Create a Homebrew Campaign | #3 The First Arc
Introduction
Hello! Welcome to another session in my homebrew campaign creation series. Previously, we worked on creating a map of the world, then we fleshed out a region of that map and wrote out the details of the population center that will serve as the starting point for our first arc. That arc is what we’ll be focusing on in this session. We’ll be talking about the key points of the first arc rather than focusing on the finer details of it. Those details will be explored in our fourth session of this series, being released next week. To handle this session, you'll just need your settlement details from the last session, your region map, and a word processor that you can use to start drafting the arc.
As is standard, there is a video version of this post if you would prefer to get your information through that means. You can find that here:
So, let’s get started with creating what I’ll be referring to as the skeleton of our first campaign arc!
Components of the Arc
To create our arc’s skeleton, there are a few core components that need to be determined. This is the first arc in the campaign, so it needs to accomplish quite a bit. I’m sure you’ve experienced plenty of stories that are the first of a longer series and have been inundated with world-building and character introductions. The initial segment of a story has to accomplish these things, but there are ways for it to be done well--this is the focus of our first arc. We'll walk through each component of the arc and I'll provide some examples and suggestions as we move forward.
Bringing the Party Together
The first component of the arc is bringing the party together. This is how your player characters will be introduced to one another. There are numerous methods of doing this, all of which have positive and negative sides. My goal with this arc is going to be executing the party introduction in a way that is interesting, unique, and contributes to the arc overall.
The most common method of bringing the party together is to just have everybody meet up in a tavern. It’s not particularly uniting, though, and you require some suspension of disbelief from the players to make this a sensible party of the story. You expect them to never raise the question of “wait, why are we all hanging out?” because you didn’t actually bind them as an adventuring party or group of friends with a common goal.
I said this in my overview of this series, but I’ll repeat it now: I don’t think that it’s a wrong choice to just put everyone together in a tavern and run the game from there. It’s easy, it gets the story started, and the players can find reasons to stay together on their own. However, I won’t be approaching this arc in that way.
So, what are some alternative ways that you can bring the party together? I’m going to list a few that I like. Hopefully, one of these suggestions will spark some creativity. Later in this video, I’ll talk about my plans for bringing the party together in this arc.
Common Goal
This one is about as easy as having everyone meet in the tavern: give the party a common goal before the first session even hits. This allows the players to think about why their character is going to participate in the party prior to sitting down with the other players. In a later episode when we discuss writing copy for your players, you would include information about what the goal is and ask your players to consider why their characters are pursuing this goal.
Then, when bringing the party together, you already have a reason for all of them meeting up: they’re meeting because they’re pursuing this goal. If they’re meeting for the first time, there are numerous different ways to explain the meeting. Perhaps their common goal is one that was given to them by someone who’s hired each of them and told them where to meet. Or, maybe one of them is that person who hired the others to complete the goal and they’re all there for the money (at first). They could also just be united solely by the goal, finding one another because they sought out people to ally with in the name of this common cause.
Historical Companions
Having some of your companions already know one another is really great. You can even have your players work together to create these characters and give greater depth to their histories. They don’t all have to know one another, though this is entirely plausible and allows you to skip the introductions, though I feel that this removes some of the experience that your players need with acquainting their characters with those of their companions, allowing relationships to develop naturally.
Allowing your players to work together to establish their characters has several positive benefits beyond just making it easier to unite the party. This grants additional camaraderie lays the foundation for relationship growth and skips a bit of the awkwardness that comes from figuring out who a character is. It also allows the party to be more cohesive right from the beginning.
The Railroad
This isn’t one I would advise but is also one that I have personally done. I think it can work for the first arc of your campaign but isn’t great for the arcs that follow. Railroading is essentially removing choice from your players to a significant degree so that they have to work together and follow your plot thread, even if the characters otherwise wouldn’t.
For my first campaign, I went with railroading for the first arc. I don’t think I’d do it again, but it did work. I introduced the players one by one as they arrived at this village with considerably diverse goals that they hoped to accomplish within that village. Then, the village was locked down by its leadership for an undetermined amount of time, as they needed to keep people from fleeing, allegedly for their safety.
The party tried to go about their individual errands, but not all of them could be accomplished during the village’s lockdown, so they determined that they’d need to work together to eliminate the threat to the village. After several sessions, they eliminated the threat and became a group of friends, though there was some conflict still present between a couple of them.
