Building a Campaign

## **The World and the Adventure**

The main objective of this game is to provide a team-based PvE experience set in the fantastic worlds of Magic: the Gathering. Also all encounters and dungeons are built around a full commander deck meant to not only add to player’s commander deck options but to also embrace theme built commander decks. So, obviously you’ll need a commander deck to build your first adventure.

Let’s approach the majority of this chapter like we’re planning to build the first part of a five part story set on Theros. There are several key components a DM needs to think about when crafting an adventure, we’ll separate these into the Adventure, Exploration and Combat.

The Adventure aspect of a campaign is everything outside of exploration and combat, mostly this covers the world building, role playing, and anything else you would associate with a village in an RPG. Which brings us to a good starting point for any campaign, the starting location or major settlement of the story.

In this Theros based adventure we’ll start our heroes in Meletis, the equivalent of Athens in this greek mythology inspired world. Before the rise of the gods, archons ruled the plane, now as the gods are distracted by the actions of the Reveler the archons have decided to attack this city of scholars.

So this gives us a starting point, a location, and presumably some sort of a goal: either stopping the archons, setting out on your own, or pursuing the Gods and the Reveler. Because we don’t want each campaign to take a year to build we will try to keep the rest of this simple.

**In Act I of our Theros campaign our central hub will be Meletis. Because this is an RPG system based on a limited card pool of resources we should focus on story elements and character progression a.k.a. Stuff and things! We should provide merchants that cover all four major equipment slots: Weapon, Armor, Trinket, and Item. We should also provide outlets for certain colors and schools of magic and perhaps a location unique to the setting.**

* **SHOPS:** Each shop display four items, randomly rolled on off the shop inventory
*(15 cards in total of varying rarity)*

* **TRAINERS:** Each trainer will have four spells available to purchase per color.
NOTE: These trainers will sometime has multicolor spells available, can be at either trainer as long as it is within color identity.
*(20 cards of varying rarity and color)*

* **UNIQUE:** A place of interest, with or without wares, unique to the story or setting.
Example: A gladiator arena, a guild house of Ravnica, or a cemetery.
*(number varies)*

If a player tries to be cheeky and start combat or steal then depending on ability roles fails should be dealt with the commander cardpool closest to the involved NPC color identity. If this isn’t possible the GM may opt for a simple punishment like loss of life or status effect.

Again the goal is to get as close as we can to that Dungeons & Dragons feel while still mostly playing MTG, at least using MTG cards to play a game of sorts. The only issue is overall player freedom compared to D&D, because our adventures need to be a bit more scripted to accommodate the associated card pools. In D&D, players can say screw you helpless village we are going south to the woods for funsies, however in this game the GM at most could have you fight a green deck and then have no more material beyond that point. It’s got to be a little bit of give and take between the players, they are encouraged to be creative in their approach to problem solving but they mostly need to follow a semi-linear path, like RPGs of yore.

## **The Commander and the Dungeon**

Which brings us to the “script” of our adventure, so long as we are trying to kill two birds with one stone and build real-life MTG commander decks while also serving story purposes we have to bend a little. As long as we want to build around the visions of the sets built by Wizards of the Coast and the characters they choose to build around, our story will mostly have to be a spin off of those ideas.

Essentially if we want to use legendaries from our Theros set Meletis (a white-blue associated location) than Daxos of Meletis is an obvious build around. We don’t have to follow his Elspeth connect storyline and we don’t have to use excerpts from Uncharted Realms (though they help immensely). But we need to build the deck utilizing his mechanical themes and the flavor cards related to him and our goals. Maybe we have Meletis be a pawn of a higher power or make him a strict rules following vigilant who sees the players as a threat. He could also become an ally and assist the player characters. All of this could lead up to a reveal of the white-black dead version, Daxos the Returned.

