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Creating a Campaign Guide

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 20
In television series and similar ongoing media, there is the concept of the “story bible,” a document setting forth the essential information about the characters, story, and setting of the series so that later writers can produce scripts with some amount of consistency. In a similar vein, Game Masters can create a campaign guide to help keep track of their creation and to supply players with an overview of an ongoing campaign. This way, the players have some idea what to expect and can create and play their characters to best fit into the overall setting. The most important function of a campaign guide is to make your players excited to delve into the setting and play the game! Consider the following when preparing a campaign guide.

System

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 20
The default assumption is that your game will use the rules as presented in the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. Many GMs customize the Core Rules to fit their preferences, play style, and players, and the campaign guide is the perfect place to set out these custom house rules so the players know what to expect and so customizations or exceptions remain consistent throughout the campaign. You’ll also want to lay out character creation guidelines for the game and clarify what is expected or prohibited, so players know their choices going into the process of designing their characters.

For example, you might ban a particular sorcerer bloodline or other character option simply because it doesn’t fit into the setting and does not exist there (at least so far as anybody knows). On the other hand, you can set up a rule that PCs cannot be assassins or choose evil as their alignment because you’d rather not deal with the complications those possibilities entail. That doesn’t necessarily mean assassins and evil alignments don’t exist in the setting; they’re just not an option for the players.

Setting and Scope

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 20
The meat of a campaign guide is the description of the setting: where and when the campaign takes place, and in particular, the “base state” or status quo with which the characters should be familiar. Doing this effectively can be more difficult than it sounds, so follow these guidelines to keep this interesting and on point.

Broad Strokes: You don’t need to hand your players a 200-page document detailing every corner of the campaign world and every major event in its history. Even if you do have such a document, it’s probably best to hit new players with just the highlights. Focus on where the campaign starts and, if you describe other parts of the world at all, do so in generalities. You can always fill in more information as the campaign progresses.

Focus on the Present: Historical context is good, particularly historical events that have an impact on the present day, but focus on giving the players the status quo as it will be when the game starts. Don’t focus too much on irrelevant historical detail; if an account of a particular battle hundreds of years ago doesn’t impact the present day, summarize or cut it altogether.

Enliven with Detail: Try to give the players some essential details about daily life in the setting. What do people eat? What kind of clothes do they wear? What do they do for fun? What is a typical day, week, or year like? What are some expressions people use? These details form valuable hooks players can use to get into character during the game.

Story

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 20
You may or may not want to include story content in your campaign guide, depending on the type of game you want to run. You may find it helpful to fill the players in on the type of story you want to tell, so they can assist with their character concepts. Is this an epic fantasy wherein local heroes discover a terrible threat to the world at large, or a focused struggle for domination over the guilds and noble houses of a single city?

Some GMs prefer a freeform campaign, starting the players off with just a setting and their characters’ backstories, letting the rest unfold as play progresses. The story is written as the players choose what their characters do and the dice determine the outcome of those actions. Other GMs have a particular kind of story in mind and try to deftly steer the players, allowing them a wide range of choice within the bounds of the story, but keeping it focused on a particular field of play; for example, a player who wanted his character to go off exploring some lost ruin in a campaign about warring guilds might discover something hidden in the ruins that has some bearing on the main conflict, bringing things back around to that story.

Voice

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 20
Voice is how the guide conveys the content to the reader. It includes choices like viewpoint, tone, and style, which can not only affect how the content is conveyed, but can also provide additional information and insight for players in and of itself. The two main approaches to voice are an “inside” or subjective voice, or an “outside” or objective voice.

Subjective Voice: This method presents some or all of the content of the campaign guide in the form of fictional documents or dialogues, such as travelogues, journals, letters, or scholarly works written by people in the setting. Subjective voice documents are heavy with setting-specific flavor and present a strong point of view, a fictional window into the world for the reader. On the other hand, they can be biased or incomplete, and they tend to provide less information in the same amount of space than documents written in objective voice. These qualities can be good things, especially if you want players to initially receive somewhat biased or inaccurate information about things, but crafting such documents typically involves more work. Subjective voice presentation can serve double duty by introducing players to the fictional authors of the documents in addition to the subjects they discuss. For example, if the party is likely to interact with a certain sage or noble in the setting, perhaps part of the campaign guide can be written in that character’s voice. This way, when the game starts, the players already have a feeling of “knowing” that character.

Objective Voice: This style of guide is written from the perspective of the Game Master and exists outside of the setting. This approach allows for a broader perspective in campaign guide materials, in which you can provide comparisons to modern examples and discuss things a subjective author might not know. Objective voice tends to be more concise because you can say exactly what you mean without having to phrase it in terms an insetting character would use. This lets you provide more information in less space, saving time and effort if they are at a premium.

Combining Voices: Of course, you can also mix subjective and objective voice in your guide. You might use a primarily objective voice to provide the bulk of the information and then put the information into context with snippets or examples of subjective voice, such as quotations from in-setting characters or even more involved things like sketched-out maps.

Publication

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 21
Once the campaign guide document is prepared, you need to consider how to get it in front of the players. Modern media and desktop publishing create a wide range of options for sharing a campaign guide.

Print

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 21
The first and simplest option is to print the campaign guide and give each player a copy. It could be printed out at home or produced professionally at a copy shop. Larger campaign guides might be held in binders or report covers, and print shops offer a variety of binding options, from square tape-bound to plastic spiral binding (with or without cardstock or plastic covers). These options add durability and quality to your guide, making it easy for players to use and reference over time, but might make you less inclined to make changes as you go.

Electronic

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 21
You can also publish a campaign guide as an electronic document, easily shared via e-mail or hosted online. With laptops or handheld devices, players can still reference these documents during play.

The other main electronic option is to publish your campaign guide as a web page or website. Web page design programs make this a fairly simple matter even for non-programmers, and there are many inexpensive web-hosting services. Players can access a web-based campaign guide from anywhere with an Internet connection, can save or print the pages for their own reference, and can even actively edit the guide (if the GM allows it). Unless the site is secured, web publication also makes your campaign guide publicly available to anyone who wants to view it, allowing other Game Masters to benefit from your ideas.

Even if you publish your campaign guide in print for your players, you may want to have an electronic version as well for backup, further additions, and ease of reference, especially if you want to make the guide publicly available.

Copyrights

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 21
Most published RPG products are copyrighted, so you should take care not to violate the law by republishing parts of them without permission. Paizo has a Community Use Policy (paizo.com/communityuse) that explains how you can safely use some of our copyrighted materials in your campaign guide.

Other Media

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 21
Game Masters have taken advantage of desktop and online multimedia in recent years to create other ways of providing information to players. If you have musical talent, opening each session with custom theme music can be a powerful way of getting players into the right mindset. You can also create audio podcasts for your campaign, or even take things a step further and use video editing to create a “campaign trailer,” like a trailer for a film, which you can then distribute among your players or share online. This doesn’t have to involve a lot of original video; you can use still images and artwork and give them motion through effects like pans or zooms, with different dissolves and transitions between images.

Archives of Nethys

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