Dungeon Master Inspiration
DMI is a podcast made to share the tricks of the trade of DMs with a wide range of experience levels, from fresh, new DMs to wisened masters of the position.
We focus on exploring topics within the world of DnD that consistently pose problems to DMs, such as developing characters, the use of monsters & NPCs, and combat. You'll hear from a variety of DMs speaking on a plethora of intriguing controversial issues in-depth.
No matter where you are in your DnD journey, we've got something worth listening to.
Dungeon Master Inspiration
Taking Your D&D Campaign to the Next Level with Strategic Theming
Get ready to unlock the secrets of theming in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns! This episode, filled with insights and strategies, promises to elevate your D&D campaigns to a new level of engrossing storytelling. We are delighted to be joined by renowned gaming enthusiast, Jay Cerulean. Jay and I delve into the exciting world of theming, exploring everything from the crucial role of a pantheon to the thrill of creating new game worlds. We discuss the importance of maintaining player interest and share our experiences and tips for dealing with the challenges and curveballs that come with D&D campaigns.
Theming isn't always about the big picture; it's also about the tiny details that make your D&D world rich and vibrant. We chat about how to use monsters and biomes to enhance your campaign, and share our tactics for creating narratives that keep players hooked. We also discuss how to effectively pitch your campaign and ensure the prelude sets the stage right for your players. Jay and I both agree that a cohesive theme is a magnet for players, and if done right, can skyrocket the engagement level of your campaign.
Our conversation takes another interesting turn as we dive into the art of creating Non-Player Characters (NPCs). We exchange ideas on how to develop a list of names, races, and vibes to keep your campaign interesting and diverse. We also discuss strategies for dealing with potential fights, and share our favorite resources for determining the best placement for themed locations. Trust us, after hearing our chat, you'll be well-equipped with a unique arsenal of ideas and tips to take your D&D theming to the next level. So gear up and join us on this thrilling adventure!
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All right, welcome back to episode six of DMI. Today our topic is gonna be theming and we are joined by Jay Cerulean. I would never join you, would never join us on this great little adventure of ours.
Speaker 2:No, I definitely haven't been here for a number of the episodes. That'd be insane.
Speaker 1:Theming is a very large topic that I think is very, very expansive, and it's probably the most important part of any session because it really sets the dynamic for how you build all of your encounters With me. I like to start based on what type of game I'm running. What are your kind of thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:I usually try to pick a bit right, whether it be like oh, I'm doing a story with all the gods or something, whether it be like mythological gods, d&d gods or pirates or something, and kind of base it on that as to where I want the focus to be, because in one, even if you're doing making a whole world or taking a world that somebody else has made, you can get a number of themes within the one world.
Speaker 1:So it kind of depends on what vibe you're going for yeah, and for me, when I'm theming, my major question really starts out on am I running more of a fight campaign? Am I running something that is looking at maybe rebuilding a town, a political campaign, a mystery campaign? That's really my starting point usually, as I ask myself what value am I trying to bring to my players so that they stay engaged and they actually want to chunk out the time in their busy schedules to actually play in my campaign? Cause that's a big thing with D&D, the largest nightmare is scheduling and if you're not providing value and entertainment for your players, they're going to be less interested in actually chunking out that time.
Speaker 2:So if you're just for anything with that like if you're just doing like run of the mill, exact identical things, honestly something super interesting that people want to dive into they're just not going to be like oh yeah, I want to go do the thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would say that there's definitely an alternate way to how I do it that I think has a lot of merit, which is starting with your world and then choosing what kind of campaign you're going to run second. I think that's a very valid way to do it. That being said, I personally just like to start out with well, I want to run a mystery campaign, because if I want to run a mystery campaign then I can choose my world, like I could go off of the prebuilt campaign of Strodd, use that same kind of atmosphere where I could really grab from one of my homebrew worlds or something else to kind of give me that option to decide where I want my setting to be. But sometimes you can choose the actual physical setting of the campaign and then decide what kind of campaign you want to run off of that, which I know a lot of DMs do.
Speaker 2:And it depends on if you're doing a world per campaign or multiple campaigns in the world. If, like you're doing one themed campaign per world, right, let's say a pirate, because that's one I've been working on for a little bit.
