Professor dungeon master excels at doing human based campaigns. 'Terror in the streets', 'power behind the throne', and 'B6 the veiled society' are all modules he recommends and has run for his urban campaign.
The older WFRP adventures are all about this. People think the adventurers are chumps who can't fight demon incursions miss that most adventures are about basic chumps like you. A single demonette is a big deal. There are adventures where you walk around talking with people about stock fraud or finding a pie some snotlings stole. A fight is a big deal, from a legal duel to two robbery with knives.
@@L3monsta The WFRP system gives you maybe 6 Wounds. A typical human with a sword deals d6 damage. When you reach 0 the gnarly crit table comes out. Any sort of fight has weight. Daemons have their instability rule. They are abnormal things who can struggle to hold themselves together. It is almost as fun as the Stupidity rule of the falling giant rule.
Came here to say the same (about PDM). And to add that the little details and quirks seem to somehow be the invitation often. A player gets drawn in and things take off from there. Also, carousing is one way. PC woke up in ditch w his stuff stolen. Asked about to find out who did it and it turned in to a completely different campaign.
Think about the Conan movies. Thulsa Doom knew Two Spells. But it took Conan a long time to bring him down because he had to get through the minions. Even in the second movie, where he faced a sorcerer and killed a god, the main problem for him to solve was dealing with the cultists. Most of the conflicts in both movies were against relatively normal people.
Really really low-level scenario: An old lady owns a cow. The cow is up a tree. How did it get there? How to get it down? That's what the PCs are for. Let them figure it out themselves. Bonus points for the DM if this somehow leads to something epic.
I think writing a human scale pre-packaged adventure is very do-able. My favourite one-shot that I sometimes pull off the shelf is about a corrupt guard captain who stole a big haul of gold from the city treasury. A guardsman goes to the players for help, not knowing who he can trust. The players need to act fast if they want to save an innocent man from hanging, and they stand to get a generous bounty for catching the actual criminals.
@@adamguthrey6160 well, see, a corrupt guard captain who stole a big haul of gold from the city treasury. A guardsman goes to the players for help, not knowing who he can trust. The players need to act fast if they want to save an innocent man from hanging, and they stand to get a generous bounty for catching the actual criminals.
In my BX campaign, the party has been exploring a megadungeon for 15+ sessions. The megadungeon is a sandbox with a multitude of options, puzzles, mysteries, and some monsters or monster-like adversaries. There are human elements from the town that have competing objectives. In our experience, this has drawn the PCs into human centric engagements. They've tried to poison a local militia's water supply and overthrow a Baroness, for example, in order to keep them from confounding the party's goals among the various factions in the dungeon. The cleric is currently trying to establish a loyal religious following to assist with work and establish a political foothold, to secure their continued access to the dungeon... and a few other things. It took time, but it did grow organically. Also, slow level advancement helped... as well as a lower fantasy setting.
Bandit's Keep is one of the most underrated channels (by subscriber count) in this space. I've gotten an immense amount of inspiration and creative thoughts from what you've done here over the years and I look forward to every new video.
Hi again Daniel. You said it in a past video. If you have to start with high levels, use King Conan as inspiration. The heroes will have help and resources. If the goal is to start from the bottom and face "human" challenges then we must use the onion method (Shrek would be proud) Adding layers of depth and difficulty where a human challenge is just the tip of the iceberg in a Levistus plot to escape from its prison of eternal ice and take over all hell... I got carried away with the iceberg. Anyway, great video and advices. Thx!
Writer of the Who Endures series here, I write and run D&D campaigns myself. The most humbling moment for me in my life is writing this big grand trilogy campaign module, tons of fun homebrew elements and really just using D&D as a "base" than anything else. First story is about stopping an eternal winter that's plagued the lands. Crops won't grow, going out to collect firewood is dangerous because you might freeze to death, but it sets up the greater narrative of all these Greater Powers battling for control over the material realm. Rather than being reactive and allowing things like the Permafrost to occur then saving the the realm, the story goes into taking up arms against powers greater than man and severing our destiny from the higher will. You know what my players said? It was too much. The first campaign of the three was the best, because it was small. It's cold outside, people are dying. Let's go stop that. I had put the least thought into it, the cosmology, factions, world history, everything else from later campaigns was what I was really proud of. But it was less fun because the stakes were just too high. They couldn't even connect to it anymore.
Reading Conan and other pulp weird tales has definitely given me an appreciation for focusing mainly on human foes with some occasional monsters thrown in to spice things up. The Frandor's Keep adventure module put out by Kenzer and co for Hackmaster(their version of keep on the borderlands) does a pretty good job of getting the players interested in the npc's of the area.
In the biggest german ttrpg “The Dark Eye” a common criticism is, that the scale is very human und mundane. I think in the example adventure in the core rules you save a sheep from some cliff (using all the maneuver rules and teaching them). It is a completely different feel from D&D and it’s derivative systems, more lifelike and simulative.
Is there still combat and monsters or is it not focused on that at all? Is it a fantasy setting or more like historical fiction? Sorry im so curious about games played in other countries
@@evandierker2272 It is a classic medieval fantasy setting, it 's skill based (100+ skills) and culture as class, there are over 30 cultures from Elves to Thorwalers (Vikings) to Novadi (sub-Saharan African-like). It's infamous for its complex skill system, every skill check requires three rolls! In Germany it outsold D&D until the OGL came in the early 2000's. It's less about fighting monsters and much more about inter-kingdom wars and conflict. Less dungeons and more wilderness and city adventures. It even has a whole sourcebook for sexuality with critical fumbles and STDs and all. Its big city module "Havena" has floorplans for every house!!! In other words, it's very very german. Almost every german gamer started his ttrpg journey with it.
@@evandierker2272 If you love number-crunchy, highly complicated and hyper-realistic ttrpgs it's probably the king of that. I myself find it overcomplicated in a way that slows down the game a lot and isn't very beginner friendly. Not to mention it feels insanely restrictive through its inherent historical-realism leanings. Then again there's a lot of people who dig exactly these aspects so it's more a preference thing.
I ran B6 The Veiled Society for my current group and am following it up with B10 Night's Dark Terror. The Veiled Society is a city adventure with only humans, demihumans, and a few humanoids to deal with. It's a human level scenario. I very much enjoyed it. Other DMs say it's boring because it doesn't have any big monsters, but in my opinion that was a positive with squishy, low level characters. Characters almost died many times, especially when the veiled society manipulated them into PVP. And now we're running Night's Dark Terror. So far all the main enemies are small, humanoids and their pets, vermin and giant vermin, and a few larger creatures. But the main enemies are the small and medium humanoids at the moment, plus the vicious bandits, and later on the main enemies will be large humanoids as well as a few dangerous casters. We enjoyed B6, but B10 is special. It's a great scenario!
Thanks for this post. I’m going to add B6 to my current adventure. Running a 5e “hardcore” campaign with all of the optional difficult rules in use. Running them through the castle Amber adventure and when they go through the gate to the city to find the required artifacts I’m going to use B6 instead of what’s in the adventure
Daniel, As always, a great video. More "Dungeon Tubers" could benefit from your calm and thoughtful approach to the questions that seem to be so common among GMs. Watching your videos are a breath of fresh air. Cheers
This makes sense especially when you consider that Waterdeep Dragon Heist is one of the most popular modules and it's literally a simple story about a lost Hoard of Dragons stashed away in a city intertwined in a gang war
My favorite human-sized module is N3: Destiny of Kings. There are some monsters sprinkled throughout, but it's mostly a question of finding a prince and ensuring his succession to the throne.
Very good points you have brought up with. Perhaps this is also the reasons why more and more start to publish not adventures but adventure locales or locations who are well fleshed out with background. The background is more often than not so that you can fit it in your campaign. This sort of products I love most. Cause already when I starte to GM 37 years ago I never ever have played a scenario as it was published. Already back then I mixed and matched how it pleased me. Today I strip adventures down to the for me useful parts: Locations, NPCs, factions, what is the actual situation and how did this situation happen. I then plan what will happen when the players don't interfere... After this I am ready to rock and roll and let my players choose whatever way they want. For sure this is not everyones style of play but my current campaigns is in its 8th year and the going is faster than ever. This is my way! I hope to all that you find your way - because this is the right one for you. Dare it and love it! (and astonish your players) Cheers
Really good essay. I like your point about the "human connection" at the table; something a VTT can be a barrier to, in my opinion. I also like the point made about "really interesting npcs that then get in the players' faces".
After watching about a dozen of your videos I just realized I'm not even subbed?! You've got a lot of great rambles that have helped me a lot in writing. Thanks man!
