Pillars, Spines and Connective Tissue

There are, broadly, two approaches to a campaign book. You can do a book that’s one big adventure: there may be sidetracks and optional encounters and subplots, but there’s a central spine that runs through the whole thing. The Dracula Dossier and Eyes of the Stone Thief use that model; everything revolves around Dracula or the dungeon.

The other approach is to do an anthology of adventures with optional connections. Books like The Borellus Connection or Pillars Built on Sand fit this model. Instead of a central spine, you’ve got connective tissue that can be sewn together or cut away, depending on the GM’s needs. The virtues of this approach are twofold. First, because you’re not as tightly bound to a concept, the adventures themselves can have more variation. Everything in Dracula has to connect first and foremost to Dracula. Borellus uses the heroin trade as its connective tissue, but the individual adventures don’t all need to be about drugs. Second, it’s easier to pull an individual adventure out and use it as a standalone adventure, or to remix the order. The first three adventures in Pillars, for example, can be run in any order.

But nothing comes for free. The drawback of this approach is that connective tissue isn’t as strong as a spine (thank you, Biology 101). If you’re going to run Pillars Built on Sand as a campaign, it’s worth thinking about how best to sew your player characters into that tissue. The connective tissue of Pillars (spoiler warning) is a feud between a family of the Ancient Nobility and their upstart Mercanti ex-servant, and a sinister occult conspiracy’s plan to exploit that feud. Pages 11 and 12 discuss how different groups and factions might get involved, but that’s just the starting point. The key is looking at your player characters individually.

Look for emotional resonances. Read the adventure and note the themes and characters. Do any of them echo those of your player characters? For example, the inciting incident in Pillars is a rejected marriage proposal; if any of the player characters are married, or if romantic or political marriage is part of their backstory, then you can use that as a possible connection. Another adventure revolves around a plague ship. In that adventure, the plight of the crew is a secondary concern, as both sides are more interested in the cargo. But if a player character has a tragic backstory involving, say, a shipwreck, then you could play up the resonance between the quarantined crew of the ship and the Hero.

Look for substitutions and connections. Every adventure has a slew of non-player characters in various supporting roles. Sometimes, the NPC is integral to the adventure, but often they’re just there to deliver a clue or play some limited part in the plot, and everything else about them can be tweaked. You can get a lot of, uh, connective juice (?) by using a character from a player character’s background in place of a minor NPC, or just adding such a character to the mix. For example, the adventure Dead Men Sell No Sails has three government inspectors in a boat. Their primary purpose in the adventure is to be a time limit: the PCs need to get to a logging camp and make sure everything’s in order before the inspectors show up. But swap a player character’s mother for one of the inspectors, and suddenly the player character feels much more a part of the story, even though it changes next to nothing of the plot.

Look for ambitions and desires. Plot hooks are great, but lures are even better. Treat the plot hook as a reward that the players have to win, and then let them ‘find’ the hook through their diligent investigation. For example, The Stylite of Ironcross begins with the player characters happening to foil an attack on a holy hermit, which is fine. But if you can set things up so the player characters have a reason to go find a holy man, so much the better.

Look to the future. You don’t need to hook the whole group at once. Indeed, in a campaign like Pillars, you shouldn’t even try. Spotlight one or two Heroes in each adventure instead of the whole group; in the next adventure, spotlight different characters. By the time you get to the final adventures, everyone’s tied in…