Campaign

Playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, there's kind of an understanding that, while one person is bring the DM for our current campaign, future campaigns will be run by different DMs - and me being the writer, it's pretty safe to assume that I'll be running the next one. So I've spent a pretty fair amount of time just trying to decide how I would go about that. I need some kind of world, I need to create a vast number of npcs, I need to have a coherent and ongoing plot with branching pathways, but I also need that world to persist around them and to continue on regardless of their actions.

Which made me start to realize that, for me, the best place to start would be in one of my stories. And with fantasy, the favorite story of mine that I have written thus far has to be On Bluebird's Wings - or Wings, as it has been called previously here on the blog. To have players run through a campaign with a story parallel to that of Wings, perhaps running across the characters and choosing to either assist or ignore them. Perhaps this could even explain some of the things that Arianna missed while she was traveling alone.

And what would be especially cool would be if the final boss fight for the campaign was the same as the novel - not exactly, of course, because I plan for Arianna's final fight to not have her be accompanied by a group of adventurer's, but to make a sort of alternate ending where they join together to defeat the walking storm. Speaking of whom, I should really probably give him an actual name.

I think the most challenging part of all of that is going to be to balance things. Arianna isn't particularly strong - she's not a fighter, and while she has an impressive amount of magic, it's not something that's necessarily combat oriented. She can turn into a small bird, she can talk to animals, and eventually I plan for her to learn how to use a bow - and that's about it. In the novel, her final fight will be about outsmarting her opponent.

But in DnD, while that's certainly an option, it's a lot harder to get around a guy who can crush you in his fist - especially if he gets good rolls. And especially having a decent number of players against a single boss, I'll want him to be a challenge, but I don't necessarily want him to be able to completely decimate them in a single blow. Thematically that is accurate, but gameplay-wise that's certainly not fun.

It's gonna take a lot of thought and planning. Probably a lot of winging it as I go. Fortunately I have plenty of time to think about it.