Really late to the party but I’m currently running a game that started at level 12 and is currently level 13. We’re still somewhat early on, and I will absolutely be building to a titanic conflict at the end. But I’m surprisingly getting a ton of enjoyment out of the more humble obstacles in placing in the way. So I’m going to be implementing intrigue and politics WAY more into the middle sections as it builds into high stakes for the end. As for motivations from the group, it’s been a somewhat mixed experience but I’m almost at a point where I can really rope in some of their backstories. A lot of the character intrigue is players at the “peak” of their power and renown being able to discover the last key piece of themselves to become wholly complete characters. I think it’s gonna turn out great
I recently ran a modified gold rush scenario with my group that went well. A rare mushroom started fruiting in a nearby forest and the town went crazy trying to collect them. On the way I got to pull in miscellaneous forest dangers like carnivorous plants and parasitic worms, as well as NPCs like rival collectors that the PCs competed and made deals with and corrupt guards that were charging the mushroom hunters for “permits.”
There was this game about a heist where the hobbit of the party went off the story, found a pie baking competition, and got in a fight on some culinary difference with the others there, which resulted in a professionally demolished neighborhood, and he (and other NPCs) being jailed, waiting for judgment. So well, I salvaged the situation by turning the heist into a jailbreak. Same difference really. So I just want to add if the PCs find something more interesting to do than the actual module, I like to roll with that.
Hi again Daniel. You said it in a past video. If you have to start with high levels, use King Conan as inspiration. The heroes will have help and resources. If the goal is to start from the bottom and face "human" challenges then we must use the onion method (Shrek would be proud) Adding layers of depth and difficulty where a human challenge is just the tip of the iceberg in a Levistus plot to escape from its prison of eternal ice and take over all hell... I got carried away with the iceberg. Any way, great video and advices, you gotme some inspiration! Thx!
I recently finished a Star Trek Campaign using it's own game system and it took me a while to adjust from the DnD style narrative to the more human, non-violent Star Trek style. What I learnt from that was that mystery is the key. In DnD characters are typically motivated by greed and a desire to destroy evil. In Star Trek curiosity and good will were the main driving forces. I think for this type of narrative you need to rely on discovering clues, exploration and conversation. Problems and threats in these stories often emerge from the environment. It generally involves more grey areas and rarely a clear villain. I imagine this style could work with DnD too, if the players are interested in that kind of story telling.
Some cool ideas. I have lso found that a lot of this advice works really well at low-levels to make for moreinteresting adventures. When the party is less able to take on direct fights from monsters and such, human enemies are a good solution. Also, advetures that involve more investigation and role-play are a great way from the "oh look another bunch of rats" type adventuring that can often happen at low levels.
Interestingly, that human centric adventures is exactly what I want to do with my system. I think if character creation properly set up for that style of play, then it actually is quite easy to do that. I for my part usually do that through themes. Like I outright tell the players what the theme is, and have them then tell me how that relates to their characters and through that theme all the connections to NPCs and motivations to deal with it, or explore the aspects of what that theme means to the character or the world.
Great video, as always! I appreciate the emphasis on social issues, exploring the hierarchies of a setting; fighting monsters seems to be more about expanding (or preserving ) the boundaries of that society. When I saw the thumbnail I expected something else entirely: fighting other characters with class levels as advanced PCs. I feel like the "dark mirror" party could be a good way to explore that; instead of fighting a Dragon at the end of the dungeon, you're facing Raphael the Damned; the greatest of all bandit kings.
The Thieves' World anthologies (edited by Robert Asprin - 1979-1989, 2002-2004) are, in my opinion, very good examples of the sorts of things that can go on in a fantasy human-scale campaign. Mostly based in and around the city of Sanctuary which is under occupation by the forces of an expansionist empire bringing their own culture to the population. Plenty of ideas for characters and situations that don't require a monstrous monster.
As a player, fights against groups of humans are the toughest for our party to handle. You never really know what their abilities are as opposed to, e.g. a Medusa (don't look at her, they're poisonous), and are always full of wits, tricks and cunning. Not that monsters can't be. When I'm GMing my groups I rarely use monsters and when I do they're many times induced by some or something human.
Great video! I get to run a "level 0" adventure for my group this week. Its gonna start with a carnival, some nice little mini-games (participating in the games is hiw they will earn stat points), them its gonna get real hairy when beast-headed cultists attack. I think having some very human sized mini adventures in the carnival could be nice. I'll see what i can cook up!
Cool channel, glad it popped up in my feed. I will binge! I am running a fallout campaign, so most everything is morally gray with faction vs faction vs faction (I have dozens). No good vs evil, no obvious big bad monsters or NPCs. Just groups trying to survive and doing questionable things to make that happen. Been challenging to setup but going well so far.
I feel like what would be more useful than an adventure to run would be a region with details on NPCs and factions. Outline existing conflicts between these factions and maybe give some potential status quo breaking events that could happen. With the setting in place, the story could come from the king dying or the neighboring country invading. A GM could buy that and then entangle their players into the goals of the various organizations. BBEG is sort of optional. Odds are the party will make one for you if you give them a place with NPCs to interact with. Just give new GMs somewhere for this to happen. This is really the thing that DnD 5e was really missing- a coherent world that players could quickstart in. Wizards of the Coast spent most of their effort creating these broad, vague systems of monsters and gods and such that are abstracted away from the players and GM the GM has to do a lot of work picking from the various entities and monsters in order to decide what fits the setting, and that can be overwhelming. What they really need is somewhere to start, or a town they can throw into an existing campaign without having to spend weeks tweaking everything to fit their world. Most adventurers offer inspiration to experienced GMs but cannot offer the same level of an experience for their players as making their own would.
I find this is a useful approach, ESPECIALLY when things get to an epic level. So, your team can go to another plane and battle gods and demons... doing so to avenge someone they became attached to and who died protecting the group.
I think of these threats in terms of locality scale. Progressing, in modern terms, through Local, Regional, National, and Worldwide regarding how far-reaching the results would be if the characters did nothing. In terms of medieval style fantasy, it would likely be more extended due to the extra realms such as magic. The basic medieval progression would be something like Personal - Family - Town/Village - Clan/Liege - Kingdom - Continental - Worldwide - Universal - Multiversal. Plus various threats to magic and other supernatural things which can both coincide or be it's own thing. Start a campaign at the low end of that scale and don't make big leaps if you want to moderate how huge the threats become. Only bump them up slowly & occasionally to the next level if you're afraid of repetitive nation- and world-scale threats becoming too common too quickly. Gives matching progression to the PCs' own along the way.
I think it's easier to run a human scale campaign with a sandbox rather than individual adventures. I'm currently a player in a campaign of Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. The world is very fleshed-out, including lots and lots of NPCs. Each of our PCs started the game with personal goals, and from there, the GM has pretty much left us to do our own thing. There are apparently a lot of tables to drive encounters with these various NPCs, and a little bit of interaction quickly pulls you into their agendas, or you find yourselves at cross-purposes. The GM was an editor of the game during its creation, so he's very familiar with the material, but he doesn't really have to do any prep besides determining what happens as a result of our downtime activities (which we plan and submit). I very much recommend this game. It's very underappreciated and it does human-scale gaming is a very naturalistic fashion. The rules are also very simple and intuitive.
You could have a beloved NPC request the party investigate a disappearance or murder of a friend of theirs, maybe an animal. It doesn't even have to lead to some grand conspiracy to destroy the world, just someone being awful that should be stopped. They can be tacked onto larger quests. Barkeep could overhear where the party is headed, and request they make a delivery to their mother on the way. Small stops with small rewards.
The best examples I can think of come from Warhammer FRP and RuneQuest, Daniel. For that reason, I recommend (now named) the Empire in Flames campaign (WFRP), and Six Seasons in Sartar (RQ).
"City is itself a character" Oh my god, YES! I've played Pathfinder: wrath of the righteous, and was blown away by Alushinnyra - demon city. At first it wasn't impressive at all, even annoying, but with time, after i learn one story after another they all became aligned in one picture. Alushinnyra is a venus fly trap, people came here full of ambition, desire to be on top, change their lives, and city will slowly devour them, broke them and leave husk of their former self. And those rare individuals who will succeeded became empty, full of bitter disappointment and sorrow... But allure of the city is undeniable. It's like femme fatale, like dream so close, but unreachable, you can't help yourself but love it.
Don't know if this is the most topical for this video, but as someone who both likes 5e and has been wanting to try more OSR games, I appreciate how genuine you seem when the topic of not bashing people for their prefereed edition or game comes up. I think that's what puts a lot of newer edition players off and it's good to see you reject it when it comes up. Also, really appreciate the other topics I've seen you cover! You've suggested a few hex crawl rules that actually make that style of play feel possible. Keep up the great work
It's something that makes the Spider-man movies always good, despite what people may think about other Marvel movies. They always remember to give him human problems, Peter Parker (or Miles Morales) problems, in addition to the Spider-man problems. I think people often forget, while scaling up toward world ending threats, that there are other people out there. It may feel good to be the saviors of the world or be the only ones who can end a big war, but I like my stories to have other adventurers. And people who aren't adventurers, but can still play a role in things. I'm trying to make a mini campaign that's heavily inspired by the first Alien movie. Building up the NPC crew members, and the PC relationships is very important, because it makes the threat more meaningful. And I'm just running a Displacer Beast in lieu of the Alien, because normal monsters are terrifying to the average person.
