"You all meet in a tavern..." How to start a campaign

I'm currently running my first campaign (It has thus far been a success) and I had to come up with a rather interesting start for the players. This requires a bit of context; my players aren't big on creating their own histories or backgrounds for the start of a campaign. They generally pick general archetypes and rely upon the player to provide any background/history assuming it gains any scrutiny at all.

I started with a cold open with the players discussing (I allowed our pre-game banter to lead into the opening, they wanted to be traveling scoundrels) a plan to heist the locals in a city by arranging a bloc-party as a distraction. I let them make their typical assumptions about their races and backgrounds (At first, they later discovered the dramatic divergences from typical fantasy settings I had) before cementing the party together by having a mysterious hostile entity attack and force them on the run. Pretty standard seeming at first.

This comes into play much later on when they discover that for the entire first arc of the story they were actually in the dream world for this setting. And that they were, in fact, dream-folk that had been fashioned by the mysterious entity in a bid to escape to the real world (Though there were other entities manipulating this entity to create the P Cs in the first place). This let me not only justify the cold opening, their characters literally not existing before this opening scene, but all the discrepancies caused by their assumptions about the setting, as they could all be handwaved as being parts of the dreamworld...particularly, now that they've made it to the real world.

I must admit I take a certain amount of joy in taking the patterns my players have fallen into over the years, and manipulating and justifying them in-universe. Among other patterns I've twisted have been the bare bones ties between P Cs; they are now tightly bound together by a mutual paranoia towards those outside the party and a trust they reserve only for each other. And I've also torn down their stereotypical dismissive attitudes towards NP Cs; they count 4 NP Cs as trusted members of the party, that they regularly banter with. Formerly 5 NP Cs, before I revealed to them that one of their familiars had been a horrible psychopathic little tyrant, before they had met him and been charmed by him. They had actually been rather torn about getting rid of him, for reasons outside of mere pragmatism.

Granted this isn't really a very useful example for other G Ms to start a campaign; I tailored it very specifically both to my players and the story I had in mind.

My current Pathfinder campaign started with "You all meet in a slave auction. A quarry buys you all. A meteor strikes the carriage you are being transported in, killing the guards and leaving you free in the middle of the wilderness. What do?"

Tailoring the opening to the players and the game is generally the best way to do it.

Speaking of which, I'm planning a campaign starting either this week or next week, and I have no bloody clue how to start it. In short, the player characters (and lots of NP Cs) are Travellers, Magic The Gathering Planeswalkers without the copyright infringement. They're all fairly new at the Travelling business, but not so wet behind the ears I have to exposition everything ever. They will form, or will have already formed, a Covenant, basically in-game terminology for a party. Even as weaker Travellers, they could take on a small army of mortals in most Realms (dimensions). I have no idea how to open this, or what to do about the first adventure.

edited 7th Oct '13 8:38:50 AM by Exelixi

Why would you need to worry about copyright infringement? I mean, you're only using it amongst yourselves.

Anyways, what kind of campaign are you looking to run? Combat-focused? Mystery and intrigue? Character-based roleplay?

If your players are that powerful, introduce them in a suitably confined environment with clear and present danger, and make them work together to get out of the situation. This tends to bond superhero characters, since now they feel they owe each other something.

On page 1, I half-jokingly suggested that campaigns with Exalted-style power level can be started inside, say, an erupting volcano. The thing is, I was only half joking.

Someday, I'mma start a campaign exactly like this, only with an inn and a Dire Bear.

"You are all at the same branch of a certain major bank. What are each of you doing?"

"Ok, now as you are doing [whatever], 3 men stroll in with MP-9s. They spray some hapless civilian at the door with bullets and then announce loudly to the rest of the bank: 'ALL OF YOU WHO WANT TO LIVE, GET ON YOUR KNEES, HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK'. Two more men follow up with duffel bags, already stuffed with cash( mysteriously). Roll initiative..."

Another.

Each player is given a slip of paper naming another player character as their employer, and details on a meeting, all at the same place. They are explicitly told that their character has seen the face of their employer.

DM-"Having recieved your instructions, each of you make your way to the rendezvous to meet with your new mysterious employer. You all make it to the rendezvous at exactly the same moment, with the understanding that you are the only one who knows about this job, and that your employer is one person."

Cue ensuing confusion, wherein it is revealed that each player thinks they are the employee, and is confused as to why their employer doesn't recognize them from their previous meeting.

And then their collective shadows split off from themselves and reform in the centre to reveal their true employer.

"And then their collective shadows split off from themselves and reform in the centre to reveal their true employer."

"Santa?"