Speaker 2:You're not going to make a world that's also going to be a mystery thriller, because the world needs to incentivize your story and encourage whatever aspects of your story that you want brought out to the front, whereas if you're trying to make a world and then make campaigns within it, you're able to then have a world that has, you know, a coastal area where there's pirates and you have your castles where you can have a night and royals type of stories in the same like larger world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I do personally really enjoy building a world that can host multiple campaigns in it, and the reason that I do that is simply time. It saves me time. I don't always have to go back to the drawing board every single time that I want to start a new session. That being said, your mileage may vary greatly from what I do, but I would say a big part of every world is planning your pantheon, and we already went over it. But with your pantheon there's kind of two ways to do it. You either build it before you build your world or you build it in response to how your world is functioning, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for me, I think with any pantheon it's going to be a little bit of both. A good example is what's your main motivator for the plot? Right, and it might be something to do with the God, right, and that can motivate how the theme ends up going. And, depending on how you're setting it up, the world's also going to affect them. So they've kind of built off of the world and back into it, kind of like that a giant loop of what's building life and it is pretty much like that spherical loop like you talked about.
Speaker 1:I just try to focus more on picking out which gods I have the intent to use before I actually go back through and remove what I don't think is valuable. I would say a very large challenge with that is for me. I'm building my world's top down and when you're theming a campaign and building a world top down to run those kinds of campaigns and it is a lot more man hour intensive so when theming your campaigns it might make sense to build out the whole world roughly and then let your players build out the rest of them, the rest of it within the campaign.
Speaker 2:And like, no matter what, if I try to build the campaign right and I'm like this is the path that they're supposed to do, Unless there's no other way for them to do anything else, they're going to go to that spot where you weren't expecting anyone to go, and it was just kind of mentioned in an offhand comment of oh yeah, there's this island over there. So much would be like we're stopping, we're going there and kind of using that as a point of okay, what do I need to focus on as well? And kind of improving the world a little bit as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would definitely say when you're themeing your campaign, a big thing to look at is take regardless of if it's a homebrew world or a premade world find a copy of the world map and start with the world map and plan roughly what different areas are going to be useful. If you want to run a pirate campaign, just take print off a copy just for yourself and circle that area where the pirates are prevalent, like, just do circles of like roughly where you want things to be. I noticed that that is something that has helped my workflow greatly because it shortens my downtime quite a bit, and then I kind of know for the future what I want to do. Even on the Sword Coast you can kind of do it. You can circle where there's different things. Like, if there's a large volcano on your world map, that's probably a pretty good place to put an oaky, spooky bad guy.
Speaker 2:Like with that kind of the building your overall world, making those like as you're building your world, you also have to think of who's where and what are they doing. For, like instance, if you're building your world map right and you have a peninsula, there might be a city or something there that you can then build something out of. And kind of looking at given I'm pay attention to the states of civilizations a little more than most people but kind of finding these points at where you're oh, someone would have settled here and made a civilization. Kind of as you're building your overall world and then expanding on those civilizations into you can even make minor themed civilizations of oh, I want this to have this kind of vibe or that kind of vibe within them. Kind of using your maps to help build your cities and nations.
Speaker 1:And if you want to hear more about building world maps, stay tuned. Next week we're going to do a whole episode on how to build a world map and kind of give some insight as to our methods and hopefully inspire you to kind of build your own. But yeah, the world map has so much to do with how you theme your campaign. Really looking at it beforehand super helpful. Deciding what nations look like on your map really depends on your experience that you want to go for. You really do need to do some planning before you start a campaign. If there's a nation that is a war hungry nation, they're going to be a little bit larger than other nations. Unless there's a coalition that has recently defeated them, then they might be pushed back.