I base most of my game adventures on daily life struggles and more realistic events. Does not make them boring at all. Granted in the end there will be some climatic challenge, but not fighting epic monsters. Some times the "end game" is taking on a gang of bandits and their leader or solving a crime. I take lots of inspiration from movie genres, especially noir, western and action films.
People have very mixed feelings about this campaign, with some feeling that its one of the best prewritten 5e adventures and some saying that it takes a lot of work to make it that, but IMO Waterdeep: Dragon Heist does an excellent job of starting the campaign out at a very human level, from essentially starting with the "gang war" going on and ending with any (or all) of the villains that all in the end have very human (or, well, not-so-human in one case, but you get the picture) motivations that really form the backbone of the plot. It's all about, like you said, making sure the PCs buy in. In my campaign I do this by making sure the villains are a threat, and the book actually gives an excellent means to do that by threatening the PCs in other ways than just death. I've been teying to avoid spoilers but it's pretty well-known that you are given a base of operations/potential business very early on, and I find that threatening that is an excellent way to make it "personal" for the players, especially since one villain in specific operates in a very classic "mafia" sort of style, and some of the others are very much the "political machinations" type, so that is very plausible. Anyways sorry for the long rant. TL,DR: Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is great at this for several reasons and I love it 😂
I find that the Eberron setting is good for human-level conflicts, especially as one of the conceits of the setting is a 100 years long war has just recently ended, and the nations that were involved in the war are still antagonistic towards each other, but no one wants to make an obvious first move as they have the threat of a mysterious nation destroying power hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocleus. So you have intrigue, noir kind of scheming going on between nations, but there is also the threat of demonic Overlords returning to destroy the nations and reclaim the planet to rule over.
This easy! Make some factions with objetives and resourses, make some NPCs with objectives and resourses too. Make NPCs and Factions objetives opposed, neutral and good (or complement themselves). Make the players interact with them. You have a pseudo-braunstein? But works nicelly
I think modern gamers could benefit a lot by reading and absorbing the fantasy classics... Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, John Carter etc. The authors of these novels were (and still are) the foundation of my hobby :-)
Interesting topic. I had my players talk about an epic campaign that they loved but tired them out after 18 months of play. So I created a low stakes, human-level problems adventure and they got bored and kept bringing up the epic things they'd done in previous adventures. Now I mix in both. But what I have learned is given many options they seem to choose the epic level stuff to do pretty quick. They may take a few simpler things then go after the biggest thing they can do when they have leveled up a bit. I want to listen to my players but their behavior shows me they want to do epic things even when they say they don't. If I remove them completely then they don't seem to feel like they are doing big things. I guess giving them both makes it their decision and that is pretty much what I do now. The grand, sprawling city adventure I am running now has 7 epic scenarios and 23 minor scenarios. The very first thing they took on, day 1, was one of the epic quests. They managed to solve it, barely, and during that time they also completed 3 minor ones in the process. Now they are mid level having completed 4 of the 7 epic ones and 14 of the 23 minor ones. It is a tough thing sometimes being a GM and listening both to what the players say and also watching there behavior for underlying desires.
I really like to run this human-centric campaign style, yet im running it in Pathfinder 2e because thats kind of what was available. Already at level 7 they have quickly started surpassing such human level threats. We are taking a few weeks break due to IRL events taking up the weekly timeslot, but when we return, I plan on introducing them to troupe play, where they will effectively be officers in a company of soldiers. Now the threats will be to their soldiers, and their ability to more widely effect change with their men. Im excited to try it out!
Choose 5-8 different challenge rating mobs in order from lowest to highest. Choose 3 locations that would be intriguing. Draw a line connecting mobs and locations and find a way that they are all part of one major problem to build up to. At the end make it either a force they have come to trust, or something dark and too powerful that orchestrated them all. Your campaign doesn't end at level 6. You will always have a human level story and scenario as long as you follow this.
Personally I like these kind of campaigns more than I like the short-format campaigns that focus on action and escalation. I run RP-heavy games and that allows people to explore everything that they want out of their character, so sometimes we do have A LOT of downtime. For right now I'll call this the BG3 problem. A lot of people have had BG3 as their first experience, and a lot of gamers ended up speed running the encounters for the sake of beating the game. Skipping dialogue, side quests, exploration, etc. This IS how a lot of common, by the book campaigns and inspired campaigns end up. A narrative that is of great scale, where every challenge and the story increases with the levels observed, and while you'll deal with people along the way, most of the issues escalate into monster lords, gods, devils and the like. My thing on it matches exactly what we're talking here. That the players need downtime. Not every enemy has to be the biggest and baddest possible to fit the narrative and I like to reflect that in my milestone games. In my current campaign, the party has done about 1/5 of the main storyline designed for the campaign and has been allowed to pick their own plot hooks if they wanted. They moved on from early game, and the whim of one player who went on hiatus took them to a dwarven city to the west on the border of our country. During that phase, I had them get raided by Wyvern bandits deploying their crew onto the ship while the two riders flew above. They lost an NPC that was a couple levels lower that a majority got attached to and recognized him as a plot important NPC. They ran into an Inn, met the lovely halflings there and their huge family, and they heard of a temple that was "Epic" (In the sense it's four levels higher than they were in terms of design) but if they could get through the ruins of the temple, a Sphinx guards the gate of the dead there and can revive on person if you master their riddle or prove yourselves to be a great combatant. They decided to head out and some of the brave halfling men chose to come with for one reason or another. They went in, found out that the temple had a cult that moved on that was trying to use some strange tech they had discovered (Lore wise it's from a Githzarai ship that had a teleport mishap into the crust of this planet centuries ago that had been revealed by a previous campaign) to revive people. They offered a rather bruised and battered shelter after they had lost another teammate (His stupidity lead to a death we all saw coming. He got a lot of crap for his suicide kind of decision), and they had lost two husbands from the community they borrowed them from, one of which to a wall of fire that was cast up, leaving him alone because the paladin had chosen to make him the front liner (as rogue) because he was making flirty comments towards the fems of the group even though he was married. She felt bad about that one, and the other was a volunteer they liked. WIthout the consent of the Player to revive the character he was tired of, they were offered a chance to use the cults tech to revive the lost NPCs and their friend from the main quest, Flynn, with the condition that the party couldn't watch. The party debated this, also killing them, but decided that since they were also tied into the story of another character that had died, to spare them. With their friend back, they went to the tavern, continued on their way. Helped the bandit leaders daughter who lead the party to the bandit cave. A coup was thrown, the bandits that sided with the survivors and the saved daughter broke up after the fight and those who were loyal all died with the exception of the actual wyvern handler who freed the beasts and climbed out their exit hole. We then went into town, found out it was being shelled by a large mechanical ox from the main story (had a variation of these things going on in all possible towns they could have gone too, just to tie into the main plot) and during the exhibition, I gave the players a chance to roll for "hits" on locations around town. The alchemist shop was one. During downtime, the party's fighter went to explore the shop to see if there was any free loot to discover. Rolled a nat 1 on a d100 luck roll in the ruins, fell into the destroyed building's basement, found a creepy little cave tunnel that lead to a room basked in red light, and a scrawny man with two circle scars on his neck and dozens of cuts on his body stuck in a cage claiming how the vampire had been slain in the explosion and he was the only one to survive, and that he should have been freed. The party had a lot of time in between that point where they dealt with things like an ooblek, a goblin gang, murdering a connection of an enemy for the gang, and helping fight in a gang turf war that popped up while they were at a club before ghouls attacked at night, and then a secret monk organization spoke to them and had them deal with the issues they caused. All of these major epic beats of fantasy were born out of moments of "Human" downtime, offering smaller but human like problems. Being attacked by normal road bandits lead to an epic temple run to save a friend and came with it's own trauma. Trauma that they found out later was revivification at a price of trapping the original soul in it's dead body and making a physical copy and imbuing it with enough magic that it creates a souless copy out of magic (Think how zombies work, but a more sophisticated process to keep great heroes and leaders in a semblance of life if the worst happens) and that if you free the original, you kill both copies unless the original was in a state of life at the time of capture. Because of downtime and deciding to explore the city for loot, paired up with a terrible 1/100 chance die roll, we had a whole vampire subplot get released into the city. And I love that type of story development.
WFRP does this a lot. Older adventures are about walking around Marienburg looking into stock fraud. There is an adventure where snotlings have robbed a pie contest. Rough Night at Seven Feathers is a classic adventure taking place in a single night as at least five story plot crash together. A fight is a big deal. A legal duel, a dude hidden with a crossbow or three lads with a log on the road are weighty. Or three chump orcs. Something like a single mummy or demonette is a huge deal. They show up sparingly.
For a module to run CM1 Test of the Warlords. You're going to have to create NPCs. But, you're claiming rulership over an unsettled land between two warring empires. NPCS grow real good in that soul.
