Between Adventures

A campaign is much more than a series of adventures. It also includes the moments between them-the various distractions and side pursuits that engage the characters when they’re not exploring the wilderness, plundering dungeons, and gallivanting around the multiverse on some epic quest.

The natural pace of a campaign offers lulls between adventures, time for the characters to spend their treasure and pursue their goals. This downtime gives the characters an opportunity to sink their roots a little deeper into the world, building a personal investment in what happens to the people and places around them, which can, in turn, draw them into further adventures.

Chapter 5, “Equipment,” of the Player’s Handbook details the expenses that a character incurs for basic necessities, depending on the lifestyle the character chooses, from poverty to luxury. Chapter 8, “Adventuring,” of that book describes some of the downtime activities they can pursue between adventures. This chapter fills in the gaps, describing the expenses of owning property and hiring NPCs, and a variety of additional downtime activities characters can pursue. The beginning of the chapter also offers suggestions for linking adventures together and keeping track of events in your campaign.

Linking Adventures

A campaign in the style of an episodic television show rarely needs story links between its adventures. Each adventure features its own villains, and once the characters complete the adventure, there are typically no loose plot threads. The next adventure presents an altogether different challenge having nothing to do with the adventure that preceded it. As the characters gain experience points, they become more powerful, as do the threats they must overcome. This kind of campaign is easy to run, since it requires little effort beyond finding or creating adventures appropriate for the party’s level.

A campaign with a narrative lets the players feel as though their actions have far-reaching consequences. They’re not just racking up experience points. A few simple modifications can help you overlay overarching elements to create a serialized campaign in which early adventures help set up later ones.

Using an Overarching Story

This section presents a couple of examples of overarching stories which have, over the years, fueled many classic D&D campaigns.

The adventurers' goal in the first example is to amass the power they need to defeat a powerful enemy that threatens the world. Their goal in the second example is to defend something they care about by destroying whatever threatens it.

The two examples are, in effect, the same story (variations of the battle between good and evil) told in different ways.

Example 1: The Quest of Many Parts

You can tie adventures together using an overarching goal that can be fulfilled only by first completing a series of related quests. For example, you could create a villain who can’t be defeated until the characters explore nine dungeons in which the Nine Dread Princes reside, with each of these dungeons stocked with enough monsters and hazards to advance the adventurers two or three levels. The adventurers spend their whole careers fighting the Nine Dread Princes before finally pursuing an epic quest to destroy the princes' monstrous progenitor. As long as every dungeon is unique and interesting, your players will appreciate the tight focus of the campaign.

In a similar type of quest campaign, the adventurers might need to collect fragments of an artifact that are scattered in ruins across the multiverse, before reassembling the artifact and using it to defeat a cosmic threat.

Example 2: Agents of X

You can also build a campaign around the idea that the adventurers are agents of something larger than themselves-a kingdom or secret organization, for example. Wherever their allegiance lies, the adventurers are motivated by loyalty and the goal of protecting whatever it is they serve.

The characters' overarching mission might be to explore and map an uncharted region, forging alliances where they can and overcoming threats they encounter along the way. Their goal might be to find the ancient capital of a fallen empire, which lies beyond the realm of a known enemy and forces them to navigate hostile territory. The characters could be pilgrims in search of a holy site or members of a secret order dedicated to defending the last bastions of civilization in an ever-declining world. Or they might be spies and assassins, striving to weaken an enemy country by targeting its evil leaders and plundering its treasures.

Planting Adventure Seeds

You can make a campaign feel like one story with many chapters by planting the seeds of the next adventure before the current one is finished. This technique can naturally moves the characters along to their next goal.

If you’ve planted a seed well, the characters have something else to do when they finish an adventure. Perhaps a character drinks from a magic fountain in a dungeon and receives a mystifying vision that leads to the next quest. The party might find a cryptic or relic that, once its meaning or purpose is determined, points to a new destination. Perhaps an NPC warns the characters of impending danger or implores them for help.

