Starting Woes

This is the bane of any writer - word one. I've been considering what kind of campaign I want to build, and am beginning to get a feel for what I'd like to start developing. Unfortunately, I'm still left with no beginning. Ideally, we can sit down over the next day or two and begin play on a new campaign. But for the moment, I've got nothing.

Thee are options. As I mentioned yesterday, there are a some options that work well as "asides" to the main quest, wanderings might be a better word. I could use one of those, and that would be fine. The concern is that we spend all our time wandering and none developing a unified central theme. Wanderings are fine, but they can't substitute for a plot. That was Storm King's Thunder.

I'm fresh off King Solomon's Mines, so the idea of a questing adventure to recover someone or something is at the forefront of my mind. It's been one of the options we've discussed all summer, the Dr. Livingston hook, as it were. After that, it devolved into numerous options of who to look for, the circumstances of their disappearance, the makeup of the searchers... That's part of the problem.

At least it's an option that can be used multiple times. It may be one that we use at the heart of multiple adventure paths, which is fine, although I think it will work better if there is some variation in the target of the search. Unless, all of the adventures are looked at as filaments of one larger skein! Maybe the whole point of our adventures should be locating Artus Cimber and the Ring of Winter. Different groups would have different reasons for and approaches to the search, not to mention vastly different possibilities about where to find them, what the danger is, or the importance. That might be a good unifying theme.

I'd rather define our own theme, but this might work in the meantime... Picking a theme might be easy enough, but giving it the proper meaning and relevance is tougher. This could work as a preparatory device. I suppose all of this is comical, when the pretense of the adventure is to discover the cause of the death curse and end it... but as a theme, it doesn't resonate with me as a hook that will mean anything to first level adventurers. We want to start from scratch.

So, we use Artus Cimber... it just opens more questions. Why do we all want to find him? Why do we care about the Ring of Winter?

Let's vary it... let's chase after an archaeologist. One group wants to find him and help explore the ruins he has discovered. Another group will want to find him and silence him, multiple groups more likely - some because of the item, some the location, some to protect their own interests. This will work. Let Artus Cimber wander through the story as scripted, we'll head out to find our own lost soul, or treasure of our own.