@@jben6 I took the extra steps of creating character sheets for the listed ones & solo rpg'd them. Since the players are pacing season by season, I did the same. The NPCs competing for land & power alongside the characters felt more real to the players.
At domain level you become the tax man. We had two sessions of figuring out how local courts and bribes worked to get out hot dog stand back to legal status.
Curse of the Crimson Throne is pathfinder adventure path I've been running for over a year now and it's, I think, as close to this as you can get. Human sized problems that then grow into something larger at higher levels. I've heavily adapted it on a couple fronts (both storywise and mechanics since I'm running it in 5e).
@@BanditsKeep strong suggest to check it out! The bones are there for SUCH a cool campaign, it just needs tweaking and there's already a bunch of thoughts people have shared online on how to do it.
Being of the opinion that in the beginning as low level characters the world should be rare magic with monsters still legendary, the primary foes being humans of equivalent power. This feels both real and in keeping with old school play where monsters lurk in dungeons or wildernesses, as discovered they are rather lowly and amp up as one delves deeper or further. Within such a world the first 5 levels can be epic as the game intended without needing super hero players or mega monsters to scale. Imagine if all ordinary humans were the same 3-18 hit points and PCs or important NPCs maxed at 18 or 24 hit points? Even a bandit fight at 1st level can be dangerous or deadly with normal weapons. But as PCs gain better armor, weapons or magic they are more epic yet just as vulnerable so never quite feel invincible. That is my current design philosophy.
No Rest for the Wicked from Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a great adventure module for human dilemmas & solutions! If I remember correctly, unless the players or GM introduces fantastic elements, the scenario is completely mundane, but by no means boring!
the simplest solution is to not run one-shots. If you run a campaign it is easy to weave in motivation, cuz the player said what motivates his character at session zero. Just use that or intertwine it with the mainstory. Like they have to find and stop the slavers so that NPC helps them with finding the Mcguffin. But normal stuff won't do it for high lvl players. If you instant teleport across the Continent and obliterate an Army with Metorswarms than just do a big Monster. I also as a DM like heroic fantasy more. It way more fun to have an epic showdown than a political succes via talking.
My solution is to have my PCs be part of a hierarchical organization, like the military or a crime syndicate. They have to follow the missions they’re assigned, but they have lots of discretion on how they execute those missions. That’s automatic buy-in.
I want more downtime adventures and human level problems, but my party bemoans it. They want to be the Avengers killing evil gods and saving the universe.
Big adventures are fun and all but I like putting in adventures that can’t simply be solved by killing everyone and everything in a 5 mile radius. Things get complicated and messy and there’s no one easy fix to simply just solve things.
I think that humans are some of the best "monsters" and a ton of my story arcs have them as the BBEG. What that really does is make the real monsters even more terrifying.
Running things on a human scale works great with a grim dark campaign. I agree, you must make your NPC's more dynamic. A quick look at real life gives us many examples of human scale bad guys we can hate...drug dealers, abusers of the innocent, slavers (yes, this still happens, even in the U.S.A.) and my favorite...the people at the Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) 😁 One of my favorite sessions was having my level 1 party track a local pig thief who was a well known drunk. The pig and the thief had to be returned unharmed. It was basically a car chase with a pig and a fat drunk guy set in a medieval world. Simple and easy but full of laughs and challenges
That sounds fun, I ran an adventure a while back where the PCs could not kill the bandits they had as enemies because it was inside the city limits and could be treated as murder.
I remember there was a time I ran a game where the PCs came to town to sell items after a delve and had to pay exorbitant taxes while the town was still s*thole. So they immediately started to attempt and rally a coup which led them to skipping town immediately.
I've ran campaigns of 5e ranging from level 1 to 20 without ever using non-human stat blocks. I will never understand this idea that you cannot challenge 5e characters past a certain level. When the stat blocks fail, the mechanics are right there to use for the GM as well as the players to create characters. If you're level 20 and have a castle and an army, somebody else does. If you're still homeless at level 20, fair enough Gandalf, but that doesn't mean there aren't more selfish wizards who spent their time creating an empire. The best part is that using PC rules for high level human NPCs is easy to run if you know the game, and absolutely brutal and fast and intense compared to CR 20 monsters. All the while, the paladin and cleric players aren't fighting gods, they're contending with mortal men...as, in my opinion, it should be.
I'm digging into the Forbidden Lands adventure sites lately, most of them so far have a good might of human problems, and then a monstrous or supernatural one if the PCs did deep enough. I interesting approach...
I recently had a character that my bard had screwed over, come back as an enemy. Even my big bad is just a dude trying to smuggle goods. Is this what you mean by human level?
I’m running my players through a paizo adventure path (I know I know) but the entire campaign is set in a single town. It’s been interesting. So seems doable but the fact I say it’s interesting is because it is very different to the usual JRPG arc - “start as nobody, end the game by fighting god”.
Yeah I tend to follow modules too closely which leaves the players feeling like they dont have enough agency or emotional attachment 😢 I have heard advice that the higher the level the more straightforward and simplified you should approach it, maybe its high level cosmic horror but it doesnt also need to be a mega dungeon, just 5-10 rooms would suffice
If it hasn't already been plugged, I'm going to suggest The Shucked Oyster by the boys over at Black Lodge Gaming, as a human centred 'module/adventure'.
Im running BX with a "hardcore mod": PCs do NOT gain class levels. They use gold to pay trainers, good trainers belong to factions and will only train members of that faction. Membership to factions and access to higher ranks demands meaningful role-playing, engaging with its members (NPCs or PCs), its conflicts, politics and viewpoints, and of course it costs gold.
Normally,when DM a module, I work into it over a dozen mini side quests, all something to do with the main quest. Just a lost sheep perhaps that needs to be found, that will point to something bigger. A library needing a tome back, a ruin somewhere, a scammer trying to pull a fast one on the party, etc... Often I get the ideas from adventures for level 1 characters and such, or even from pulp fiction books, old westerns (Zane Gray, Larry McMurtry, Louis L'Amour, Karl May), etc... Actually the crappier the book the better it can be in a side quest, the better books always have a lot of plot devices that are hard to translate into a game. LeoGuild movies perhaps, yeeah, those are crappy enough. Also, they give very human sized problems. All of them just small stumble stones on the way to the main issue, depleting the resources of the players while giving them a sense of accomplishment.
Do people play D&D like this? As in a gauntlet of ever pressing challenges? When I used to run a d&d campaign (and subsequent RPG systems) I usually would first create a world with a backstory, every key location had a quick backstory to it and the players would run around interacting with it, this way I didn't had the problem of players derailing the adventure, because it was generated on-the-fly. It would play like a sandbox rpg
I think people coming into the hobby and seeing adventure design advice don’t often see the human side stuff. Or that is the vibe I get from comments and direct messages
Professor dungeon master excels at doing human based campaigns. 'Terror in the streets', 'power behind the throne', and 'B6 the veiled society' are all modules he recommends and has run for his urban campaign.
The older WFRP adventures are all about this. People think the adventurers are chumps who can't fight demon incursions miss that most adventures are about basic chumps like you. A single demonette is a big deal. There are adventures where you walk around talking with people about stock fraud or finding a pie some snotlings stole. A fight is a big deal, from a legal duel to two robbery with knives.
@@SusCalvin frankly, a single demon should be a scary ordeal.
@@L3monsta The WFRP system gives you maybe 6 Wounds. A typical human with a sword deals d6 damage. When you reach 0 the gnarly crit table comes out. Any sort of fight has weight.
Daemons have their instability rule. They are abnormal things who can struggle to hold themselves together. It is almost as fun as the Stupidity rule of the falling giant rule.
Came here to say the same (about PDM). And to add that the little details and quirks seem to somehow be the invitation often. A player gets drawn in and things take off from there.
Also, carousing is one way. PC woke up in ditch w his stuff stolen. Asked about to find out who did it and it turned in to a completely different campaign.
Think about the Conan movies. Thulsa Doom knew Two Spells. But it took Conan a long time to bring him down because he had to get through the minions. Even in the second movie, where he faced a sorcerer and killed a god, the main problem for him to solve was dealing with the cultists. Most of the conflicts in both movies were against relatively normal people.
Really really low-level scenario: An old lady owns a cow. The cow is up a tree. How did it get there? How to get it down? That's what the PCs are for. Let them figure it out themselves. Bonus points for the DM if this somehow leads to something epic.
This will 100% be the opening situation my players will encounter when we start our new campaign.
It's an Incowbus.
@@trublgrlmoozilla
Mooowl
Dragon grabbed it and dropped it as it struggled. Nearby Wyvern confirmed :)
I think writing a human scale pre-packaged adventure is very do-able. My favourite one-shot that I sometimes pull off the shelf is about a corrupt guard captain who stole a big haul of gold from the city treasury. A guardsman goes to the players for help, not knowing who he can trust. The players need to act fast if they want to save an innocent man from hanging, and they stand to get a generous bounty for catching the actual criminals.
Nice
That sounds really interesting! whats the oneshot?
