Summer got you thinking of new campaign ideas? Here are five more ‘campaign styles’ you should consider giving a try at least once.
There are so many different ways to play D&D. You might go on a hexcrawl, a pointcrawl, a dungeon crawl. Don’t wanna crawl? There are plenty of campaign styles that don’t involve you ever setting foot into a dungeon. The beautiful thing about there being so many ways to play is that each one can unlock something in the brain that seeps into your own personal style as a GM.
You might pluck hexcrawl adventure design for an intrigue-laden, roleplay-heavy campaign and find that it works surprisingly well, for instance. So if you wanna expand your campaign horizons, consider giving one of these campaign styles a whirl. Even just for a short campaign.
Gritty Realism
I feel like giving this a try is a rite of passage. You get to be a DM long enough, and you think, yeah, but what if the world felt real? And then, instead of realizing that means figuring out how to structure your worldbuilding to revolve around grain, roads, waterways, and easy access to salt, you start to think, “and that means life gets more granular.”
What makes a campaign gritty and realistic varies from one table to the next. But most often this means either nerfing Rests or stretching them out so they take longer. A Long Rest, for instance, might take a week. And a Short Rest a single day. It makes the game more of a grind. But you might also just have different injury rules, or require that the PCs have to eat and drink and might have to deal with bad food, so you ban spells like goodberries. If you start sprinkling in mechanics from survival games, or make PCs have to repair their armor or do the other maintenance stuff that vanilla D&D handwaves, you’re in gritty realism territory.
Empire Building
Much less gritty and/or realistic is the empire-building campaign style. Empire here is a loose term. If you’ve ever played a campaign like Pathfinder’s Kingmaker, then you know exactly what’s up here. The PCs get access to their own little corner of the realm, and proceed to carve out a niche of power and intrigue and diplomacy and the like.
If you want to be kings and queens, and princes and dukes, and to have a lot of faction roleplay and rules for how the kingdom handles the turning of the seasons, etc., that’s what this is.
Life Sim
Related in theme to both empire building and gritty realism, but radically different in terms of execution is the life sim campaign. These campaigns are all about a slice of fantasy life. What does it mean to be an adventurer in the world, which you can kind of see in the early parts of shows like Delicious in Dungeon or Frieren.
In this style of campaign, adventurers often have to deal with things like food and water, but that’s part of the fun of it. The DM describes all the weird treats they find. The PCs might well have their own plot of land, but it’s more like Stardew Valley than Crusader Kings 3. If you want to run a fantasy inn? This is the campaign style for you.
War – What Is It Good For
Speaking of which, there’s always the Military style Campaign. In this one, there’s a big fantasy war, and the players are recruits thereof. WotC had a recent version of this with the Dragonlance campaign, where players were swept up into the events of one of Krynn’s Wars of the Lance. This can be a fun style of campaign because it provides a little more structure, and it gives the PCs a little more responsibility in the world.
An ‘Evil Campaign’
And I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention the “evil” campaign. These are where you play with themes like oops all goblins, or whee all kobolds. I think an evil campaign is at its best when you don’t take it too seriously or get too gritty with it. It’s more like “pirate scum” who loot and plunder and act in their own self interest, that kind of makes it fun for everyone to feel a little rebellious, I’d say.
Have you ever played one of these campaign styles?
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Source: Bell of Lost Souls
