I ran my first game in 2007. I’d been playing for about 2 years at that point. It was a game of Star Wars Saga Edition and it went terrible. I was completely overwhelmed. I didn’t have enough prepared and I wasn’t able to effectively improvise. The players were super excited to the point that they were talking over each other when asking me questions. I snapped, was really rude to one of my friends, and asked for a break. On the way to Taco Bell, I apologized to my friend and said that we can wrap the game up fairly quickly when we get back. I’d really just ripped off a KOTOR comic book for the story so the session ended with the players finding a ship and leaving the planet of Taris after the Sith bombardment. Another player said that he still wanted to do Star Wars so he took over the game and we played it for a total of 3 sessions. It was several years before I ran a game again.

So the next time I ran a game, I tried it with a system that I was very familiar with and I did session prep to a huge extent. I was really concerned with it going well. I’d convinced my friends to try out Dark Sun. They’d heart of it but didn’t really know anything about it. But they agreed to play so long as I used the 3.5e material from Athas.org. Descending armor class was always a deal breaker for them so we couldn’t use the 2e material! I also used a fair bit of material from the Sandstorm book.

Campaign Overview

So it started with reading as much of the old 2e material as possible. But I didn’t like the adventure from Freedom and wanted to craft my own adventures. I decided to go them in the city of Nibenay for the first session and about the first 1/3 of the campaign took place there. I adapted Nibenay to work a little better for my group. An example being removing the cultural aspect of high social status people wearing less clothes than low status people. That wasn’t gonna do anything except add dirty jokes to my game. But I was using the Dark Sun calendar and whatever else I could. I even printed out that material so that my players could get more acquainted with the setting. The first session began at some festival in Nibenay. A monster crept up from the sewers attacked some festival goers and the PCs leapt into action. They revealed some magical ability (cause I knew that they would) and the Veiled Alliance stepped in to help them not get caught by Nibenay’s templars.

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The PCs did some missions for the Veiled Alliance for a while and even got a couple magic items. But when ambushing a powerful merchant caravan that was headed out of the city, they had to flee from the city templars. After some mishaps in an ancient temple filled with serpent-men mummies, they briefly ended up on the elemental plane of earth. They spent one session there and one of the PCs even died. But they met a genie who gave them three wishes: they asked for a dead PC to be resurrected (the thri-kreen became a goliath), a tree (they got a potted sapling), and to go back to Athas (dropped in the middle of the desert). Still hunted by Nibenay’s templars, they traded their tree sapling with the queen of Gulg for protection. She would protect them but advised them to still stay away from the city of Nibenay.

During this time, I was trying to provide my players situations, but I think I was still very much prepping stories. The campaign occurred sometime around 2012-ish so I was reading some of the then current OSR blogosphere and Gygax’s old posts on Dragonsfoot, plus listening to podcasts that were “GM advice” focused such as Fear The Boot. But this was my first campaign so I still had a lot of learning to do.

Back to the campaign, the PCs journeyed to the town of Silver Sands where they had their most memorable two sessions in the campaign. The town was being repeatedly targeted by a large band of raiders so the PCs snuck into the bandit hideout. But of course, their plan didn’t work and they found themselves surrounded by every single bandit in the group. One of the PCs challenged the leader to a 1 v 1 battle for their freedom. The PCs won, but the bandits (who outnumber the PCs by about 20-to-1) decided to cheat and the PCs had to run away! The next session was them preparing for and enduring the Siege of Silver Springs. The PCs did some prep work to bolster the defenses and train local villagers. I rolled some mass combat rolls from some half-decent system that I put together. That determined how well the nameless warriors on either side would fair while the PCs primarily took on the “named bandits” instead of trying to fight the dozens of mooks. These two sessions of the campaign became the ones that stick out as the best sessions of the whole campaign.

I think a large part of this segment’s success was the fact that I actually prepared it as a situation, not as a story. It was the classic “village with a problem” set-up. I didn’t plan for the PCs to attempt to infiltrate the raider camp (I thought they’d try to plan a trap). The final conflict being a raid attack on the town was an outcome created by the PCs angering the raiders. The players understood how the village’s survival was at stake and they essentially had a “Seven Samurai” moment. I think these 2 sessions were the first time I ever ran an A+ level game.

Back in Athas, the PCs soon learned that Dregoth, the level 29 lich sorcerer-king, had a plan that would finally allow him to get to level 30 and transform into a dragon. This last story arc was based on some fan-made adventure modules that were on Athas.org. They were supposedly based on an adventure module (Dregoth Ascending) that never got fully developed and published by TSR. But it was essentially 3 fetch quests and then a journey to the Pristine Tower where Dregoth planned to perform his ritual. As written, the adventures were decent but not truly amazing. The PCs just needed to stop Dregoth, not defeat him. The final combat lasted a single round. Just long enough to stop him and them nearly get TPK’d by a maximized, empowered, and upcasted fireball. They then fled on their flying carpet. A few months later, we had a single epilogue session where they found an ancient city that was once ruled by a now dead sorcerer-king.

Throughout the course of the campaign, the players also crafted their own character stories. The thri-kreen had an identity crisis about being reincarnated as a goliath. The fighter hunted down his father’s killer. And the vow of poverty paladin (who temporarily went mad while in that ancient serpent man temple) slowly worked to realign divine magical conduits of Athas (that Dregoth was messing with in his big ritual) to allow a single god, a water goddess, access to the world. All that by level 13.

What I learned from my first campaign

The world of Athas was so terrible that the PCs stopped being murder hobos and started being heroes. For our group, murderhobo-ism was a behavior learned from countless generic fantasy campaigns that were abandoned by level four and its always generic fantasy. But my Dark Sun campaign lasted about a year and a half so the players were able to see the consequences of their actions. But this campaign also put me entirely off running 3.5e. The whole time, I was calculated Challenge Ratings so that every session was a level appropriate challenge and made sure that the PCs were getting the exact amount of XP that they deserved. I was pouring over Dark Sun material and splatbooks so that I was doing my best to accurately present Dark Sun in accordance with the established lore. It was a lot of work!

However, I’d learned a lot about homebrewing monsters, balancing (and when not to balance) adventures, how to handle pacing and narrative beats, etc. I wasn’t a master of any of these things, but I wasn’t a novice anymore. But I needed a break from that kinda of heavy duty DMing. Some other folks ran some shorter length campaigns for a while. Eventually we did a rotating judge game where we all played the “NPC classes” for 3.5e and even leveled up in them. I started it with a zombie movie inspired scenario and each person in the group ran a single session based on another type of horror movie cliche. We ended that with a Final Destination inspired session where we all died. Looking back on it, it was somewhat similar to a DCC funnel…

Anyone else big Dark Sun fans? Or what about Dragon Kings? Tell me about your favorite campaign where you got deep into the lore of a game world!

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