@@adamguthrey6160 well, see, a corrupt guard captain who stole a big haul of gold from the city treasury. A guardsman goes to the players for help, not knowing who he can trust. The players need to act fast if they want to save an innocent man from hanging, and they stand to get a generous bounty for catching the actual criminals.
In my BX campaign, the party has been exploring a megadungeon for 15+ sessions. The megadungeon is a sandbox with a multitude of options, puzzles, mysteries, and some monsters or monster-like adversaries. There are human elements from the town that have competing objectives. In our experience, this has drawn the PCs into human centric engagements. They've tried to poison a local militia's water supply and overthrow a Baroness, for example, in order to keep them from confounding the party's goals among the various factions in the dungeon. The cleric is currently trying to establish a loyal religious following to assist with work and establish a political foothold, to secure their continued access to the dungeon... and a few other things. It took time, but it did grow organically. Also, slow level advancement helped... as well as a lower fantasy setting.
I often only run games at a human scale, monsters are rare, special and terrifying. Giving monsters a mythic or fantastic feel.
Cool
Bandit's Keep is one of the most underrated channels (by subscriber count) in this space. I've gotten an immense amount of inspiration and creative thoughts from what you've done here over the years and I look forward to every new video.
Hi again Daniel. You said it in a past video. If you have to start with high levels, use King Conan as inspiration. The heroes will have help and resources.
If the goal is to start from the bottom and face "human" challenges then we must use the onion method (Shrek would be proud) Adding layers of depth and difficulty where a human challenge is just the tip of the iceberg in a Levistus plot to escape from its prison of eternal ice and take over all hell... I got carried away with the iceberg.
Anyway, great video and advices. Thx!
Good point and nice metaphors
Writer of the Who Endures series here, I write and run D&D campaigns myself. The most humbling moment for me in my life is writing this big grand trilogy campaign module, tons of fun homebrew elements and really just using D&D as a "base" than anything else.
First story is about stopping an eternal winter that's plagued the lands. Crops won't grow, going out to collect firewood is dangerous because you might freeze to death, but it sets up the greater narrative of all these Greater Powers battling for control over the material realm. Rather than being reactive and allowing things like the Permafrost to occur then saving the the realm, the story goes into taking up arms against powers greater than man and severing our destiny from the higher will.
You know what my players said? It was too much. The first campaign of the three was the best, because it was small. It's cold outside, people are dying. Let's go stop that. I had put the least thought into it, the cosmology, factions, world history, everything else from later campaigns was what I was really proud of. But it was less fun because the stakes were just too high. They couldn't even connect to it anymore.
As a fellow DM, that experience is so relatable - but also such an important one to have.
Reading Conan and other pulp weird tales has definitely given me an appreciation for focusing mainly on human foes with some occasional monsters thrown in to spice things up. The Frandor's Keep adventure module put out by Kenzer and co for Hackmaster(their version of keep on the borderlands) does a pretty good job of getting the players interested in the npc's of the area.
Cool, I’ll have to check that out
In the biggest german ttrpg “The Dark Eye” a common criticism is, that the scale is very human und mundane.
I think in the example adventure in the core rules you save a sheep from some cliff (using all the maneuver rules and teaching them).
It is a completely different feel from D&D and it’s derivative systems, more lifelike and simulative.
Is there still combat and monsters or is it not focused on that at all? Is it a fantasy setting or more like historical fiction?
Sorry im so curious about games played in other countries
@@evandierker2272 It is a classic medieval fantasy setting, it 's skill based (100+ skills) and culture as class, there are over 30 cultures from Elves to Thorwalers (Vikings) to Novadi (sub-Saharan African-like). It's infamous for its complex skill system, every skill check requires three rolls! In Germany it outsold D&D until the OGL came in the early 2000's. It's less about fighting monsters and much more about inter-kingdom wars and conflict. Less dungeons and more wilderness and city adventures. It even has a whole sourcebook for sexuality with critical fumbles and STDs and all. Its big city module "Havena" has floorplans for every house!!!
In other words, it's very very german. Almost every german gamer started his ttrpg journey with it.
@@evandierker2272 If you love number-crunchy, highly complicated and hyper-realistic ttrpgs it's probably the king of that.
I myself find it overcomplicated in a way that slows down the game a lot and isn't very beginner friendly. Not to mention it feels insanely restrictive through its inherent historical-realism leanings.
Then again there's a lot of people who dig exactly these aspects so it's more a preference thing.
I ran B6 The Veiled Society for my current group and am following it up with B10 Night's Dark Terror. The Veiled Society is a city adventure with only humans, demihumans, and a few humanoids to deal with. It's a human level scenario. I very much enjoyed it. Other DMs say it's boring because it doesn't have any big monsters, but in my opinion that was a positive with squishy, low level characters. Characters almost died many times, especially when the veiled society manipulated them into PVP. And now we're running Night's Dark Terror. So far all the main enemies are small, humanoids and their pets, vermin and giant vermin, and a few larger creatures. But the main enemies are the small and medium humanoids at the moment, plus the vicious bandits, and later on the main enemies will be large humanoids as well as a few dangerous casters. We enjoyed B6, but B10 is special. It's a great scenario!
Thanks for this post. I’m going to add B6 to my current adventure. Running a 5e “hardcore” campaign with all of the optional difficult rules in use. Running them through the castle Amber adventure and when they go through the gate to the city to find the required artifacts I’m going to use B6 instead of what’s in the adventure
Thank you for mentioning the Fritz Leiber stories. Great memories. Means a lot to me.
You bet!
Daniel,
As always, a great video. More "Dungeon Tubers" could benefit from your calm and thoughtful approach to the questions that seem to be so common among GMs.
Watching your videos are a breath of fresh air.
Cheers
Thank You! I appreciate the kind words.
This makes sense especially when you consider that Waterdeep Dragon Heist is one of the most popular modules and it's literally a simple story about a lost Hoard of Dragons stashed away in a city intertwined in a gang war
For sure
My favorite human-sized module is N3: Destiny of Kings. There are some monsters sprinkled throughout, but it's mostly a question of finding a prince and ensuring his succession to the throne.
Love this video, you are so right and I love how there isn’t a single cut throughout this entire video, either way thanks for the great content!
Thank You!
just stumbled on your channel. your voice is so calming! i could listen to you speak all day!
Thanks!
Very good points you have brought up with. Perhaps this is also the reasons why more and more start to publish not adventures but adventure locales or locations who are well fleshed out with background. The background is more often than not so that you can fit it in your campaign. This sort of products I love most. Cause already when I starte to GM 37 years ago I never ever have played a scenario as it was published. Already back then I mixed and matched how it pleased me. Today I strip adventures down to the for me useful parts: Locations, NPCs, factions, what is the actual situation and how did this situation happen. I then plan what will happen when the players don't interfere... After this I am ready to rock and roll and let my players choose whatever way they want.
For sure this is not everyones style of play but my current campaigns is in its 8th year and the going is faster than ever. This is my way! I hope to all that you find your way - because this is the right one for you. Dare it and love it! (and astonish your players)
Cheers
I LOVE ALL Bandit's Keep videos!
Thank You!
Law and Order Greyhawk... dun dun
👮♂️
It’s super refreshing to hear someone put into words these feelings and ideas I’ve been mulling over for most of my dungeon master career. Subscribed
Welcome aboard!
Really good essay. I like your point about the "human connection" at the table; something a VTT can be a barrier to, in my opinion. I also like the point made about "really interesting npcs that then get in the players' faces".
After watching about a dozen of your videos I just realized I'm not even subbed?! You've got a lot of great rambles that have helped me a lot in writing. Thanks man!
That’s awesome. Writing gaming stuff or fiction?
@@BanditsKeep A hexcrawl 2e d&d campaign. :)
Really late to the party but I’m currently running a game that started at level 12 and is currently level 13. We’re still somewhat early on, and I will absolutely be building to a titanic conflict at the end. But I’m surprisingly getting a ton of enjoyment out of the more humble obstacles in placing in the way. So I’m going to be implementing intrigue and politics WAY more into the middle sections as it builds into high stakes for the end. As for motivations from the group, it’s been a somewhat mixed experience but I’m almost at a point where I can really rope in some of their backstories. A lot of the character intrigue is players at the “peak” of their power and renown being able to discover the last key piece of themselves to become wholly complete characters. I think it’s gonna turn out great
I recently ran a modified gold rush scenario with my group that went well. A rare mushroom started fruiting in a nearby forest and the town went crazy trying to collect them. On the way I got to pull in miscellaneous forest dangers like carnivorous plants and parasitic worms, as well as NPCs like rival collectors that the PCs competed and made deals with and corrupt guards that were charging the mushroom hunters for “permits.”
There was this game about a heist where the hobbit of the party went off the story, found a pie baking competition, and got in a fight on some culinary difference with the others there, which resulted in a professionally demolished neighborhood, and he (and other NPCs) being jailed, waiting for judgment. So well, I salvaged the situation by turning the heist into a jailbreak. Same difference really. So I just want to add if the PCs find something more interesting to do than the actual module, I like to roll with that.