I now want to write/run a Shadowrun story where the Mr. Johnson is Santa.

I think for the February campaign I'm going to go with "you all meet in training camp for a super-soldier programme, having just been recruited and shot up with Super Serum."

Thoughts?

Do it.

How bad would it be if I ripped off the beginning of Uncharted 2 for my treasure hunter game?

My current campaign started with "you all responded to a job posting for bodyguards for a major trading guild." I also included in the setup a time length that they're going to be stuck working for the guild, so that they have time under which they feel some obligation to work together.

The players have actually really gotten into it so far - they post watches over their cargo when they're at the inn. One of the options I have in store is to give them a chance to renew their contracts when they're up, and I'm starting to think it's quite likely that they'll take it.

My first campaign started with the players going to the circus for a school trip.

Then the demon fetus attacked.

My Walking Dead-inspired game started with a flashback to the initial outbreak, then Time Skipped to several months later, when they were living off the land in rural Georgia. And trying to keep the land from living off them.

My first campaign started unimaginatively as the players being mercenaries in a camp and receiving their first mission.

In my second campaign the players all were princesses and woke up in the lair of an evil wizard. Then they had to fight themselves free.

I've got 2 groups, technically. group A is close friends, partially overlapping with group B. I'm using A as a test run of myself as a DM(haven't before), and they will form the core of party B and be hiring others to form a merc squad of sorts, serving the King along side some town guards and a detachment of Paladins. They're gonna be up against an island of cultists trying to bring about Ragnarok by releasing Loki's son Fenrir, a giant wolf.

group A's getting a fairly standard meet up, some in an Inn, one member's a druid they'll meet later on(she's expected to be late and it makes sense character wise so I'm rolling with it), gonna get some normal quests and a few encounters.

edited 27th Feb '14 7:33:40 PM by Joesolo

If I ever run a campaign, it'll probably start with everyone in a refugee camp during a war, whether as refugees or as people in charge or whatever, depending on the players's characters. unfortunately, said camp happens to be a touch too close to the border.

I'm years and years away from being comfortable enough to DM something though.

Re: princesses. holy crap that sound AWESOME

edited 2nd Apr '14 1:50:52 PM by Ellowen

My usual go-to for lazy campaign introduction is "You all meet in the town square as the mayor declares a general assembly."

Baelfyre usually starts hers with "You all wake up naked and chained to a wall."

And by usually, I mean always. That is how all of her campaigns start. Even campaigns where that doesn't make sense. Ostensibly, it's because she wants us to actually get into the mindset of our character without those pesky "mechanics" and "class abilities" and "gear" getting in the way, so that when we escape we can reference that point to understand just how our characters operate under pressure.

Realistically, though, she does it so she knows which players to weed out. The ones who can't get it through their head that their character is more than just a race/class combination are the ones who usually struggle or start complaining.

Ulteriorilly, she also likes to picture our characters naked.

So, she's a perv.

Just started a one-off 5th ed game with my folks (which pretty much only happened 'cause I asked on my birthday) recently; we still haven't completed the thing yet.

Started pretty much in exactly the way I described above, only it was a zombie bear ^note (the stats for which don't actually officially exist, and the HP of which I buffed twice during the fight because it seemed to be going down too easily).

After they beat it, an illusion of a dude in robes showed up stating his intention to take over the city, and the party was sent to go deal with him. I plan on running this same one-off at least once more (Possibly for the local college's gaming club, and probably for my current party while the usual campaign's on hiatus), and maybe even starting a proper campaign in the same gameworld.

edited 3rd Apr '14 1:32:58 PM by Knowlessman

My current campaign opened with "You've all stepped through portals to the headquarters of the nigh-omnipotent organisation that has just recruited you."

My current campaign started with a werewolf, two vampires and a mage stumbling to another werewolfs camp.

This werewolf then got shot with a silver bullet.

One setting my RPG group did was very strongly influenced by Guns of the Patriots (i.e., a cyberpunk black ops squad). Our crew was one that had been working together for the last 6-7 years, so there was no Misfit Mobilization Moment here. The opening scene was the team having hitched a ride in an APC to the site of the mission.

HOWEVER, while we'd created our characters, and were clear on our own characters' attitudes/personas/etc, but not so much on the others. The GM told us to just engage in Seinfeldian Conversation as our characters, to get a feel for the team. From the conversation, we learned:

• Two of the characters were a Battle Couple
• One had lost a spouse a couple years back (divorce, not death)
• One was a Death Seeker
• Another one, the Token Evil Teammate, had, in the past, earned the nickname "The Human Blender" among the mercenary community

Now that last one's interesting.