You get the idea. You are restricted by the cards they printed and the stories they told, but if you’re clever you aren’t really all that restricted. Just stay on flavor. Let’s say we want our version of Daxos to meet up with the players and help them fight against giants and archons. Then we would want to build his deck to meet those themes, where his deck would need those creatures in them and we would use his commander card as an ally against that deck. If he was a rule obsessed hunter of our party maybe we would fight his commander card and his deck would be built around white-blue control and lockdown magic.

How you build the commander deck, or commander decks depending on the size of your Act, will determine your story telling options. So no matter what when crafting a story outside of the basic character management stuff in town, it starts with the commander deck. After building the deck, all of the results of encounters while exploring dungeons or combat will come from these commander decks in some way. At times removing a certain amount of cards while at other times playing the deck as is.

Upon completion of the commander deck(s) for the Act you will need to build your Dungeon Book, the bible of your story-telling that contains all the roll tables associated to the major encounter cards for exploring a dungeon. You’ll also need all the appropriate rewards for the dungeon experience.

## **The** **Codex**

The codex is the god book of your act. It will have a basic outline of the story and the adventure, give information on the type of setting to build your dungeon layout, and most importantly have your roll tables for the different encounter types.

* ***Encounters:*** A list or table of all scripted encounters related to the adventure or commander deck being used to create the dungeon. Usually contains a Boss, Mini-Boss, a few generic strong enemies, a few generic weak enemies.
* ***Fate:*** A series of skill checks or games of chance, capable of leading to positive, negative, or neutral outcomes. Heavily connected to the Virtue and Vice system.
* ***Loot:*** Six different categories, most of them preset with basic items or rewards regardless of adventure:

	+ **Gold**
	+ **Craft** (15 preset component items, with 5 unique campaign related components and 5 unique compaign related schematics)
	+ **Items** (15 preset items, 5 unique to campaign, setting, or adventure)
	+ **Scrolls** (One time use spells 20 unique spells, one time use scrolls of the same skills learned by trainers in this chapter or act)
	+ **Trinkets** (15 preset items, 5 unique to campaign, setting, or adventure)
	+ **Equipment** (15 preset items, 5 unique to campaign, setting, or adventure)

Connected to the dungeon book will be the encounter avatars, these are simplified versions of the players avatars meant to represent the enemy avatar, especially for scripted combat, mini-bosses, or final bosses. They mostly will consist of an emblem like effect, a Invocation/Evocation ability, character modifiers, and ability scores.

## **Taking An Inventory**

Okay enough explaining, let’s get down to brass tax.

My current plans for a Theros campaign begins with an Act I, featuring:

* ***Daxos of Meletis***
* ***Kynaios // Tiro of Meletis***
* ***Ephara, God of Polis***

So lets make a "Shopping List" to build this act:

* **3 x Commander Decks:**
	+ Daxos
	+ Kynaios / Tiro
	+ Ephara
* **Custom Cards:**
	+ Avatar cards for scripted encounters
	+ Emblems, Schemes, Archenemy, Domain, and Planes cards.
	+ Recipes, Schematics, Components, and Custom-items:
		- 5 x Craft - Campaign-related Components
		- 5 x Craft - Campaign-related Schematics/Recipes
		- 5 x Item - Consumable, Key Items
* **30 x** **Loot Cards - Spell and Artifact Cards:**
	+ 20 x Spell cards (Can be learned by a trainer or gained as a one-time use scroll)
	+ 5 x Artifacts (non-equipment cards as Trinkets)
	+ 5 x Artifact Equipments (equipment cards as Gear)

The above list is specifically for the unique cards needed for the campaign, several of the loot and spell cards will be reinforced with a large list of preset base cards that fit all campaigns and settings. In addition to the cards you'll need to develop the guide to your campaign, the Codex:

* Story Overview
* Character Outline, associated Avatars
* Tables for campaign information involving: Enemies, Fate, Lore, and Quests

Each campaign will be different and unique depending on how it was developed, but hopefully the guides and metrics listed above will help give you an idea of what will be needed to prepare the beginnings of a campaign. Using the example above we would have an adventure capable of representing a city, the surrounding areas, three full dungeons, along with a variety of loot and character improvements.