For sure
For some reason I never noticed before, but you sound so much like Casey Kasum. I would love to hear your Shaggy sometime 😁
Hi again Daniel. You said it in a past video. If you have to start with high levels, use King Conan as inspiration. The heroes will have help and resources.
If the goal is to start from the bottom and face "human" challenges then we must use the onion method (Shrek would be proud) Adding layers of depth and difficulty where a human challenge is just the tip of the iceberg in a Levistus plot to escape from its prison of eternal ice and take over all hell... I got carried away with the iceberg.
Any way, great video and advices, you gotme some inspiration! Thx!
I recently finished a Star Trek Campaign using it's own game system and it took me a while to adjust from the DnD style narrative to the more human, non-violent Star Trek style. What I learnt from that was that mystery is the key. In DnD characters are typically motivated by greed and a desire to destroy evil. In Star Trek curiosity and good will were the main driving forces. I think for this type of narrative you need to rely on discovering clues, exploration and conversation. Problems and threats in these stories often emerge from the environment. It generally involves more grey areas and rarely a clear villain. I imagine this style could work with DnD too, if the players are interested in that kind of story telling.
Some cool ideas. I have lso found that a lot of this advice works really well at low-levels to make for moreinteresting adventures. When the party is less able to take on direct fights from monsters and such, human enemies are a good solution. Also, advetures that involve more investigation and role-play are a great way from the "oh look another bunch of rats" type adventuring that can often happen at low levels.
Interestingly, that human centric adventures is exactly what I want to do with my system. I think if character creation properly set up for that style of play, then it actually is quite easy to do that. I for my part usually do that through themes. Like I outright tell the players what the theme is, and have them then tell me how that relates to their characters and through that theme all the connections to NPCs and motivations to deal with it, or explore the aspects of what that theme means to the character or the world.
Great video, as always!
I appreciate the emphasis on social issues, exploring the hierarchies of a setting; fighting monsters seems to be more about expanding (or preserving ) the boundaries of that society.
When I saw the thumbnail I expected something else entirely: fighting other characters with class levels as advanced PCs. I feel like the "dark mirror" party could be a good way to explore that; instead of fighting a Dragon at the end of the dungeon, you're facing Raphael the Damned; the greatest of all bandit kings.
For sure - a rival party is pretty classic at any level.
This is one of my favorite videos Daniel, and why I keep coming back for more!
Awesome, thanks
The Thieves' World anthologies (edited by Robert Asprin - 1979-1989, 2002-2004) are, in my opinion, very good examples of the sorts of things that can go on in a fantasy human-scale campaign. Mostly based in and around the city of Sanctuary which is under occupation by the forces of an expansionist empire bringing their own culture to the population. Plenty of ideas for characters and situations that don't require a monstrous monster.
As a player, fights against groups of humans are the toughest for our party to handle. You never really know what their abilities are as opposed to, e.g. a Medusa (don't look at her, they're poisonous), and are always full of wits, tricks and cunning. Not that monsters can't be. When I'm GMing my groups I rarely use monsters and when I do they're many times induced by some or something human.
Nice
Great video! I get to run a "level 0" adventure for my group this week. Its gonna start with a carnival, some nice little mini-games (participating in the games is hiw they will earn stat points), them its gonna get real hairy when beast-headed cultists attack.
I think having some very human sized mini adventures in the carnival could be nice. I'll see what i can cook up!
How do they earn stats in minigames?
I love Bandit's Keep! Great points here
Cool channel, glad it popped up in my feed. I will binge!
I am running a fallout campaign, so most everything is morally gray with faction vs faction vs faction (I have dozens). No good vs evil, no obvious big bad monsters or NPCs. Just groups trying to survive and doing questionable things to make that happen. Been challenging to setup but going well so far.
That sounds awesome!
Exactly correct! I appreciate the encouragement of rational storytelling.
I feel like what would be more useful than an adventure to run would be a region with details on NPCs and factions. Outline existing conflicts between these factions and maybe give some potential status quo breaking events that could happen.
With the setting in place, the story could come from the king dying or the neighboring country invading.
A GM could buy that and then entangle their players into the goals of the various organizations.
BBEG is sort of optional. Odds are the party will make one for you if you give them a place with NPCs to interact with. Just give new GMs somewhere for this to happen.
This is really the thing that DnD 5e was really missing- a coherent world that players could quickstart in. Wizards of the Coast spent most of their effort creating these broad, vague systems of monsters and gods and such that are abstracted away from the players and GM the GM has to do a lot of work picking from the various entities and monsters in order to decide what fits the setting, and that can be overwhelming. What they really need is somewhere to start, or a town they can throw into an existing campaign without having to spend weeks tweaking everything to fit their world.
Most adventurers offer inspiration to experienced GMs but cannot offer the same level of an experience for their players as making their own would.
I find this is a useful approach, ESPECIALLY when things get to an epic level.
So, your team can go to another plane and battle gods and demons... doing so to avenge someone they became attached to and who died protecting the group.
That’s a great way of looking at it!
I think of these threats in terms of locality scale. Progressing, in modern terms, through Local, Regional, National, and Worldwide regarding how far-reaching the results would be if the characters did nothing. In terms of medieval style fantasy, it would likely be more extended due to the extra realms such as magic. The basic medieval progression would be something like Personal - Family - Town/Village - Clan/Liege - Kingdom - Continental - Worldwide - Universal - Multiversal. Plus various threats to magic and other supernatural things which can both coincide or be it's own thing. Start a campaign at the low end of that scale and don't make big leaps if you want to moderate how huge the threats become. Only bump them up slowly & occasionally to the next level if you're afraid of repetitive nation- and world-scale threats becoming too common too quickly. Gives matching progression to the PCs' own along the way.
Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.
I think it's easier to run a human scale campaign with a sandbox rather than individual adventures. I'm currently a player in a campaign of Wandering Heroes of Ogre Gate. The world is very fleshed-out, including lots and lots of NPCs. Each of our PCs started the game with personal goals, and from there, the GM has pretty much left us to do our own thing. There are apparently a lot of tables to drive encounters with these various NPCs, and a little bit of interaction quickly pulls you into their agendas, or you find yourselves at cross-purposes. The GM was an editor of the game during its creation, so he's very familiar with the material, but he doesn't really have to do any prep besides determining what happens as a result of our downtime activities (which we plan and submit).
I very much recommend this game. It's very underappreciated and it does human-scale gaming is a very naturalistic fashion. The rules are also very simple and intuitive.
You could have a beloved NPC request the party investigate a disappearance or murder of a friend of theirs, maybe an animal. It doesn't even have to lead to some grand conspiracy to destroy the world, just someone being awful that should be stopped.
They can be tacked onto larger quests. Barkeep could overhear where the party is headed, and request they make a delivery to their mother on the way. Small stops with small rewards.
The best examples I can think of come from Warhammer FRP and RuneQuest, Daniel. For that reason, I recommend (now named) the Empire in Flames campaign (WFRP), and Six Seasons in Sartar (RQ).
Thanks! I’ll check those out. RuneQuest didn’t work for my group (likely my fault) but I might give it a shot again it or farm ideas
@@BanditsKeepIt’s very particular and it rewards discretion over valour. I certainly think the world is worth mining for ideas though.
"City is itself a character"
Oh my god, YES! I've played Pathfinder: wrath of the righteous, and was blown away by Alushinnyra - demon city. At first it wasn't impressive at all, even annoying, but with time, after i learn one story after another they all became aligned in one picture. Alushinnyra is a venus fly trap, people came here full of ambition, desire to be on top, change their lives, and city will slowly devour them, broke them and leave husk of their former self. And those rare individuals who will succeeded became empty, full of bitter disappointment and sorrow... But allure of the city is undeniable. It's like femme fatale, like dream so close, but unreachable, you can't help yourself but love it.
By Crom the taxes are too damn high!
😂
Don't know if this is the most topical for this video, but as someone who both likes 5e and has been wanting to try more OSR games, I appreciate how genuine you seem when the topic of not bashing people for their prefereed edition or game comes up. I think that's what puts a lot of newer edition players off and it's good to see you reject it when it comes up.
Also, really appreciate the other topics I've seen you cover! You've suggested a few hex crawl rules that actually make that style of play feel possible. Keep up the great work
Thanks! I would not be playing now if not for 5e, and I’ve played many systems with many different styles with diverse people. I have enjoyed it all.
5 seconds after upload! Loyal follower here!
It's something that makes the Spider-man movies always good, despite what people may think about other Marvel movies.
They always remember to give him human problems, Peter Parker (or Miles Morales) problems, in addition to the Spider-man problems.
I think people often forget, while scaling up toward world ending threats, that there are other people out there.
It may feel good to be the saviors of the world or be the only ones who can end a big war, but I like my stories to have other adventurers. And people who aren't adventurers, but can still play a role in things.
I'm trying to make a mini campaign that's heavily inspired by the first Alien movie.