The trick is to not distract the characters from the adventure at hand. Designing an effective hook for a future adventure requires finesse. The lure should be compelling, but not so irresistible that the players stop caring about what their characters are doing right now.

To keep players from straying, save your best ideas for the very end of your adventures, or insert them during periods of downtime.

Here are a few examples of ways in which an adventure seed can be revealed:

• On a villain’s corpse, the characters find evidence that the villain was working for someone else.
• A captured NPC reveals the location of someone or something that might interest the characters.
• The characters are heading to a local tavern when they spot a wanted poster or a missing person poster (complete with the promise of a sizable reward).
• Members of the local militia or city watch put out the word that a crime has been committed, and they’re looking for potential witnesses and suspects.
• The characters receive an anonymous letter that sheds light on a plot or impending event of which they were previously unaware.

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is an exercise in subtlety, involving the delicate planting of seeds for future adventures. Not all foreshadowing bears fruit, particularly if the clues are too subtle or if events conspire to take your campaign in a new direction. The goal of foreshadowing is to hint at upcoming events and new threats in your campaign without making it obvious to players that you’re telling them what the future holds. Here are a few examples:

• An object worn or carried by an enemy has the symbol of a previously unknown organization engraved or written on it.
• A mad woman standing on a street corner spouts fragments of an ancient prophecy, while pointing a crooked finger at the characters.
• The king and queen announce the marriage of their son to the daughter of a neighboring monarch, but various factions oppose the union. Trouble is brewing.
• Bugbear scouts are making incursions into civilized lands and spying on settlements, as a prelude to a hobgoblin warlord’s invasion.
• A puppet show in a market square predicts a tragic outcome if two noble houses on the cusp of declaring war on each other refuse to reconcile.
• NPC adventurers in a city are being murdered in a similar yet unusual manner, hinting at a future threat to the player characters.

Campaign Tracking

Consistent details bring your campaign to life, and continuity helps players imagine that their characters are living in a real world. If the adventurers frequent a particular tavern, the staff, layout of the building, and decor shouldn’t change much from one visit to the next. That said, changes can occur as a result of the characters' actions or of actions they learn about. When the adventurers kill a monster, it stays dead, unless someone raises it. When they remove treasure from a room, it doesn’t reappear the next time they enter—assuming it hasn’t been stolen from them! If they leave a door open, it should stay open until someone closes it. No one’s memory is infallible, so it pays to keep records. Jot notes directly on an adventure map to keep track of open doors, disarmed traps, and the like. Events beyond the scope of a single adventure are best recorded in a notebook dedicated to your campaign.

Whether it’s a physical book or an electronic file, such a record is a great way to keep your notes organized.

Your notebook might include any of the following elements.

Campaign Planner

Write down the main story arc of your campaign, and keep track of things that you hope appear in future adventures. Update it as the campaign develops, adding ideas as they come to you.

Character Notes

Write down the characters' backgrounds and goals, since these notes can help you design adventure content that provides opportunities for character development.

Keep a running tally of the adventurers' classes and levels, as well as any quests and downtime activities they’re engaged in.

If the characters have a ship or stronghold, record its name and whereabouts, as well as any hirelings in the characters' employ.

Player Handouts

Keep a copy of all handouts you make for your players so that you don’t have to remember their contents later.

Adventure Log

Think of this log as an episode guide for your campaign. Summarize each game session or adventure to help you keep track of the unfolding campaign story. You can give your players access to this log as well, or to an edited version stripped of your notes and secrets. (The players might also keep their own record of adventures, which you can refer to if your own log is incomplete.)

NPC Notes

Record statistics and roleplaying notes for any NPC the characters interact with more than once. For example, your notes might differentiate important people in a town by their different voices, as well as their names, the places where they live and work, the names of their family members and associates, and maybe even a secret that each one of them has.

Campaign Calendar

Your world feels more real to your players when the characters notice the passage of time. Note details such as the change of seasons and major holidays, and keep track of any important events that affect the larger story.

