Draw Steel Toolkit

Building the Campaign

After your players agree to your pitch, it's time to start building the setting where your game takes place.

Reading a Published Setting

If your campaign takes place in a published campaign setting, read the material that pertains to the campaign you've pitched. You shouldn't feel as though you need to read the entirety of the setting if it isn't pertinent to your campaign. For instance, if you're building a campaign that takes place entirely in the Barony of Dalrath, you probably don't need to read about the city of Blackbottom many miles beyond Dalrath's borders.

As you read, make notes on anything interesting in the setting that you might want to incorporate in your campaign, as well as anything you want to change.

Your top priority should be the campaign's starting location. In which district of Capital do the players start their first adventure? Which world of the timescape will be the first the heroes visit? What settlement in Vasloria holds their first adventure? Answer that question and get familiar with that place first. You'll have plenty of time to read further as you plan out your games.

Building Your Own Setting

If you plan on building your own campaign setting, the work of worldbuilding can be overwhelming. But don't worry! You don't have to build the whole thing before the campaign starts. Your world is more likely to feel layered, interesting, and authentic if you start small and build out the locations, people, and organizations within it as you go.

Start Small

If you're planning on making your own campaign setting, start small. Instead of detailing every settlement on every continent on every planet in a universe, build a starting town or an initial district in a city, then work up the surrounding area in which the first adventure takes place. Use the following steps as a guide:

Locations: Make a list of any important locations in the campaign starting point, such as an inn or house where the heroes are staying, merchants they might want to visit, and the headquarters of organizations that might be important to them.

  • NPCS: Write the name, ancestry, age, gender, and a brief note on personality for each NPC the characters might interact with in the locations you've created.
  • Adventure Sites: Repeat the above two steps for any adventure sites the heroes might visit during their first adventure. Detail the sites, as well as any important NPCs and villains the heroes might interact with.
  • Organizations: You can also detail the laws and function of organizations the heroes might interact with during their first adventure. What governments, churches, and guilds could they come across? How might these organizations interact with the characters? You don't need to write up every bylaw in a pirate code, but it would be good to know how the pirates react to adventurers asking to sail the seas on their ship.
  • Map: Make a map of the starting area. It doesn't need to be good! Just a few clearly labeled dots and squiggles showing the setup of city neighborhoods or the locations of forests, deserts, mountains, bodies of water, and other landforms should be plenty.

Each time you need a new location or adventure site for an upcoming adventure, detail it in a similar way and add it to your map!

Keep Things Vague

There might be other details of your campaign you'll want to establish before your first adventure. For example, you might want to know the nearest settlement to the heroes' starting town or the name of the monarch who rules over the country where that town is found. Go ahead and sketch out the names of any places you know will be an important part of your campaign, along with a single sentence or so of detail. You'll be able to add more detail to these items as needed while preparing the campaign.

The main reason you shouldn't overprepare for the future is that you can't know how the players' choices and the characters' actions might change the world. Those actions should matter and have consequences. That's what makes the game fun and authentic. When what happens during a session surprises you, it should be a moment of delight—not a moment of grumbling because you just lost a lot of preparation work.

Overpreparing means you'll end up doing work that you'll later throw out. So do the minimum you need to do to be comfortable running the game and no more.

Campaign Styles

You can run many different types of campaigns in Draw Steel, with some of the most common types discussed below. Any of the following concepts can be modified as you see fit to work for your campaign.

Long Arc

The long arc is a campaign model in which one villain or organization is behind almost every threat the heroes face. If every adventure sees the heroes battle the forces of Ajax or the vampire Count Rhodar von Glaur before eventually facing this main villain in their final adventure, then you've got yourself a long-arc campaign. Long arcs allow the heroes to learn of and even meet the villain several times before the final showdown, allowing for the creation of personal drama with the main antagonist and their underlings.

If you're planning on running a long-arc campaign, you might want to make sure the villain's threat is quieter at certain times. Doing so gives the heroes a chance to take a respite now and then and work on their downtime projects.

Adventure of the Week

An adventure-of-the-week campaign lets the heroes face an entirely new threat each time a new adventure kicks off. During their first adventure, they might face cultists bringing an undead horde to life. In the next, they battle a band of pirates hell-bent on taking control of a peaceful island. Then it's a race to catch a group of time raiders before they disappear across the timescape with their kidnapped victims.

Adventure-of-the-week campaigns can give the heroes plenty of downtime between adventures, since the quests aren't connected. However, they often lack the personal drama that comes from a campaign with recurring threats and villains.

Looming Threat

A looming-threat campaign is a combination of the long-arc and adventure-of-the-week-types of campaigns. Although many adventures in the campaign contain individual threats, a few have events orchestrated by a recurring villain who the heroes face at the end of the campaign. The villain's forces might make brief appearances to harass the heroes in adventures that otherwise have nothing to do with them.

A looming-threat campaign allows the heroes to create personal drama with the main campaign's villain, while experiencing the variety of an adventure-of-the-week campaign.

