How to GM: How I Come Up With Campaign Ideas

I have been told that I come up with very intense campaigns. It's usually meant as a compliment, which I'm happy to accept, as well as a criticism, which I'm just as happy to listen to. Some people have asked how GMs come up with their concepts. I've always struggled to come up with an answer to this, mostly because to me it's a very intuitive, very personal, sometimes horrific picture. I assume that people do not want to use the method that I keep stumbling across, no matter how hard I try to run from it, but sometimes people get desperate. They want an idea to grab the group they GM for, they want something more than what they've been doing. And what I do definitely produces that. It produces a lot of other things as well and is definitely not perfect, but what works is better than what is just in your head, gathering dust. The process is as follows: I found out what my favorite stories are and why, what those stories made me feel, and then the thoughts behind those feelings. Taking those concepts, which are at the core of who I am as a person, I then use these concepts as themes in all my games.

Um, yeah. That probably sounds weird, if not convoluted. Let me explain.


I have always gravitated towards stories where victory comes at a price. If my protagonists do not walk out looking or feeling like poor Mal over on the right, I'm generally not very satisfied with said story. If Frodo didn't go West I would not have liked it as much as I do. Severian wipes out almost all life in order to save his planet. Cost cost cost! The Reavers almost killing the Serenity crew was one of my favorite scenes from that whole series! Just the sheer intensity of these types of stories is an amazing experience.

Oh, for the record, these are some of my favorite movies, in no particular order:

- Serenity
- Ostrov
- Schindler's List
- The Big Short
- The Last Jedi
- Brick
- Pacific Rim
- The Amazing Spider-Man 2
- Chronicle

Eh, why not put some books too?

- Ocean at the End of the Lane
- Stardust
- The Graveyard Book
- Lord of the Rings
- Children of Hurin
- The Book of the New Sun/ Urth of the New Sun
- The Farthest Shore
- The Tombs of Atuan
- The Last Battle
- The Great Divorce

So, after that, I ask how those stories make me feel? Well, the common thread that I keep running into is exertion. These stories are intense. They deal with intense problems, require solutions that may or may not kill the person who's attempting to fix them, and rarely come out clean. Morality is grey; there are no good people, no bad people, just people trying to make the best decisions they can. Even if there is a transcendence in these stories it's harder to find, often requiring the characters to make decisions without the benefit of an intact inner compass. They do what they can, and pray it works. It often doesn't. But on the other hand there's a beauty that goes through these stories of pain, supporting and holding these characters through their trials. This interaction of pain and divinity creates moments of pathos and beauty.

All feelings have thoughts behind them. So these feelings of pain and divinity have some basic idea behind them, that holds them up and allows them to continue. So, after thinking about those for a while, I came to the conclusion that the two thoughts running through these stories is "This world is doomed. There is no saving it." and "This world was never the point. Let go of it." I find that, no matter where I turn, these are the two thoughts that drive who I am, as a person, and that they always have been. And so therefore these are the things that I explore in all my campaigns: the inevitability of one's world (interior and exterior) collapsing, and how there is so much more than what we thought we had.

I then take every single plot or concern of my players and wrap that thought in, somehow. This usually means that players will come to me with a pitch  these days. I'll ask them what they want, I'll give some feedback, and then I'll take over from there. I take their ideas, and run them through the above process, until I get something that I would like to run. I then ask them about it, and we then discuss what we want the campaign to be about. And then we just keep playing it out. There's not much of a plan beyond the guiding principles of contrasting misery and divinity. Sometimes I have some overarching ideas about how to implement that, but so long as I keep my themes in mind I can address pretty much anything on the fly.

There are notable exceptions to this, of course. The Giggling Dark was an idea that I had, that I couldn't not run, and so I took it to Ryan, cause I figured he would want to play it. He did, and his feedback turned the campaign into something far greater than I ever could have imagined alone. But exceptions prove rules and all that.

So, by way of example, when Bryna and I decided to do a Burning Wheel game, I had a few ideas for what I wanted to do, but I only gave broad setting strokes. Bryna responded back with the specific stuff she wanted to investigate within that framework, which was being the daughter of a rape victim. Given my history with the subject I had some questions, and together we hammered out exactly what that would look like. There was a lot of back and forth at this stage, as we decided on ground rules for what is an admittedly pitch-black concept.

So, what I do is figure out what the core of my interests are, theme-wise, I then get some basic ideas (either from myself or others) of a campaign, run them through those themes, and then begin to collaborate like crazy with the player(s), sketching out what they want to get out of the campaign. And, of course, we then decide upon how long the bloody thing is going to run for. All of this is something that takes place pretty naturally. Now, obviously not everyone does anything even close to this. But it is what works for me. And it may work for you, dear reader.