Toolbox

Keep notes whenever you create or significantly alter a monster, magic item, or trap. Keep any maps, random dungeons, or encounters you create. This information ensures you won’t repeat your work, and you’ll be able to draw on this material later.

Recurring Expenses

Besides the expenses associated with maintaining a particular lifestyle, adventurers might have additional drains on their adventuring income. Player characters who come into possession of property, own businesses, and employ hirelings must cover the expenses that accompany these ventures.

Maintenance Costs

It’s not unusual for adventurers-especially after 10th level-to gain possession of a castle, a tavern, or another piece of property. They might buy it with their hard-won loot, take it by force, obtain it in a lucky draw from a deck of many things, or acquire it by other means.

The Maintenance Costs table shows the per-day upkeep cost for any such property. (The cost of a normal residence isn’t included here because it falls under lifestyle expenses, as discussed in the Player’s Handbook.) Maintenance expenses need to be paid every 30 days. Given that adventurers spend much of their time adventuring, staff includes a steward who can make payments in the party’s absence.

Total Cost per Day

The cost includes everything it takes to maintain the property and keep things running smoothly, including the salaries of hirelings. If the property earns money that can offset maintenance costs(by charging fees, collecting tithes or donations, or selling goods), that is taken into account in the table.

Skilled and Untrained Hirelings

The Player’s Handbook explains the difference between a skilled hireling and an untrained one.

Businesses

An adventurer-owned business can earn enough money to cover its own maintenance costs. However, the owner needs to periodically ensure that everything is running smoothly by tending to the business between adventures. See the information on running a business in the “Downtime Activities” section of this chapter.

Garrisons

Castles and keeps employ soldiers (use the veteran and guard statistics in the Monster Manual) to defend them. Roadside inns, outposts and forts, palaces, and temples rely on less-experienced defenders (use the guard statistics in the Monster Manual). These armed warriors make up the bulk of a property’s skilled hirelings.

Downtime Activities

The campaign benefits when characters have time between adventures to engage in other activities. Allowing days, weeks, or months to pass between adventures stretches the campaign over a longer period of time and helps to manage the characters' level progression, preventing them from gaining too much power too quickly.

Allowing characters to pursue side interests between adventures also encourages players to become more invested in the campaign world. When a character owns a tavern in a village or spends time carousing with the locals, that character’s player is more likely to respond to threats to the village and its inhabitants.

As your campaign progresses, your players' characters will not only become more powerful but also more influential and invested in the world. They might be inclined to undertake projects that require more time between adventures, such as building and maintaining a stronghold. As the party gains levels, you can add more downtime between adventures to give characters the time they need to pursue such interests. Whereas days or weeks might pass between low-level adventures, the amount of downtime between higher-level adventures might be measured in months or years.

More Downtime Activities

Chapter 8, “Adventuring,” of the Player’s Handbook describes a few downtime activities to fill the void between adventures. Depending on the style of your campaign and the particular backgrounds and interests of the adventurers, you can make some or all of the following additional activities available as options.

• Downtime Activity: Building a Stronghold
• Downtime Activity: Carousing
• Downtime Activity: Crafting a Magic Item
• Downtime Activity: Gaining Renown
• Downtime Activity: Performing Sacred Rites
• Downtime Activity: Running a Business
• Downtime Activity: Selling Magic Items
• Downtime Activity: Sowing Rumors
• Downtime Activity: Training to Gain Levels

Creating Downtime Activities

Your players might be interested in pursuing downtime activities that aren’t covered in this chapter or in the Player’s Handbook. If you invent new downtime activities, remember the following:

• An activity should never negate the need or desire for characters to go on adventures.
• Activities that have a monetary cost associated with them provide opportunities for player characters to spend their hard-won treasure.
• Activities that reveal new adventure hooks and previously unknown facts about your campaign can help you foreshadow future events and conflicts.
• For an activity you expect a character to repeat with variable degrees of success, consider creating a random outcome table, modeled on the ones in this chapter.
• If a character belongs to a class or has a proficiency or background that would make him or her well suited to a particular activity, consider granting a bonus to ability checks made by the character to complete that activity successfully.