Multiple Fronts

In a multiple-fronts campaign, several villains threaten people or locations the characters are bound to protect, with the heroes forced to prioritize the threats they face. While the heroes deal with one of their foes, the other adversaries advance their plans, growing in power and resources.

Multiple-front campaigns make the world feel authentic and alive, but they require more preparation, since you're juggling multiple villains and storylines at the same time.

Echelon Outline

As part of your worldbuilding, you can create an outline of the events that might occur in each echelon of your campaign. The farther these events get from the start of the campaign, the vaguer you can leave the details. The actions of the heroes should matter and influence the course of events, so don't plan too much. Otherwise, you might end up throwing out earlier preparation to make player and character decisions matter.

Your outline should include the plans of the villains in your campaign. Review Echelons of Play in Chapter 1: The Basics to get an idea of the threat level and stories the heroes should be experiencing at each stage of the campaign. An echelon outline might look like this:

  • 1st Echelon: The heroes protect the village of Gravesford in the Barony of Bedegar from the forces of Lord Saxton, an usurper and tyrant loyal to Ajax. Eventually, they must bring the fight to Lord Saxton's keep in Bedegar City.
  • 2nd Echelon: After toppling Saxton's keep, the heroes find a letter from Ajax detailing plans to amass powerful treasures from throughout Vasloria. The heroes can race to these locations to claim the treasures before Ajax's forces do.
  • 3rd Echelon: With some or all of the treasures secure, it's only a matter of time before Ajax's army seeks out the heroes. The characters can build a coalition of allies to face Ajax, but those allies first require help getting out from under the rule of the Iron Saint.
  • 4th Echelon: Ajax brings the fight to the heroes. If the Iron Saint loses, he retreats to his sanctum, where the heroes can follow if they dare.

Complications and Campaigns

If the heroes in your game took complications during character creation (see Complications), you should think about how the story of their complications might factor into the campaign. Complications aren't just a chance to add a benefit and a drawback to a hero. They're narrative hooks you can use to further draw the players into the campaign story.

Discuss the details of a hero's complication with that hero's player. Complications are intentionally vague, and any of their narrative details can be modified to make the hero's personal story fit into the campaign. With the details worked out, ask the player how the hero feels about the complication? Does the hero think the benefit is worth having the drawback? Are they actively trying to find a way to rid themself of the drawback but keep the benefit? Or maybe they want to be rid of the entire complication, benefit be damned!

Echelon Complication Outline

Once you understand a hero's desires for their complication, you can create an echelon outline for the complication to give the hero's backstory some narrative teeth throughout the campaign. Consider the following example.

Matt, playing Linn the talent, has the Elemental Inside complication. After discussing the details with the Director, Matt decides that years ago, Linn threw herself in front of a spell cast by Sorin the Brown, an evil earth elementalist. Sorin wanted to abduct Linn's talent mentor, a dwarf who was a perfect subject for her next deadly experiment. In taking decisive action, Linn saved her mentor but absorbed an angry force of earth named Bruulv. Sorin escaped and desires the return of her pet elemental. Meanwhile Linn is tougher thanks to the elemental within, but whenever she is dying, Bruulv takes control of her body and goes on a violent rampage.

Matt tells the Director that Linn enjoys the extra protection afforded to her by Bruulv, since it makes her a tougher hero, and she would like to find a way to keep her benefit while losing the drawback. The Director comes up with an echelon outline for Linn that will enrich the talent's story and have ties to the main campaign (which happens to be the example campaign in the echelon outline above).

  • 1st Echelon: After the heroes start riling up Lord Saxton's forces, Sorin offers her services to the tyrant for a chance to face Linn. During the heroes' assault on the keep, Sorin attacks.
  • 2nd Echelon: Assuming Sorin's defeat, Bruulv becomes even angrier, and can now try to wrestle control away from Linn whenever she is winded in addition to when she is dying. Linn finds a Crown of Elements, a special magic treasure that allows her to force Bruulv back to a "takes control only while dying" state as long as she wears it. The crown has other elemental powers too—and is one of the items desired by Ajax.
  • 3rd Echelon: As Linn and the other heroes build a coalition, an elderly high elf named Leaves of the Autumn Wind offers to enhance the crown, allowing the talent to speak directly to Bruulv. The catch is that Leaves needs a magic fire opal from the lair of a fire giant to enhance the crown.
  • 4th Echelon: With the crown enhanced, Linn can speak directly to Bruulv. By learning the elemental's history and desires through negotiation, she can see that Bruulv mostly wants to return to the City of Brass so they might once again see the raw elemental powers come together. If Linn can visit this city that is literally worlds away, she earns Bruulv's trust and the elemental stops taking over her form.

At each echelon, you should revisit your complication echelon outlines, since the actions of the players could change your plans. In the example outline above, if Sorin gets away after the battle with Saxton during the 1st echelon, the elementalist is likely to return and try to free Bruulv once again!