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I am the typical dungeon master for any time I play D&D or any of the fantasy sorts with friends. While that is all well and good, and I can come with full play through ideas and all the sort I have one thing I keep going back to and I have no desire to. That is how exactly to start, my starts are typically cliche. Rumors amongst the tavern folks. Or for just starting off characters the barman asking them to investigate the basement. Any sort like that, but when I get into much more complex campaigns I run into the issue of how to start it while my players are in a more inbetween stage. I want to keep them away from the other end of cliche of server a duke or some politician as they may decide against it. Does anyone have any ideas or their own ways of getting stuff kicked off?

The best bet is probably to start off in character creation with making notes and suggestions to give the characters reasons to act as a grpup.

An idea I've noodled with recently for a 'fast but epic' campaig was to rip off the old SNES game Actraiser. Each character would get a brief intro as they (despite being low-level) did some cool badass fight stuff to answer a strange call they felt to come to a temple, where they would find they've been invested with a tiny spark of godhood blah blah blah. need to go out and do cool stuff to make it grow yadda yadda yadda.

Another idea would be to ask for character ideas to have a common origin. Don't let the way classes work in D&D hinder you here. If you say "This is a game about pirates, you're working on a freighter" don't obsess that no one can qualify for the Merchant Crew presitge class on page 46728 of the book More Prestige Classes than you can Shake a Stick At.

Just make sure the 'core four' classes have a reason to fit in your scheme. For a nautical game, a Fighter could be a crewman, hired guard, etc. Thief would be much the same, probably the guy who doesn't mind climbing up in the rigging. Or a thief could be a dockside thug type... A Cleric might be of a related diety, or could be an itinerat wanderer looking for work while seeking a call to action from their diety. Wizard could (depending on the setting) be a common 'specialist' on ships (useful for communications, utility spells, etc.) or may have signed on (or been signed on by a teacher) to study some oceanic phenomena.

Don't be afraid to set some broad boundaries for your players.

Don't worry too much about getting players to 'buy in.' Most understand that turning down adventure is only limiting their own fun, and will take opportunities that are presented to them.

Make the players make characters who are already related to each other. I've done it by making them all watchmen, or by making them all family members, or "family" members (in the Mafia sense).

One way I started a campaign was by having one of the players sat down and told that his family was killed "2 days ago we killed your brother Marcus on the road. An hour ago, we killed your sister, and your parents. 20 minutes ago, we killed your little brother. Are you going to co-operate?"

Then I turned to the player playing Marcus and went "Right, it's 2 days ago, you and your best friend Elias are in a tavern on the road to Sharn." We played through his assassination attempt, and then his brothers, and so on, before reuniting them all with the goal of finding out who'd tried to kill them (and successfully killed their parents).

Another game had all the players be the sons of a famous adventuring Dwarf, called for a family dinner by their Ma when Da hadn't come home from an adventure. Bit corny, but the campaign has worked out really well!

The one really good campaign I played in, the DM had all our characters, and as much background as we had written up (for many of us, it was our first time ever with a DnD game) so basically he had us all "meet" in a tavern (I know it sounds cliche), where upon, as none of us were a "party" yet, we were minding our own business when a huge brawl broke out, as such we were basically hte last ones standing (there was also the grizzled door guard, and the barman).

Thing was, as my character had never left home before, the tavern was near my home in the mountains, the cleric was on a "mission" (or crusade... basically she was a misisonary/spreading the word as it were). The wizard was in that town seeking the advice of the more powerful wizard who resided there, and the paladin and thief were both on the run (the paladin was a tiefling.. not hard to determine she was running from some misunderstanding or such, and the thief was well... a thief)


I'd also thought it would be cool to have a campaign start off in a temple. Each player drawn to it by strange visions and dreams, etc. Once there, they could either be ambushed, and forced to cooperate in order to survive that encounter. Or, they could be coerced into a mission by that priest and then ambushed, etc.