goal is to observe the earth"), and roughly where they were going ("Players need to find the magical artifacts that will help them save the world"). 

At that point, I could let the players choose where to go and how to direct their efforts, all the while I'm secretly planning on adding little hints that point towards "Find the magical artifacts" so that they can get there of their own accord, and the campaign feels organic.

That's pretty much it, my big secret tool for plotting campaign story arcs using a series of nested goals and "blank space." Hope you enjoyed the read, and happy gaming.