Speaker 1:So do some light work on your world map, but leave it mostly for your players to find out as time goes on. Realistically pick where they're starting, pick your theme circle, that area and just kind of ignore it for right now. But I definitely would say the most useful thing you can add to your binder as a DM is a world map just for you to take notes on. Right on circle, mark up all you want that you will never show your players. I think that's a very useful tool that I've found, at least within my own DM binder. So I have a question, and this is kind of one that I've been pondering when is it the right time to build a new world versus just run another campaign in the same world? Because I have spent thousands of hours on three homebrew worlds and I tend to not like to leave my homebrew worlds because I Dread the idea of completely starting over again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so like I think it depends on if you feel like there's something to explore still, so in and this is like in normal games too If you play like, for example, because it's been released how many times a million and two, I think skyrim, every single thing in the map of skyrim has been explored. So people have been waiting for that next game so they can go and explore something new in a completely new place. So it kind of depends on when you especially if you have very big homebrew worlds that you're making when that world has been Exhausted of things that are actually interesting and unique to that world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and in skyrim is a wonderful example of that. Other great examples would be like. I mean, I'm pretty sure every aspect of Zelda has been explored at this point Especially a lot of those older ones, like maybe in tears of the kingdom.
Speaker 2:There's stuff that's not yet, but most of them everything's been explored and so you can.
Speaker 1:You can do these fun little things that a lot of game producers like to do, where it's like loop back in time or jump forward a thousand years. I would say that that's a very fun thing you can do. Just make sure you plan where and make sure nations move.
Speaker 2:If you're gonna change around your world map just because After a thousand years I promise you that the country of I'll use a magic name in a straw is not in the same place Like it's gonna move you can, especially if you're jumping forward thousands of years in time, the map itself will change Something that was, you know, hidden away Because of where your cotton and slide might now have come up far enough for it to be rediscovered and explored and kind of, and maybe some big bad is hiding in those depths and has been just A sleep waiting and when you're theming your maps.
Speaker 1:I know we talked about using this and using monsters. Monsters are a very important thing to do when you're theming things. Pick kind of like, what rough? Like is this a forest, are you in a planes? Because there's this really cool thing if you choose your areas and what kind of biome they are. For those of us who are bigger into science, when you're choosing what biome your campaign is gonna be in, it makes it a lot easier to plan what monsters you're gonna use, because there are plenty of Websites out there that have lists of what monsters live in biomes. There's random generators where you can choose a biome and then you don't actually have to worry about building out every single encounter and Figuring out, well, what fits here, what fits here, what monster can I use? Then you can just kind of look up a table and be like, oh, all of these monsters are gonna be found in a forest.
Speaker 2:Now I can just choose a general thing and with, like, making those Rant, those extra like random encounters, you can also always do something. If, like, you just have been walking for Two sessions or something, throw in bandits, something generic, oh, they just happen to be there. But by adding those like, especially if you can find a generator that'll come up with something for your like Environment. It makes it a lot more interesting than if it's just someone's here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I would say a big advantage to theming your campaign certain monsters, theming where you're at, and Planning all of these different themes to kind of fit together, making your mystery theme and theming your monsters and making it really inclusive is it's going to, if you have this nice little bow wrapped around your entire thing, it makes this nice, neat little package that you can sell to new players and and like I hate to say it, but you are kind of selling your campaign to new players when you're starting a new campaign, like realistically, even me, someone that has a larger group of D&D players that I know For me to get my players interested and the people in that group not everyone's gonna care about every campaign I run.
Speaker 1:So what I have to do is I have to be like I'm running a mystery campaign where it's gonna take place in a dark swamp. There's gonna be all of these really nitty-gritty monsters that you're gonna be chasing after as you try to figure out what the Big bad is trying to do as they constantly, relentlessly chase you. That's much more engaging than oh, I have a mystery campaign, would you be interested in playing? It helps you writing your preludes a little bit, especially for that like pitching part where you don't have players that are like I want to play in your campaign, like it helps you get interest so that you can write an actual, true, like session zero prelude where you go over everything in the world before you start your campaign.
Speaker 2:This is a fun little thing I've done for prelude, which is because everyone the generic oh you all and are just in this tavern, Kind of boring, kind of played out is kind of for that session zero, to introduce players to the world and this could even be just done over like DMs, not even like in person is give them like a mini, like 30 minute session of basically their character getting to that tavern and why are they at that tavern? And, like for mine, oh, one player they crashed nearby on their ships, Another one was just there, like already for unrelated reasons, and just kind of helping to create the world without making it feel as forced. Well, obviously, in any campaign there's going to be, especially in your first session, a little bit of railroading, a little bit of that like well, there's four of you sitting at this table, you're all going to be in the same party.