Building up the NPC crew members, and the PC relationships is very important, because it makes the threat more meaningful.
And I'm just running a Displacer Beast in lieu of the Alien, because normal monsters are terrifying to the average person.
Nice
I base most of my game adventures on daily life struggles and more realistic events. Does not make them boring at all. Granted in the end there will be some climatic challenge, but not fighting epic monsters. Some times the "end game" is taking on a gang of bandits and their leader or solving a crime. I take lots of inspiration from movie genres, especially noir, western and action films.
Cool
You know quite a bit of lore for a ranger, adventurer.
😊
People have very mixed feelings about this campaign, with some feeling that its one of the best prewritten 5e adventures and some saying that it takes a lot of work to make it that, but IMO Waterdeep: Dragon Heist does an excellent job of starting the campaign out at a very human level, from essentially starting with the "gang war" going on and ending with any (or all) of the villains that all in the end have very human (or, well, not-so-human in one case, but you get the picture) motivations that really form the backbone of the plot. It's all about, like you said, making sure the PCs buy in. In my campaign I do this by making sure the villains are a threat, and the book actually gives an excellent means to do that by threatening the PCs in other ways than just death. I've been teying to avoid spoilers but it's pretty well-known that you are given a base of operations/potential business very early on, and I find that threatening that is an excellent way to make it "personal" for the players, especially since one villain in specific operates in a very classic "mafia" sort of style, and some of the others are very much the "political machinations" type, so that is very plausible. Anyways sorry for the long rant.
TL,DR: Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is great at this for several reasons and I love it 😂
I find that the Eberron setting is good for human-level conflicts, especially as one of the conceits of the setting is a 100 years long war has just recently ended, and the nations that were involved in the war are still antagonistic towards each other, but no one wants to make an obvious first move as they have the threat of a mysterious nation destroying power hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocleus. So you have intrigue, noir kind of scheming going on between nations, but there is also the threat of demonic Overlords returning to destroy the nations and reclaim the planet to rule over.
This easy! Make some factions with objetives and resourses, make some NPCs with objectives and resourses too. Make NPCs and Factions objetives opposed, neutral and good (or complement themselves). Make the players interact with them. You have a pseudo-braunstein? But works nicelly
I have trouble making my players do anything
I think modern gamers could benefit a lot by reading and absorbing the fantasy classics... Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, John Carter etc. The authors of these novels were (and still are) the foundation of my hobby :-)
Indeed
Interesting topic. I had my players talk about an epic campaign that they loved but tired them out after 18 months of play. So I created a low stakes, human-level problems adventure and they got bored and kept bringing up the epic things they'd done in previous adventures. Now I mix in both. But what I have learned is given many options they seem to choose the epic level stuff to do pretty quick. They may take a few simpler things then go after the biggest thing they can do when they have leveled up a bit. I want to listen to my players but their behavior shows me they want to do epic things even when they say they don't. If I remove them completely then they don't seem to feel like they are doing big things. I guess giving them both makes it their decision and that is pretty much what I do now. The grand, sprawling city adventure I am running now has 7 epic scenarios and 23 minor scenarios. The very first thing they took on, day 1, was one of the epic quests. They managed to solve it, barely, and during that time they also completed 3 minor ones in the process. Now they are mid level having completed 4 of the 7 epic ones and 14 of the 23 minor ones. It is a tough thing sometimes being a GM and listening both to what the players say and also watching there behavior for underlying desires.
I really like to run this human-centric campaign style, yet im running it in Pathfinder 2e because thats kind of what was available. Already at level 7 they have quickly started surpassing such human level threats. We are taking a few weeks break due to IRL events taking up the weekly timeslot, but when we return, I plan on introducing them to troupe play, where they will effectively be officers in a company of soldiers. Now the threats will be to their soldiers, and their ability to more widely effect change with their men. Im excited to try it out!
Choose 5-8 different challenge rating mobs in order from lowest to highest. Choose 3 locations that would be intriguing. Draw a line connecting mobs and locations and find a way that they are all part of one major problem to build up to. At the end make it either a force they have come to trust, or something dark and too powerful that orchestrated them all. Your campaign doesn't end at level 6. You will always have a human level story and scenario as long as you follow this.
Interesting.
@@BanditsKeep Ty, I have been running games for over 30 years and tend to over-simplify at times.
Personally I like these kind of campaigns more than I like the short-format campaigns that focus on action and escalation. I run RP-heavy games and that allows people to explore everything that they want out of their character, so sometimes we do have A LOT of downtime. For right now I'll call this the BG3 problem. A lot of people have had BG3 as their first experience, and a lot of gamers ended up speed running the encounters for the sake of beating the game. Skipping dialogue, side quests, exploration, etc. This IS how a lot of common, by the book campaigns and inspired campaigns end up. A narrative that is of great scale, where every challenge and the story increases with the levels observed, and while you'll deal with people along the way, most of the issues escalate into monster lords, gods, devils and the like.
My thing on it matches exactly what we're talking here. That the players need downtime. Not every enemy has to be the biggest and baddest possible to fit the narrative and I like to reflect that in my milestone games. In my current campaign, the party has done about 1/5 of the main storyline designed for the campaign and has been allowed to pick their own plot hooks if they wanted. They moved on from early game, and the whim of one player who went on hiatus took them to a dwarven city to the west on the border of our country. During that phase, I had them get raided by Wyvern bandits deploying their crew onto the ship while the two riders flew above. They lost an NPC that was a couple levels lower that a majority got attached to and recognized him as a plot important NPC. They ran into an Inn, met the lovely halflings there and their huge family, and they heard of a temple that was "Epic" (In the sense it's four levels higher than they were in terms of design) but if they could get through the ruins of the temple, a Sphinx guards the gate of the dead there and can revive on person if you master their riddle or prove yourselves to be a great combatant. They decided to head out and some of the brave halfling men chose to come with for one reason or another.
They went in, found out that the temple had a cult that moved on that was trying to use some strange tech they had discovered (Lore wise it's from a Githzarai ship that had a teleport mishap into the crust of this planet centuries ago that had been revealed by a previous campaign) to revive people. They offered a rather bruised and battered shelter after they had lost another teammate (His stupidity lead to a death we all saw coming. He got a lot of crap for his suicide kind of decision), and they had lost two husbands from the community they borrowed them from, one of which to a wall of fire that was cast up, leaving him alone because the paladin had chosen to make him the front liner (as rogue) because he was making flirty comments towards the fems of the group even though he was married. She felt bad about that one, and the other was a volunteer they liked.
WIthout the consent of the Player to revive the character he was tired of, they were offered a chance to use the cults tech to revive the lost NPCs and their friend from the main quest, Flynn, with the condition that the party couldn't watch. The party debated this, also killing them, but decided that since they were also tied into the story of another character that had died, to spare them.
With their friend back, they went to the tavern, continued on their way. Helped the bandit leaders daughter who lead the party to the bandit cave. A coup was thrown, the bandits that sided with the survivors and the saved daughter broke up after the fight and those who were loyal all died with the exception of the actual wyvern handler who freed the beasts and climbed out their exit hole.
We then went into town, found out it was being shelled by a large mechanical ox from the main story (had a variation of these things going on in all possible towns they could have gone too, just to tie into the main plot) and during the exhibition, I gave the players a chance to roll for "hits" on locations around town. The alchemist shop was one. During downtime, the party's fighter went to explore the shop to see if there was any free loot to discover. Rolled a nat 1 on a d100 luck roll in the ruins, fell into the destroyed building's basement, found a creepy little cave tunnel that lead to a room basked in red light, and a scrawny man with two circle scars on his neck and dozens of cuts on his body stuck in a cage claiming how the vampire had been slain in the explosion and he was the only one to survive, and that he should have been freed.
The party had a lot of time in between that point where they dealt with things like an ooblek, a goblin gang, murdering a connection of an enemy for the gang, and helping fight in a gang turf war that popped up while they were at a club before ghouls attacked at night, and then a secret monk organization spoke to them and had them deal with the issues they caused.
All of these major epic beats of fantasy were born out of moments of "Human" downtime, offering smaller but human like problems. Being attacked by normal road bandits lead to an epic temple run to save a friend and came with it's own trauma. Trauma that they found out later was revivification at a price of trapping the original soul in it's dead body and making a physical copy and imbuing it with enough magic that it creates a souless copy out of magic (Think how zombies work, but a more sophisticated process to keep great heroes and leaders in a semblance of life if the worst happens) and that if you free the original, you kill both copies unless the original was in a state of life at the time of capture. Because of downtime and deciding to explore the city for loot, paired up with a terrible 1/100 chance die roll, we had a whole vampire subplot get released into the city. And I love that type of story development.
Okay...you have my atention Daniel!
WFRP does this a lot. Older adventures are about walking around Marienburg looking into stock fraud. There is an adventure where snotlings have robbed a pie contest.
Rough Night at Seven Feathers is a classic adventure taking place in a single night as at least five story plot crash together.
A fight is a big deal. A legal duel, a dude hidden with a crossbow or three lads with a log on the road are weighty. Or three chump orcs.
