Starting Areas for Your Campaign

Starting a new campaign is always hard. Trying to figure out how to get characters together or if they just know each other. Trying to figure out how much magic you want. Determining who the bad guy or opposition will be. These are all key things for a successful campaign. Another is starting areas, because this will help shape a lot of the discerns you make.

I'll be honest, I started in Bloodhelm for one reason, one of my characters was coming from another continent so I needed a port. I didn't put much thought into it and that hurt my campaign a little, though not badly. But Bloodhelm wasn't a bad spot to start. I had plenty of area around Bloodhelm to find ruins (dungeons), lots of monsters roaming the country side and a port to bring in more trouble. There were colleges (for those who needed training and research) and lots of places to restock. The best part was that I had made the House itself sort of dark so if I wanted to add a little more intrigue (which I did) then I had some right at hand.

If you use pre-existing campaign settings, do some research. Will the area you are going into really work for your campaign? My husband and I have drawn our children into the roleplaying and have been using the Pathfinder Inner Sea setting. It's wonderfully detailed, but there are definitely areas we will not bring the kids. There are places ruled by demons that would be extremely inappropriate for the kids, even though my husband and I would love to go thump on demons. There also are areas with the slave trade. And though we have rescued slaves with the kids, we never go into the gory details of what happened to them before they were rescued.

If you are making your own up, make sure it's balanced. Don't put magic shops on every corner or have incredibly rich patrons who want the players to do simple tasks for gobs of gold. Make sure you have places to shop, some nearby adventuring areas (at least at first) and something to keep the characters in the area and not wandering the country side where your adventures aren't happening. In my campaign they stuck close to Bloodhelm (at first) because Tarkil had ties there and could get them information and supplies pretty easily. Eventually they started traveling the countryside, but they had a good foundation under them and returned to Bloodhelm (which I'd fleshed out so well) after each great adventure.

Happy adventuring!