The Game Master’s Handbook of Collaborative Campaign Design

The second volume in the bestselling Game Master's Handbook series shows you how to do more than run a game—it shows you how to build a world!

Following the example of the first volume in the Game Master's Handbook series, this new entry forgoes stat blocks and maps in favour of clear explanations and guides that focus on developing and running an original campaign.

Homebrewing an original setting and story is one of the most challenging and rewarding things a GM can do. It's tough to get started with worldbuilding, plotting, and resolving your campaign—but this book walks GMs already somewhat familiar with running the game through a process for designing a homebrew campaign to be proud of, from scratch. At the core of the book is one big idea: The purpose of a TTRPG is to discover a story together with your friends, not to tell them a story you've already written.

Have an idea for a game? If so, this book teaches you the process for transforming pages of notes into a fully-realised campaign outline. You'll learn how to write narrative arcs that develop with the players and end satisfyingly even without an ending being written in advance. You'll even learn how to design mechanical details for your setting that complement the story the group is telling at the table.

Finally, you'll learn a simple system for adapting existing content (professionally published or from other homebrew sources) to fit in your campaign, with a special focus on the material provided by the other books in the Game Master's series.

Features

• Detailed guidelines and strategies for planning campaigns, implementing them during play, and effective post-game practices
• Examples and case studies for worldbuilding, planning story arcs, and resolving a campaign in a satisfying way
• A "Session -1" collaborative world-building system
• A wealth of tables to inspire or speed along the campaign-building process, including setting-building tools and narrative plot arc generators
• Examples and checklists for integrating others' content into a homebrew game