How I write a Tirenia campaign

Now that I've got a couple of Tirenian campaigns under my belt, and another about to wrap up shortly, I thought that you might find it interesting how I go about writing a Tirenian campaign! I prefer to run shorter games with a strong story arc running through them. with multiple mini-campaigns building towards the larger story. I'll use my Carnevale campaign as an example.

During Session 0, I'll hash out the idea for a story based on what I'm interested in doing and what the players are telling me. I'll be upfront with the premise, which might be as simple as just the setting for the adventure, or a simple scenario. Once we've negotiated the premise and the players are happy, they can create their characters, figure out how they relate to that initial pitch. For the session 0, the high pitch was just 'it's Fantasy Italy.' Nice and broad. The players liked Venice, so we set the game in Vanzenia (which has since been renamed Selenizia - Vanzenia was just me putting the letters in Venice into a blender.) The players decided that they wanted to be the youngest generation of a noble family that had fallen into poverty, and they gave me a lot of bonds and backstories.

After Session 0, I take what they've told me and use that to figure out the plot. This is generally 'what's been going on up to this point in time.' I like games with a lot of mystery, so this is where I figure out who the villains are, what they want, how they relate to each other, what they've done so far, what they might do next, how the players are personally connected to what's going on, that sort of thing. I also figure out what I imagine the end point is going to be. I do NOT bother figuring out how I'm going to get to that ending! This is also where I do some reading about the history, which can give me some good information. 

The players wound up giving me contradictory information about their family. Rather than telling them they were wrong, I decided that that was what the campaign was going to be about - their lost missing evil sibling, who no one knew about, who would be in disguise as an ally. I also found a medieval superstition that Venice was going to sink into the lagoon because it was too sinful, and decided to go with that as the overall plot. Since in my world, Fantasy Venice is ruled by red dragons, that gave me another villain, and I made their father be part of a secret society of devil-worshippers as well.

Once we actually started playing, I like to think of the campaign as being in three acts. Each act lasts as long as they need to. During Act One, the aim is to make the story bigger. After every session, I like to give hints as to multiple things that the players could do next, and also be open to them saying what they want to do next. I throw way more plot hooks at the players than they can achieve, and get them to tell me which one they're interested in following. So this is all about expanding things out, seeing what the players bite, what they don't bite. Characters or plot hooks that they're not interested in get repurposed or ditched altogether; characters or plot hooks that they ARE interested in get made more important. I remember Neil Gaiman saying that when he wrote Sandman, he thought of it as being like juggling: he'd throw out plot hooks with no idea of what he was going to do with them at the time, just so that they'd be there later when he figured it out.

So in our Fantasy Venice game, in the first sessions the players' home was destroyed, a revolution started stirring across the city, and a mysterious saint showed up. introduced as many of their bonds as major supporting characters as I could. The players decided to take shelter with a benevolent small-time crime boss (rather than the church, or cousins in the nobility, or any other option), and consistently rejected any plots to regain their lost prestige or wealth in favour of finding out what was going on. So much for my subplot inspired by Merchant of Venice's Portia and her chests of gold, silver and lead! They were interested in chasing the family servant who betrayed them, but not in investigating the merfolk who had been hired to destroy their manor. There were some big surprises here: Antonio the dockhand was supposed to be a minor character, but got catapulted to stardom. The red dragons completely stole focus and became the main villains. And the PCs had a weird experience exploring a dragon's manor that was meant to be weird set dressing, with which they became utterly obsessed - WHY does the dragon have an aboleth in his basement?

In Act Two, we've pretty much set up what all the different playing pieces are. The players still get to choose where they want to go and which storylines they want to follow every session, but by now I know what the main plots are that they're following, and who the major characters are. It's time to reintroduce and extend the things that were popular, and start tying things together. I start looking for connections between things that have happened, so I can go, "Ah! These two things are actually linked together all along!"

In this case, I realised that the main plot was actually going to be the revolution against the red dragons. The players got to kick this off in a Les Miserables-esque adventure. They had to decide what unsavory alliances they'd make for the sake of the revolution. They found some leads that pointed towards the conspiracy their father had been involved in. I decided that the red dragon whose house they'd attacked would be part of the conspiracy too, and the aboleth would be a part of it as well (they were 'milking' it and using its slime as part of their plan.) Antonio got more and more appearances, and the players continued to invest in him as a character at every opportunity.

The third act is when you realise that everything's expanded out as far as it's going to go, and it's time to start bringing it all back in. I make a list of every major NPC and plot point and start figuring out how to bring things back, pay off plot points, and bring everything towards the conclusion. I'll have a better idea now of what the end point is, and how to reach it. This is where you make it look like everything was planned all along! The shorter the third act is, the better - it should really barrel towards a final conclusion!

In this case, the players walked into an ambush and died. Their souls were saved by a powerful fairy (one of the characters' bonds), who gave them a lot of the exposition and final clues they were missing. A mysterious key that someone had been carrying around as a trinket got used as a relic to open the door from the afterlife back into the real world. From there, the conspiracy got wiped out almost off-screen (since they didn't really care too much), their villainous sister got revealed (since they did care about her), the crime boss turned out to be the dragonborn's father and secretly a dragon (since they cared about him), Antonio turned out to be the big damn hero to fight the big red dragon (since they really, really cared about him). Finally, we discussed how the world had changed because of what they'd done, where they'd all go now the adventure was over, and wrapped it up.

Image: 'Processione in Piazza San Marco.' Gentile Bellini, c. 1496.