Something like a single mummy or demonette is a huge deal. They show up sparingly.
For a module to run CM1 Test of the Warlords. You're going to have to create NPCs. But, you're claiming rulership over an unsettled land between two warring empires. NPCS grow real good in that soul.
CM1 provides some NPCs, but they can definitely be improved upon and/or increased in number.
@@jben6 I took the extra steps of creating character sheets for the listed ones & solo rpg'd them. Since the players are pacing season by season, I did the same. The NPCs competing for land & power alongside the characters felt more real to the players.
Love this kind of content. Pacing!
Thank you. I appreciate all the new comments 😃
Personally "stopping the taxes" is a good enough reason for me to go all in...
Yes!
At domain level you become the tax man.
We had two sessions of figuring out how local courts and bribes worked to get out hot dog stand back to legal status.
Hear, hear!
I ran The Dragon of Ice spire Peak as a human scale campaign. It was awesome
Awesome
Curse of the Crimson Throne is pathfinder adventure path I've been running for over a year now and it's, I think, as close to this as you can get. Human sized problems that then grow into something larger at higher levels. I've heavily adapted it on a couple fronts (both storywise and mechanics since I'm running it in 5e).
Sounds awesome
@@BanditsKeep strong suggest to check it out! The bones are there for SUCH a cool campaign, it just needs tweaking and there's already a bunch of thoughts people have shared online on how to do it.
I enjoy sandbox games and your last piece of advice on not distract your players with fantastical hooks is gold.
Thank You!
The Paizo Hollow's Last Hope into Kobold King series (Darkmoon vale) are a very good human-level adventure!
Thanks, I’ll have to check it out
Being of the opinion that in the beginning as low level characters the world should be rare magic with monsters still legendary, the primary foes being humans of equivalent power. This feels both real and in keeping with old school play where monsters lurk in dungeons or wildernesses, as discovered they are rather lowly and amp up as one delves deeper or further. Within such a world the first 5 levels can be epic as the game intended without needing super hero players or mega monsters to scale. Imagine if all ordinary humans were the same 3-18 hit points and PCs or important NPCs maxed at 18 or 24 hit points? Even a bandit fight at 1st level can be dangerous or deadly with normal weapons. But as PCs gain better armor, weapons or magic they are more epic yet just as vulnerable so never quite feel invincible. That is my current design philosophy.
That sounds about right to me
Excellent content!
Thank You!
Wonderful information.
Thank You!
Totally agree with this, heavy, people based stories, does not a 30-60 page adventure make.
Indeed
No Rest for the Wicked from Lamentations of the Flame Princess is a great adventure module for human dilemmas & solutions! If I remember correctly, unless the players or GM introduces fantastic elements, the scenario is completely mundane, but by no means boring!
Cool, I think I actually have that on my shelf, I’ll take a look
Power is a trick of perception
Indeed
the simplest solution is to not run one-shots. If you run a campaign it is easy to weave in motivation, cuz the player said what motivates his character at session zero. Just use that or intertwine it with the mainstory. Like they have to find and stop the slavers so that NPC helps them with finding the Mcguffin. But normal stuff won't do it for high lvl players. If you instant teleport across the Continent and obliterate an Army with Metorswarms than just do a big Monster. I also as a DM like heroic fantasy more. It way more fun to have an epic showdown than a political succes via talking.
I can see that point of view, for many though, the politics are fun.
Some of my best sessions were filled with dealing with the human factor
Nice!
My solution is to have my PCs be part of a hierarchical organization, like the military or a crime syndicate. They have to follow the missions they’re assigned, but they have lots of discretion on how they execute those missions. That’s automatic buy-in.
Nice
I want more downtime adventures and human level problems, but my party bemoans it. They want to be the Avengers killing evil gods and saving the universe.
Ah yes, that can be a bit of a challenge
Big adventures are fun and all but I like putting in adventures that can’t simply be solved by killing everyone and everything in a 5 mile radius. Things get complicated and messy and there’s no one easy fix to simply just solve things.
I think that humans are some of the best "monsters" and a ton of my story arcs have them as the BBEG. What that really does is make the real monsters even more terrifying.
For sure
Running things on a human scale works great with a grim dark campaign. I agree, you must make your NPC's more dynamic. A quick look at real life gives us many examples of human scale bad guys we can hate...drug dealers, abusers of the innocent, slavers (yes, this still happens, even in the U.S.A.) and my favorite...the people at the Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) 😁 One of my favorite sessions was having my level 1 party track a local pig thief who was a well known drunk. The pig and the thief had to be returned unharmed. It was basically a car chase with a pig and a fat drunk guy set in a medieval world. Simple and easy but full of laughs and challenges
That sounds fun, I ran an adventure a while back where the PCs could not kill the bandits they had as enemies because it was inside the city limits and could be treated as murder.
I remember there was a time I ran a game where the PCs came to town to sell items after a delve and had to pay exorbitant taxes while the town was still s*thole. So they immediately started to attempt and rally a coup which led them to skipping town immediately.
Nice
I've ran campaigns of 5e ranging from level 1 to 20 without ever using non-human stat blocks. I will never understand this idea that you cannot challenge 5e characters past a certain level. When the stat blocks fail, the mechanics are right there to use for the GM as well as the players to create characters. If you're level 20 and have a castle and an army, somebody else does. If you're still homeless at level 20, fair enough Gandalf, but that doesn't mean there aren't more selfish wizards who spent their time creating an empire. The best part is that using PC rules for high level human NPCs is easy to run if you know the game, and absolutely brutal and fast and intense compared to CR 20 monsters. All the while, the paladin and cleric players aren't fighting gods, they're contending with mortal men...as, in my opinion, it should be.
I'm digging into the Forbidden Lands adventure sites lately, most of them so far have a good might of human problems, and then a monstrous or supernatural one if the PCs did deep enough. I interesting approach...
Cool
I recently had a character that my bard had screwed over, come back as an enemy. Even my big bad is just a dude trying to smuggle goods. Is this what you mean by human level?
I’m running my players through a paizo adventure path (I know I know) but the entire campaign is set in a single town. It’s been interesting. So seems doable but the fact I say it’s interesting is because it is very different to the usual JRPG arc - “start as nobody, end the game by fighting god”.
Cool
Id live another few videos on this topic, its very relevant to my future games.
Even if you just analyze other human conflicts and how to set them up
Cool, I’ll see what I can do
Started a playlist so I can circle back with whatever I write for my players.
Cool
Yeah I tend to follow modules too closely which leaves the players feeling like they dont have enough agency or emotional attachment 😢 I have heard advice that the higher the level the more straightforward and simplified you should approach it, maybe its high level cosmic horror but it doesnt also need to be a mega dungeon, just 5-10 rooms would suffice
For sure
HOur of the dragon is my favorite from Robert E. Howard.
It was really good!
You are probably thinking of "Hour of the Dragon" where Conan gets temporarily deposed.
That’s it!
If it hasn't already been plugged, I'm going to suggest The Shucked Oyster by the boys over at Black Lodge Gaming, as a human centred 'module/adventure'.
Im running BX with a "hardcore mod": PCs do NOT gain class levels.
They use gold to pay trainers, good trainers belong to factions and will only train members of that faction. Membership to factions and access to higher ranks demands meaningful role-playing, engaging with its members (NPCs or PCs), its conflicts, politics and viewpoints, and of course it costs gold.
Congrats, you re-invented Runequest 2E from 1978! That is exactly how it works there:)
Great video. I think the DND starter set in Phandlin is a good basic human level adventure
I’ve heard good things about that - and I have it, just haven’t read it - will have to do that!
So, human level for super high level players would be like a powerful sorcerer/priest cult then?!
I think the idea of human scale is it’s not something that brute strength (levels) alone can overcome
Normally,when DM a module, I work into it over a dozen mini side quests, all something to do with the main quest. Just a lost sheep perhaps that needs to be found, that will point to something bigger. A library needing a tome back, a ruin somewhere, a scammer trying to pull a fast one on the party, etc... Often I get the ideas from adventures for level 1 characters and such, or even from pulp fiction books, old westerns (Zane Gray, Larry McMurtry, Louis L'Amour, Karl May), etc... Actually the crappier the book the better it can be in a side quest, the better books always have a lot of plot devices that are hard to translate into a game. LeoGuild movies perhaps, yeeah, those are crappy enough. Also, they give very human sized problems. All of them just small stumble stones on the way to the main issue, depleting the resources of the players while giving them a sense of accomplishment.
Cool
Do people play D&D like this? As in a gauntlet of ever pressing challenges? When I used to run a d&d campaign (and subsequent RPG systems) I usually would first create a world with a backstory, every key location had a quick backstory to it and the players would run around interacting with it, this way I didn't had the problem of players derailing the adventure, because it was generated on-the-fly. It would play like a sandbox rpg
I think people coming into the hobby and seeing adventure design advice don’t often see the human side stuff. Or that is the vibe I get from comments and direct messages
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