Speaker 1:It's very, very challenging when you're starting out with that and kind of also having a theme makes it easier. If your theme is a dark, scary, mystery theme in a swamp and you give that to people as an interest before you give them that world story, that's going to give those players time to be like okay, well, what races might I see in a swamp? Well, I could choose this race for my character, and it gives your players more of an opportunity to actually build characters that are going to fit the theme of your campaign, which is going to make it a more interesting story, and that's something that I feel like gets overlooked far more than it should. Now there is always the looming disaster of NPCs. Npcs are an absolute living nightmare.
Speaker 1:You kind of have like three ways to do it. You can either a go on a random website and try to find ones that other people have made as home brews and pick random names for them and take some. Take and borrow someone else's work. If you have friends that are interested in D&D your other. Your second option is just to use the pre-made ones that D&D and other ones use. I tend to go for this for some of my characters, so like. For example, there's this wonderful book called the Dungeon Masters Guides to Non-Player Characters. It's got like thousands of NPCs in it. I own that book. I really like it. I'll use it as inspiration for some of my characters, but I won't take exact things out of it, but I do think that is a very useful tool. That being said, the last option you kind of have is just taking a character sheet and duking it out with your own imagination and building it from square one. That's what I tend to do, but it is by far the most taxing way to do it.
Speaker 2:So for me, when I'm making like NPCs especially for like, because you're going to have your cities and towns and people they're going to end up at them it's kind of having a list. It doesn't have to be for a specific town, you can modify it. You can also have this is a major town they're going to keep going to. We were going to need some like staple NPCs, but by creating like a list, you just have a list of like character names, character names, what like. Are they a human, are they elf, are they a tiefling? What are they? And then vibes so like one might be a laid back like bar keep, someone else might be like a laid back, like a carefree, something else, and you just kind of have those couple things and then if you want to create a voice, you can use those to help create your voice for them and just having them be your shop keep and just kind of having that super basic. Doesn't need to be a full character, but enough to like have something there, yeah.
Speaker 1:Now, when you're picking NPCs, the biggest piece of advice I can give you is have at least three character sheets behind your DM screen of different classes, races, whatever, three different stat blocks with attacks planned, because, I guarantee you, either your party is going to try to convince them to fight with them or they're going to pick a fight, and when that happens, you need to be prepared. Don't attach a name to it, just have three of those and then one of your random NPCs. If they pick a fight, be like okay, this seems fitting, for let's say that they go into the local potion store. I have three character sheets in front of me. There's a fighter, there's a fighter Rogue and there's a sorcerer. If they come into the magic shop and pick a fight, I'm gonna grab that sorcerer sheet, I'm gonna slap a name on it and combat can go right away. I don't have to like scramble for a random stat block. I do highly recommend that.
Speaker 2:Some of that comes with knowing your players well enough, like if you have a, if you have a party who you know aren't or just gonna try to talk to people and maybe talk a little too much to people and Sometimes just follow the enemies into their base. It happens.
Speaker 2:We've seen it happen. You don't necessarily need to have a full stat block for those NPCs because you know that party is just gonna be like yeah, sure, leave me to the butchering table instead of actually like putting up a fight. Well, first, if you have a party who's gonna walk up to your tap like your, you know blacksmith and be like Give me a hundred percent off on that, and the blacksmiths would say no, and they're gonna try to steal it. There's go. You know your party's gonna make a fight happen and again.
Speaker 1:That's why I say don't leave names on them, but always have like three characters character sheets filled out without names on them, because I guarantee you someone's gonna push that Button at least once. Even in my most peaceful campaigns I have ever had, I have that one player that just wants to poke the big red button and I have to be prepared well, that's how you have your level 20 fighter as your tavern keeper, just just to be casual sitting there, you know, chilling the party.
Speaker 2:mess with them, they die. They lose that fight absolutely.
Speaker 1:I love that idea.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 1:So one thing that I do I do think is often overlooked is Almost nowhere on the internet Do they give advice for how to pick when a swamp should be, where your themed places in your world should be. You're picking for themed places, themed countries. What not? Your best resource you can ever have is go find a random Geology book for kids. It is going to be your best friend if you don't really want to get into geology or politics. Get a random history book, get a random geology book.
