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Preview of One Issue Campaign

Last time I discussed how I was going to steal Jeff Rients idea (THANKS!) of a “One Issue Campaign.” Well now I am going to outline the few changes I plan to implement. But first let’s review exactly what Jeff’s idea of the project was. (I will be doing so in my owns words)

1)      “Start with set of core rules, preferably one a small amount of setting material or a strongly implied setting.  Too much setting info will spoil the soup I think, while none whatsoever will serve as an insufficient basis.  I'll be using Labyrinth Lord(revised edition/fourth release), with its Duchy of Valnwall sample wilderness.

The core rules that I will be using on this blog are 5E. These rules are on the light side of things, and also there are a ton of people out there playing it. The next change, will be the setting. I will be using a custom setting of sorts. I am the kind of guy that likes to borrow a lot of ideas from other people (obviously, I try to credit them the best I can. I promise!).  And I also do not like to box myself into one setting itself. So instead I just plan to throw a bunch of different settings together and figure it out from there. In the beginning we won’t even have a setting at all, and slowly we will find a setting that we like and implement the story into it. This will depend on the type of locations and people we end up creating out of the content.

2. Get a single issue of Dragon or some other gaming mag.  Ideally I should have selected one at random, but for sentimental reasons I'm going to use Dragon #69.  It was the first issue I owned. 

Alright, while Jeff Rients picked issue #69 because he liked it. I just picked one at random, and got #124

3. Squeeze every possible of iota of usable information out of that magazine and nothing else to flesh out a campaign for your ruleset.  (FYI I'm not switching campaigns.  This is just a thought experiment.)

This is where it starts to get difficult. Jeff is ridiculously good at grabbing things from the bleakest of pages. I on the other hand, will most likely struggle a lot with this. And of course, as a reader you can contribute too. Just post your imaginative ideas down in the comments and we can make changes as we go (The more gonzo, the better). There is a small change I will be making to this still. I will not be boxing myself in with just Issue #124. Instead, I will continue to grab some things here and there from blogs that I find. I will link to these within the postings.

So that is the general idea. We are going to absorb as much information from Dragon Magazine Issue #124 as possible, and with that come up with a campaign that our players can wreak havoc in. And that is a key part, I DO NOT WANT THIS TO BE SOME RAILROAD. Rather I want it to be a campaign/setting that just has a lot of things going on it in, that the players can then interact with that stuff.

I am sure I am missing some rules that I have for myself on this project, but they are not coming to mind. So as they come up I will post them in the blog, and then maybe later make another larger post outlining how this whole thing is operating. 

One Issue Campaign - Thanks Jeff!

Dungeon and Dragons by definition is a hobby. For me, just like many of you, we use this hobby to exercise our creative imagination and also have a shit load of fun. But I also believe that D&D has many hobbies within the D&D “Umbrella” so to speak.  Some people like to draw their characters, some DM’s go into crazy world building, other’s use it to write novels, and some of us (ME BIG TIME) just love to collect as many cools things as possible (dice and miniatures for example).

For me, those cools things are collecting interesting ideas that other people came up with on the web. And of course come up with my own. I have spent many hours going through adventures other people have posted, taking the parts I like and scrapping the rest. One of my favorite resources for interesting ideas are blogs. Some blogs I go through are DNDwithpornstars and Goblin Punch. I even have massive documents that sort and filter the different articles that the prior mentioned blogs have created. But as the well ran dry on their blog, I scrambled for more blogs. And recently came across Jeff’s Blog, which I am sure MANY of you have read. As of late, he hasn’t posted much content, so I went deep into his archives. And that is where I found a gem. A gem that has inspired me to create this blog, and begin to really practice my writing skills, drawing skills, creativity ability, and begin to use the tools and tables I have been gathering over the months of DMing.

That article is: http://jrients.blogspot.com/2011/04/one-issue-one-campaign-part-1.html

The idea is simply, create a campaign out of a single Dragon Magazine. Jeff explains it as such

1. “Start with set of core rules, preferably one a small amount of setting material or a strongly implied setting.  Too much setting info will spoil the soup I think, while none whatsoever will serve as an insufficient basis.  I'll be using Labyrinth Lord(revised edition/fourth release), with its Duchy of Valnwall sample wilderness.
2. Get a single issue of Dragon or some other gaming mag.  Ideally I should have selected one at random, but for sentimental reasons I'm going to use Dragon #69.  It was the first issue I owned. 

3. Squeeze every possible of iota of usable information out of that magazine and nothing else to flesh out a campaign for your ruleset.  (FYI I'm not switching campaigns.  This is just a thought experiment.)

And when he says squeeze every bit of information possible from the magazine, HE MEANS IT! Unfortunately, he only wrote 4 parts to this little series (if anyone actually knows if he made a comment about this, or if I am missing something PLEASE DO TELL ME!). But those parts were enough for me to get my imagination running. I would recommend everyone to go read the 4 articles, and they can all be found HERE.

And guess what? I am going to do exactly what he did in those articles right here in this blog. I am going to grab a random Dragon magazine and make a campaign out of it. What you will find on this blog will most likely be nowhere near the quality of content that Jeff made in those 4 articles. BUT, I hope to slowly build some skill in creating content from resources like Dragon so that I can come up with cool stories too. Jeff is an amazing talent, and if I can even scratch the surface of what he did, then this blog would be a success.

So yeah, the writing style of this blog will be pretty laxed. Go ahead and rip apart anything about it. From grammar to actual content. I will begin my journey 3-5 pages at a time, and try to squeeze every bit of creative juice I can from Dragon magazine #124 (I already picked at random).