A VILLAGE A FOREST A DUNGEON A BEAST

 In 1975 Gary Gygax wrote an article in a 'zine called Europa 6-8 about a process that a game master could follow to create their own campaign world in 5 weeks. It was tidily reprinted and published in a nice little zine  by Ray Otus. 

The process was actually quite lucid and do-able, despite the prevailing image of the nerdy DM madly scrawling notebooks full of lore and maps before even getting a group together. In fact, Gygax's process was refreshingly minimalist and made perfect sense! 

After I read that article, I goofed around to create my own campaign world a few times. I came to the conclusion that if I could distill that process into a zine and come up with some random generators to support it, I would be able to bust our content for gaming pretty quickly in the future. 

So, over the last year or so I've worked towards creating a booklet to do just that: to shrink the week long process that Gygax suggested into as short a time as possible. 

The zine is called "a village a forest a dungeon a beast" after the main components of the campaign world it creates: 

1.  The Village: a small hamlet in the border country with a few important NPCs that your party might need to talk to: a Lord, Blacksmith, Trader, Vicar, Crone, etc.

2. The Forest: nearby wilds with some particular fantastic, spooky, and strange locations to visit or stumble upon

3. The Dungeon: a nearby dungeon to delve that is home to . . .

4. The Beast: a monster with a particular theme and need who is the 'big bad' of the campaign, at least at the start. I was very much inspired by THE BEAST (ahem, same name even), so thanks and credit where it's due!

Like many of you, I have a busy schedule and taking the time to create a new campaign can be difficult. The 5-week process in Europa and the Gygax 75 challenge is fun, but I needed an even lower barrier to entry to make it jive with my lifestyle.

I dug through all of my scattered links, notes, and resources to compile some lists all in one place to make the process a little bit quicker. The output is definitely not a complete campaign: but it's a good seed to get started and I think that with the right group and a GM who is comfortable ad-libbing at the table it's a good place to start. It is working well with my group so far.

 I've put it up on DriveThruRPG for anyone who wants to check it out. You can access a web version here. I would super appreciate any feedback in the comments!