So let's hop right to it! This first post will be going over the creative process and how I go about it. Whenever I create a campaign I think about a few major factors tone, setting, and players. Though there are plenty of other smaller factors these three are the main ones that effect my thought processes on what I am making.
We'll start with the tone. The tone is the feeling that you wish to envoke in your players. It's probably the most important the three seeing as once the campaign is over they will remember the tone quite clearly. Ways to setup the tone are things such as elaborate back-stories. A narration following your beginning exposition. Many people don't realize this but the first paragraph they post in a campaign sets the tone for the rest of the session if not the entire campaign. In the beginning you need your players to know what they are to expect. If you are running a horror campaign then you should include reasons for them to be afraid. Remember if you want your players to have a reaction you need to first give them a reason to react. The less spontaneous you are usually means the better.
Some examples of how I setup tone are:
- I will use ambient music, this is easy enough all you really have to do is youtube the emotion you are looking for, or you can go my route and download ost's to several shows, animes, and games. After that setup playlist of similar songs by their emotional appeal. It works great!
-Timing your pauses, this is a fun one to play with, but it's effects differ greatly player to player. What you'll want to do is time your pauses to put more emphasis on certain words. You can make this even better by stressing the word prior to the pause. A classic example of timing your pauses is the way people satirize Kirk from the original Star Trek. By placing the pauses it makes it sound cheezy and over the top but it displays the power of doing this.
- For forum based role-playing or IRC based role-playing this all relies on word choice and descriptive ability. Which for many (including myself at times) is difficult.
The next of the three is setting. This is similar to tone in many way as it is one of the main deciders of the tone. Your setting is simple to talk about but hard to decide. It is things such as time period, current events, cultures, surrounding, myth, etc. It [i]IS[/i] your campaign. Everything you want you players to go through, the very world around them.
Examples of settings I've used are:
- Zombie apocalypse (original right :P)
- Golem Master
- Detective Noir
- Explorers of the underdark
- Many more.
The last thing (and perhaps the first at time) is the players. You need to know who you are appealing to. This is really the decider for what your doing with the campaign. The reason that you normally need to do this last is that your players will be attracted to the campaign you making. (Though I have done it the other way around) It's also really important to think about how many player you want in the campaign because that effects the difficulty in a large way. Normally I'd say no more than 8, and that is stretching it. (Even for post by post campaign because you have to wait for people responses) Also with a large number of players you have a higher chance of having mishaps with scheduling which can result in a campaign getting delayed (or cancelled at times.)
Really I can't think of any other advice on this other than, get to know the people you'll be playing with, because chances are you'll be playing with them fora while.
That's about it! I hope that what I've said wasn't complete gibberish, if you have any question feel free to ask me anything. The same goes to criticism, I want to give information in the most concise way possible.
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