Class Specific II

This blog post continues my series about class specific campaigns with the next 3 classic classes, Clerics, Druids and Fighters.

Starting with clerics,the first thing you would need to determine is how wide the theological circle is.  Limiting a party to a specific god would be great for the theme of a campaign, but probably overly limits player choices.  This may be an instance where alignment becomes helpful; you could limit options to deities that are only on one axis of alignment: lawful, chaotic, good or evil.  Or maybe you want some kind of theme to the deities of the players, war, civilization, or wilderness could all be interesting.  Ultimately this is something that should be a discussion between the game master and the potential players, probably even before session 0.

 

 

A cleric based campaign should be happening on multiple levels, physical conflict, theological debate, maybe some rabble rousing.  It should involve extra-planar threats, angels, devils, demons and the like.  But it should also involve mortal enemies that are working with or for these extra-planar entities, rival priests or cultists.

It could also involve heavy doses of prophecy, though involving prophecy is a double edged sword.  Trying to have any kind of foreshadowing to work effectively in a situation where you have multiple people making choices is difficult.  Often you will need to keep things vague enough that you can pivot from your original plans to match what players are doing.  That being said, if you pull it off in a way that the players think was planned all along they will believe you are a genius.  In this situation pay particular attention to your players, they will connect dots in ways you never thought of, and a great game master doesn’t ignore all the theories of paranoid players trying to figure out the mystery surrounding their characters.  Don’t be afraid to use vague words or words with multiple meanings so you can pivot as required to keep the prophecy accurate, or find ways to show the prophecy was actually faked all along.  Your players will probably hold a significant grudge against a devil who faked a prophecy that the players spend a while trying to understand/unravel.

 

 

Druids have always been an interesting class that in many ways suffers from having to interact with all the other classes.  Many of their cool features become far less useful because they have to work with those not included in their secret rites.  Sure there are some classes like rangers or barbarians that can relate and be useful to a druid centric campaign, but most other classes often cramp their style.  As a caster with decent combat abilities and flexible class features, there can be significant variety in the characters that can be created using the class.

Druids are about restoring and maintaining balance.  So likely it would be important for there to be balance within the party, if you have 4 players consider having each of them be one one of the neutral alignments, a 5th player could be pure neutral.  Travel to many exotic and corrupted locations should be part of an interesting druid campaign, perhaps even some elemental planes to gather ritual elements to restore an area to nature.

 

 

A pure druid campaign would involve a lot of wilderness adventures, probably meeting with other druids and powerful nature figures in wild and exotic locations.  Things like Treants, awakened animals and long thought extinct creatures, such as dinosaurs, should all be part of such a campaign.  Visiting long lived creatures like metallic dragons to learn about how a region has changed over centuries can be an interesting storyline to pursue as well.  It may also involve significant conflict with the dominant civilizations to properly restore balance.  Opponents could be other druids, or even entire druid orders, that have differing views of what balance should look like, or groups like knightly orders or wizard colleges that stand for civilization encroaching on the wilds.

Fighters on the other hand are a much more brute instrument than the other two classes.  But in many ways a pure fighter campaign is much easier to set up.  A pure fighter campaign could be a pure military campaign, or a mercenary company, maybe even some kind of fighting school.  Fighters are easy to find motivation for, coin and glory are probably enough.  At low levels especially, fighters are going to get their hands dirty hacking and crushing their way through foes natural and unnatural.  You probably want to encourage each player to pick a different combat style so each character still feels unique, and having some kind of primarily ranged fighter gives the party significant flexibility that a pure melee party has.

 

 

With extreme martial flexibility, fighters are the peak of non-magical combat.  It may be worth considering a lower magic setting or maybe you want to challenge the players and force them to compete in the face of adversity.  Foes should include a variety of melee focused creatures with weird combat styles.  Perhaps a vampire that has spent centuries perfecting some odd style, or a giant able to fight with significant reach or up close.  Rival regiments, dueling academies or the like should be played up as well, rivalries like these are as old as civilization and after all where would something like the three musketeers, and their regiment be without their rivalry with the red guards of Cardinal Richelieu.

If you want to go in a different direction, maybe it is a gladiator campaign though that is themed enough for its own post and may make sense as not a pure fighter campaign.  But a pure fighter gladiator campaign would probably need a system for really dialing in on different fighting styles and how the favour of the crowd impacts a fight.  

Hopefully you found this post interesting, and want to see the next one in this series on monks, paladins and rangers.  Let me know what you think of these ideas or which class you would want to play a class specific campaign for.