Speaker 1:Aim towards like third, fourth grade. You really don't have to pay much attention, but it is super helpful and I know it's not D&D related, but it has probably been the biggest thing for helping me theme because I I personally was in college for science for a long time, so I understand what biomes need to be together on either side to make a swamp. Most people don't have that knowledge, whereas if you get like a fourth grade Science book on environmental science, it's gonna be like, oh well, you're gonna find swamps next to a forest and a river and that's gonna help you quite a bit Then.
Speaker 2:For some levels. It's also just if you you can look at a map and see these some of some of the different biomes. Like Great example in the United States, if you look on the West Coast you have a bunch of green, then it suddenly turns to like sand and brown, yeah, and then the mountain range Is what's causing that sudden change on the map. So kind of also just looking at the general geography of the world, which maybe me as a history major, where we have to pay attention to why is this place here, is part of that.
Speaker 1:But yeah, and I definitely think that's important now when you're theming your campaigns. I'm gonna rope back to monsters for a minute. Make sure that you are planning your monsters Ahead of your campaign. You can always re-skin a monster. You cannot always Do that in the moment, though.
Speaker 1:If you're grabbing a monster like, let's say, the false hydra, it's one of what's one of both of our favorite monsters of all time. False hydras are gonna be mostly found in planes and in forests. I know that well in advance. So I I have to choose whether I want my players to be surprised by it being there or whether I want it to be like oh yeah, a false hydra being there kind of makes sense. So that's kind of one of those things of if I'm going to put a false hydra in a desert, I have to have a reason why that false hydra is in the desert. So that comes back to theming your campaign.
Speaker 1:If your big bad of your campaign is a wild scientist doing experiments and trying to figure out exactly how he can change the world to make it in his own warped image, maybe he's been taking random monsters and chucking them in places where they shouldn't be. So a false hydra in a desert that makes sense, because he abducted this false hydra, shoved it in a desert to see if it would survive, and then it grew way bigger than it should have been because there was nothing to stop it. Things like that are very important to pay attention to and you'll see that a lot with creatures like for that wild scientist Honestly, that could be anything like a dragon Dragons live long enough. They're curious enough where that could definitely be a possibility.
Speaker 2:And then what's just? In general, monsters tend to be kind of thrown around into pretty like stereotypical places like Sphinx's. You're going to find them in a desert temple even though they could be anyway. So kind of making sure there's ways to have something a little more interesting if you need it a little surprising so that it's not just hitting the basic check marks of a war on a desert adventure Sphinx check, mummy check.
Speaker 1:And that's where those tables because I know DND beyond has it on there where it tells you every single monster that lives in that region can be super helpful for adding some spice while still meeting animals that are going to live in that biome. Another great way to do this, I'm sorry you can get them anywhere on the planet those three, five handbooks, the DND first edition handbooks. There are some monsters that we're not translated over that people haven't seen unless they were playing in first or third edition. You can go back to those and I think it's definitely a good decision to on occasion pick those up, because some of those old books you can get like slightly used copies a lot cheaper than other than even a modern book on eBay or something else from people that don't really want them anymore because they don't have the shelf space. I mean most of us as DND players. We either have gone full digital and I know we can get most of the stat blocks on there, or you are like me and you have had to buy a bookshelf just for your DND books because they've exploded all over your house. There's a few too many, just a couple. Overall, though, I do think that it is a very good decision to kind of play at that angle, and I know this is kind of going to be a shorter episode.
Speaker 1:We were focused on just kind of getting some of these ideas out about theming or the next couple of episodes we're really going to dive into the concept of how you can theme your campaign, how you can theme your battle maps and how you can theme your world maps and really go into monsters later.
Speaker 1:This is going to be kind of a series that we're going to go on and follow this path downwards. We just wanted to do a real short introduction, just so that it kind of got some of the base ideas out of the way and people could have some time to be really thinking about it before we went into some of the more intricate topics. So thank you for listening to this point if you are still here. If you would like to see more content from us, check out our YouTube channel. We upload unique videos there, product reviews and other ideas for people that are interested. We also have a Patreon if you'd like to support the show. On there we do put out articles that are just elaborations from the show, things that we thought we should expand upon, and they're all in nice neat little formats so that they look similar to how D&D books look, and they're just kind of a nice little.