If you think about a good, long campaign, it probably has 15 to 20 adventures in it. If the heroes level up every two adventures, it will take them 18 adventures to get to 10th level, which is where campaigns tend to end. Why not take advantage of that?

You can actually write up a list of villains and adventure scenarios that go from level 1 to level 10 or 12. Now, I’m not suggesting you just come up with 20 monsters and let the railroading begin. Instead, you should arrange your favorite 30 or 40 villains from low level to high so that you know what kinds of adventures to offer to the players in the form of rumors.

Now you have a kind of tree structure with a few low-level villains at the top, a bunch of mid-level heavies in the middle, and several high-level baddies at the bottom. At each tier, you can offer three or so adventures, some of which are connected in some way to one that came before or that could come after.

The table below is just an example, and at any point the heroes could cross from one option to another. And there would likely be more adventures than just these, but planning ahead for some makes the whole campaign feel connected.

Level of the heroes	Option 1	Option 2	Option 3
1-2	Sea folk on an island	Outlaws in the wilderness	Orcs in the foothills
3	Lizardmen in the swamp	Undead in a wild ruins	Cultists in a mountain temple
4	Pirates on the coast	Evil knight kidnapper	Ogres in the mountains
5	Vellet League in a port city	Minions of a Necromancer	Rakshasa in a flying ship
6	Vellet wizard at the College of Magic	Necromancer in her tower	Dragon in the mountains
7	Earl of Carnwich & his champions	Fiends summoned by a sorcerer	Lich in a jungle pyramid
8-9	Foreign prince on the savanna	Foreign noble border dispute	Followers of the Rose Queen
9-10	Undead army in the capital	Army of fiends at your castle	Eldritch evil in the Dark Crags
10-11	War of succession at the palace	Agor the Vile on the field of battle	Rose Queen & her champions

Now you have a collection of adventure ideas that you are, of course, free to alter as the campaign progresses. Some are linked together but most aren’t, allowing the players the freedom to pursue those they want. But it gives you ideas and reminders and a loose sort of schedule for introducing news, information, and rumors about things that may become important much later.

They will naturally want to follow up on events and relationships they dealt with previously. If the Thoronian Order caused them trouble, they may well want to go after the head of the order. But it’s very important that you not try to plan out the exact course of the campaign.

After every adventure, the players need to have choices they can make about the next adventure. You can’t try to play out a grand story of your own devising; the players are likely to resent being channeled thru your personal fantasy.

Building the Roads

At each stage, you’ll need to consider the next few adventures and seed some rumors and characters to support them. I’m a big believer in rumors. As I’ve written previously, when you come up with an adventure scenario, you can break it down into two to four rumors. You can then feed those rumors to your players via various NPCs, and they can pursue the ones they like. You then prepare whichever adventure they chose and run it.

If you want the low-level heroes to solve a mystery at a lord’s manor and end up fighting a werebat, you should introduce the lord early in the campaign as a pleasant and helpful personage. Then can you suggest there are rumors of evil doings at the manor, and then can the heroes decide to try to help their pal.

If you want them to tangle with the Vellet League a bit later, you’ll first need to mention that the Vellet League operates in the area. Leave any encounters with them neutral, and you’ll give the players leeway in deciding if they want to fight the Vellet League or join it. Have officials of the Vellet League hassle the heroes, and you’ll cement the players hatred of it immediately.

If the heroes pursue the Vellet League, they will likely get dragged into a conflict with their master, the secretly evil sorceress Illomas at the Royal College of Sorcery (who may “help” them while suggesting adventures that keep them out of her way). You’ll need to create that NPC and introduce her early enough that the players have an opinion about her before they learn she runs the Vellet League (a shocking revelation). Of course, this sort of thing is itself adjustable, per my recommendations about adding factions.

If you think you want the heroes to have the option to fight the Earl of Carnwich one day, you’ll want to mention the earl having a rivalry with the king and/or levying oppressive taxes on trade at some point when the heroes are high enough level that they are getting to know nobles. Leave it fairly open, and you’ll be able to pivot Carnwich toward good guy or bad guy fairly easily.

A Big Sandbox to Play in

These sorts of things make your campaign world live and breathe. Not all these things need to eventually come to fruition. The ones that don’t will just seem like flavor. Perhaps the heroes decide to follow up on rumors about a treasure in a distant land. If they claimed the flying ship of a rakshasa for themselves, they’ll have the means of quickly getting across the sea. Then the Earl of Carnwich adventure idea might be abandoned.

But later, when the heroes return to help the king, the Earl of Carnwich may have become a reluctant ally; or it could become part of the heroes’ new adventure to secure the earl’s support for the king. Either way, the earl exists in their minds as a character introduced well before the current adventure and therefore feeling more real and interesting. And any change in the earl’s disposition becomes a surprising and intriguing development, no matter that you simply abandoned one possible storyline for another.

If you want there to be a chance that the heroes fight a fiend-summoning sorcerer who turns out to be in league with Agor the Vile, the evil overlord of a neighboring realm, you need to plant some of the seeds of that conflict by the time the heroes rise to 6th or 7th level. They need to hear about Agor and about fiend-summoning evil sorcerers before they ever meet them. Then they can decide if that’s the kind of adventure they want to pursue.

Or they may bite on a diplomatic mission to a far-off land and go gallivanting off to the savanna, where they fight a foreign prince and his army of lions and rhinos. But they need to at least hear about the place sometime beforehand.

In fact, you can line up various one-off adventures. The heroes may decide to take one, which could be only tangentially related to any bigger story. A rakshasa in a flying ship, a lich in a jungle pyramid, a vampire high priestess in her mountain fortress, frost giants in the frozen north… all these might provide a break from directly connected adventures with larger political implications. And while they’re away on those side quests, things at home can develop in shocking ways. A noble dies, a faction makes its move, an enemy prepares for war….

This can include possible adventures being closed. If the players rejected the idea of traveling to the jungle to take on a lich, you can say a different company of adventurers did it–perhaps the champions of the Earl of Carnwich. The players probably won’t care, because they had decided against that one, but if they thought they might take on that adventure next, they’ll be irritated and perhaps start a rivaly with Carwich’s Company of Grayfellows.

The Dragon

Regardless, there are a few monsters and evil villains you may decide early on you want to be sure to include in the party’s adventures. A dragon is an obvious one. What kind of campaign would it be if the heroes never fought a dragon?

So you’ll need to plant stories about dragons and, eventually, one particularly troublesome dragon that comes to harry whatever allies the heroes develop. Make such adventures personal for them. Ideally, they could encounter the dragon early on, when they’re too weak to fight it. Then, when it comes back around in the lineup, they’ll know the dragon–and it might even remember them.