So, the railroading worked and the party was united, but I don’t like that I forced them into this situation by giving them a quest that didn’t necessarily matter to them. I got better about that when the time came for my follow-up campaign.
The Plot Hook
The next component of the arc is the plot hook. I think that this is a pretty obviously necessary component of the arc, but it still needs to be mentioned. Your plot hook is a quick summary of what your first arc is about. It isn’t a complete synopsis, it’s just what gets your players engaged and excited. This is what motivates the players and their characters alike to pursue the arc and see it through. You want something engaging and snappy. I have a few examples I’ll share--feel free to use them or be inspired by them!
Copycat Mead
A large, renowned tavern has started serving a new kind of mead that everyone in the town loves, increasing their popularity. However, the owner of a smaller, lesser-known tavern claims that the mead is a copy of his, accusing the other tavern of stealing his family’s recipe.
Street Rats
A large, beautiful city boasts that it has no one living on its streets, begging for money. No one in the city has an unmet need. A local philanthropist believes that this false utopia was achieved and is maintained through sinister means.
The Break-In
A high-profile member of the city’s council had her house broken into. She saw the perpetrator, but the individual did not harm her. The criminal stole only one thing from her household, but its value was purely sentimental for the council member and she isn’t sure why someone else would want it.
Unusual Mist
People who travel through the nearby forest report an unusual amount of mist at night. Some even claim that the mist is pinkish in hue. It’s dismissed as a tale to scare children until a lumberjack discovers a body that appears to have been drained of its blood.
World Establishment
The third component of your first arc is establishing your world. You need to make sure you determine what components of the world are important to mention to your players. This doesn’t mean filling the entire arc with world-building, but you do want to be sure to mention a few things that you believe will be important.
For example, in my first arc of the first campaign, the threat that caused the village to be created was actually an entity that had been given its power by its vile patron which turned out to be the big bad of the campaign itself. I gave a singular hint to this in the very first arc of the campaign, helping me build the important components of the world. There were other things I established as well, like rumors about the abandoned castle looming above the village as well as the hateful attitude held toward nonhumans by the kingdom as a whole.
As you are expanding your world in future sessions, make notes about crucial pieces of information that you want to include in your first arc so that your players get glimpses of the world that they have been plunged into through small tidbits rather than info dumps.
Character Development Opportunities
You need to provide plenty of chances for your players to fully experience their characters. For this, I try to make sure that I have at least one challenge for each skill in an arc as well as a solid balance between roleplaying and combat. When you’re writing your first arc, you don’t really know much about the player characters you’ll be working with, so it’s best to just include a variety of challenges that can cater to a broad makeup of different characters.
Your players can write these characters with as much detail as they like, but it won’t be until their first few sessions that they start getting a feel for playing these characters. When planning your first arc, it’s important that you devise as many situations as possible for your players to figure out how to play their character both in a mechanical sense and in a personality sense. Create questions of morality without definitive answers, design problems with multiple solutions, and plan scenarios that will require the use of each and every skill you can.
Skeleton of the Arc
Now that you know the key components necessary to create a successful first arc, it’s time to create the skeleton I first mentioned. The first arc of my campaign focuses on Kessit, the town I created in the previous part of this series. I’m going to write a basic synopsis of the campaign and make notes of the different ways that I can add character development, world-building, and party union. This is an arc that I would expect to take about four or five eight-hour-long tabletop sessions with my players, so it's going to have a considerable amount of content with which my players can interact. We'll get into the nitty-gritty of writing the arc in the next session, but the skeleton we're drafting in this session should give you an idea of how grand this arc is going to be.
Plot Synopsis
For my first arc in Kessit, the plot hook will center around the conflict between the wealthy people of the Ait and the more impoverished individuals on the mainland. This conflict will reach a peak when tax collectors come seeking dues from the leaders of Kessit only to find that Kessit is actually bankrupt, as the leadership has become corrupt and spent much of the town’s wealth on personal luxury. With no money for tax dues, the kingdom is now threatening to garnish everything Kessit produces in a time when food is already low for the locals.
This already presents a lot of interesting conflicts and moral ambiguity. The people of Kessit are enraged with everyone on the ait, but it is only the leaders of the town who are responsible for this shortage of income. There are innocents who live on the ait who are presently fearing for their lives despite being just as angry with the leaders as the common people on the mainland. Additionally, while the leaders were wrong to spend all of the town’s money on themselves, it is the king from the nearby castle town who is ultimately stealing food from the mouths of the people of Kessit to account for the evils of the town’s leaders.
