Design Journal Part 1: Characters

I think that one of the strongest methods of creating a specific "feel" for a D&D campaign setting is to control the available options for player characters. Many of the great settings of the past 20 years are strongly identified with the classes or races featured within. You can't think of Dragonlance without remembering kender and the Knights of Solamnia, nor Dark Sun without picturing mul gladiators or deadly defilers. A setting's choice of character options helps define it for the players, which is a big step toward making it "real" for them (and thus for their characters).

For my Bloodlines campaign, I had some very specific desires about the mix of player character classes and races. Because I wanted to focus on characters of about the same age, I limited the available options for starting characters to human, half-elf, and halfling. Along the way, the possibilities of some interesting inter-racial politics led me to include dwarf and elf among the choices.

Similarly, since I wanted to spend the bulk of the campaign in a limited geographical region, I wanted to avoid character classes that felt "exotic." Barbarians and monks were initially off the list for PC races (though a dwarf barbarian crept in along the way). I encouraged characters to have strong religious backgrounds (since that was another area of the game I planned to emphasize), and ended up with a wide variety of divinely themed characters.

For the Umber campaign, then, I want the choices of race and class to help define the world for me. But how to accomplish that?

Well, I know I want Umber to feel like an older world than Bloodlines. This isn't a world about new frontiers, it's a world crumbling around the edges. I want to create a sense of "been there, done that," a sense of cynical world-weariness.

I also want to create a world without defined kingdoms. Bloodlines had a human kingdom, an elven kingdom, a dwarven kingdom, and a goblinoid kingdom. Though the borders weren't always clear, most people of the world associated their identity with one of those four entities. Umber isn't like that--not only is the world racially integrated, it doesn't offer such easy identification with a large group of people.

For that reason, I plan on throwing the doors wide open when it comes to character race options. In addition to the races in the Player's Handbook, I want to include planetouched races (such as aasimar and tieflings) as well as humanoids traditionally identified as monsters (including orcs and gnolls). By doing so, I hope to break down the mental barriers that most players have about "this race is friendly, that race is my enemy"--in Umber, everyone is a potential enemy, and the black-and-white approach to good and evil must give way to a very large grey area. It also means that the player characters will encounter an extraordinarily wide variety of people in their adventures, and by the fourth or fifth time you've bought your trail rations from the tiefling provisioner, you stop noticing his horns and tail and start paying more attention to the fact that he always seems to have exactly what you need...

As for classes, I have two goals: First, I want to decrease the presence of magic in the world. That means discouraging or limiting access to pure spellcasting classes (cleric, druid, sorcerer, wizard, and maybe bard). That's a big topic, and I'll come back to it in a later column.

Second, I want to "turn the tables" regarding my players' assumptions about religious life. In Bloodlines, clerics are politically (as well as magically) powerful, while the druids are relegated to second-class citizenship because of their adherence to the heretical Old Faith. On top of that, due in large part to specific class and background choices by my players, a lot of the campaign has focused on church politics. That's been a lot of fun, but I want the new campaign to create a totally different feel. So I plan to establish druids, not clerics, as the "keepers of the faith" of this world. As symbols of the natural world, druids are relied upon to protect life in all its forms. Clerics, on the other hand, worship dark gods best left forgotten. There's no friendly Pelor or Altius here--just mysterious beings that grant power in exchange for souls.

So now I have the beginning of a framework for the campaign: an integrated world where magic is losing its grasp and desperate folk pray to dark, alien beings for power. I like where this is headed...