All of this presents a considerable roleplaying opportunity for the player characters. This is a chance for them to find a solution to a complex problem and determine which way their moral compass points. Violence is breaking out in Kessit, people are dying, the guards are on the side that funds their livelihoods, and the king is going to drive the city to starvation. The common goal that our player characters will have is bringing peace and prosperity back to Kessit, in any way that they can.
Bringing the Party Together
The party has a common goal of establishing peace, but how are we bringing them all together? For this, I will split them in half and have each half be a team that creates their characters together. Each team will have a solution to the problem in Kessit that they have devised, isolated from the second team.
When the time comes for our first session, it will take place at a discrete meeting in a house that is owned by one of the party members (okay, I know this sounds like the in-person, real-life session will be super secretive--I honestly mean that the in-game meeting will be discrete). That party member reached out to a few individuals that were known to be peace seekers in some form or fashion (the members of the other team). They meet in secret and work together to find a solution they think will work for everyone. The trouble, of course, is going to be getting everyone to agree and establishing peace with minimal bloodshed. This first session will largely be focused on those initial discussions and the presentation of ideas until a final one is presented. I would expect this to be somewhat heated, as an actual discussion of this nature would be.
World-Building
The main world-building focus here will be centered around the castle town and its king, who is ultimately far more villainous than the leaders of Kessit. The conflict in Kessit will help shine a light on the king and his nature, painting him as being a continued threat to Kessit even if the current conflict is resolved. I’ll throw in several moments that reveal the truth about the king’s overbearing and greedy nature, setting the stage for future, higher-level arcs in the campaign. By the time the party is ready to tackle that larger issue, the issues of Kessit will be years in their past and will seem trivial by comparison to the wicked ploys of the king of this region.
And yet, because I am noting now that I want this to be something I build up right in the very first arc, my players will be able to call back all the way to this first arc and see that there were hints from the beginning of our campaign. The true nature of the king was teased from the very first session--from the notes that they were given to prepare their characters--and they didn't realize it.
You may not have the ability to do this yet, as we haven't started devising what I call the central arc. Don't worry! When we get to that session (which is the twelfth video in this series), I'll remind you to circle back to your first arc and sprinkle in a couple of hints about the over-arching narrative you want your players to pursue.
Arc Challenges
The first meeting will not be the only session of this arc. This is just where they come up with some initial ideas for resolving the problems; it is the first of many challenges.
For combat, I intend for the first one to be them attempting to break up a fight between town guards and the people of the mainland, which will result in a brawl that--hopefully--doesn't have any deaths. Additional combats could be sprinkled in as the presentation of the party’s idea for peace--whatever it may be--gives them enemies. An opposing party may send thugs to rough them up or, if the individuals in opposition are the leaders of the ait, hired assassins might be sent after the player characters.
The most consistent challenges here will be diplomatic, but I’ll have plenty of chances for party members to show off traits beyond charisma. Perhaps they need to sneak into the home of one of the leaders, requiring stealth and even acrobatics. There could be traveling if they venture to the castle town to the east for part of the arc, resulting in survival-related challenges.
Diverse challenges will come up naturally based on how the party goes about the execution of their idea for restoring peace to Kessit. Because there are so many possible angles that the party can approach solving this problem, there is a limitless supply of potential challenges I can draw from and add to a session to make it exciting.
Conclusion
With a skeleton of our arc under our belts, we’re ready to sit down and really flesh it out. When we flesh out the arc in the next session, we’ll write about the most important characters and locations in the arc. We’ll also write story beats that will take place as the arc progresses so that changes can occur that shake up the experience for the players. Go ahead and finish drafting the skeleton of your arc, make sure you’ve got a solid plot hook, a way to bring the party together, and a list of challenging ideas that you want to be sure you include in your arc.
Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this part of my homebrew campaign course; I hope it was informative and that you’re going away excited about your first arc! I look forward to getting this arc fleshed out and to everything that will follow! Until then, please consider supporting me through your feedback, likes, subscriptions, or whatever else you are interested in doing. I’d love to hear about the plot hooks you come up with for your arc, as well!
Until the next video, bye!