GM Advice: How to Design a Campaign Primer

Every campaign needs a campaign primer. Presenting basic campaign information to the players it helps shape their expectations for the game and provides handy information to aid in character generation and development.

 

By William McAusland (Outland Arts)
By William McAusland

 

A campaign primer is one of the most important handouts the GM will ever create. It presents the players’ first look at the GM’s setting and is probably the sum total of their campaign knowledge during character generation. A campaign primer also enables a GM to focus his thoughts on what is important to the campaign and serves as a handy touchstone for all participants.

A campaign primer has a lot of ground to cover and it should include the following topics:

  • Area Overview: Present a overview of the region or kingdom and provide an area map.
  • Starting Locale: An overview of the PCs’ starting location be it a town, city or village.
  • NPCs: List important NPCs including local rulers, deities, heroes and villains. This shouldn’t be an exhaustive list
  • Nearby Locales: Provide brief details of significant nearby features – mountain ranges, forests and so on – and settlements of note.
  • History: A brief history of the local area including any relevant major events that may impact the PCs’ adventures.
  • House Rules: Not really part of the primer as such, but still very handy, a GM should provide the players with a separate list of any house rules he uses.
  • Relevant: Make the contents immediately relevant to the PCs.
  • Clear: The primer should be well laid out and easily read.
  • Concise: Don’t write a 20,000 word epic. Most players won’t read it all and those that do will probably forget 90% of what they read. Keep it brief and to the point. Ideally, at the start of a campaign, a primer should only be two sides long.
  • Updated: A primer that is out of date is almost as useless as not having a primer at all. Add and update information as it becomes relevant. This could include a handout on a town the PCs will be visiting soon, rumours and legends about a dungeon they plan to investigate and so on. Providing updated information in “bite-sized” portions makes it much more likely the players read and remember the information therein.
  • Printed Copies: By all means, disseminate the campaign primer via email, but make certain at the first session that every player has a printed copy for his character folder. Printed copies are way easier to access during a game and are far less distracting than electronic copies.

Campaign Primer Best Practise

  • Relevant: Make the contents immediately relevant to the PCs.
  • Clear: The primer should be well laid out and easily read.
  • Concise: Don’t write a 20,000 word epic. Most players won’t read it all and those that do will probably forget 90% of what they read. Keep it brief and to the point. Ideally, at the start of a campaign, a primer should only be two sides long.
  • Updated: A primer that is out of date is almost as useless as not having a primer at all. Add and update information as it becomes relevant. This could include a handout on a town the PCs will be visiting soon, rumours and legends about a dungeon they plan to investigate and so on. Providing updated information in “bite-sized” portions makes it much more likely the players read and remember the information therein.
  • Printed Copies: By all means, disseminate the campaign primer via email, but make certain at the first session that every player has a printed copy for his character folder. Printed copies are way easier to access during a game and are far less distracting than electronic copies.

Help Fellow GMs!

So that’s what I think should be in a campaign primer. Did I miss anything? Do you include other things in your campaign primer? Let us know in the comments below and help your fellow GMs design great campaign primers!

Published by

Creighton

Creighton is the publisher at Raging Swan Press and the designer of the award winning adventure Madness at Gardmore Abbey. He has designed many critically acclaimed modules such as Retribution and Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands and worked with Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, Expeditious Retreat Press, Rite Publishing and Kobold Press.

21 thoughts on “GM Advice: How to Design a Campaign Primer”

  1. This is looking really nice Creighton!

    Good advice on doing a campaign primer. Being a game material writer/designer and a graphic designer, I tend to go pretty all-out on my campaign primers! 🙂

  2. I definitely agree with you about the necessity for a concise primer. As a GM, I might have a humongous setting writeup, but the players only need a little bit of information to get them connected to the game world without overwhelming them with information (which seems to have the opposite effect). They can discover all the other stuff later through play.

    1. Our group also uses a Facebook group for the campaigns we run. It’s really helpful and there is a lot of activity there because it’s on Facebook.

  3. I use Obsidian Portal for all of the, very easy to navigate and kep everything g up to date. I tend to get a little crazy as far as my settings go, but since the site let’s you create a wiki for your camping, you can add on the fly.

  4. Here are some things I have done that I don’t think you mentioned…
    + Meta data stuff – How deadly? How serious? Serial or episodic?
    + Data handling – Using Obsidean Portal? Here is where you get character sheets in PDF format, etc.
    + Character Creation details – System specific stuff that you will be using. Optional rules. Etc.
    + A document version chart. That way people can see when it changed.

    Some thoughts…

  5. Excellent suggestions. I use OneNote and cloud storage on OneDrive to keep the primer up to date and shared with players. You can lock out different sections to specific players or just the DM as needed. Other solutions provide similar capabilities like EverNote, or Dropbox.

  6. This is really handy and I have done this before with my homebrew games, but needed to edit it down and the points here listed help to keep it concise. I find that summarizing the detailed information into “bite size” is the most challenging. Good article!

  7. there goes my 15 page history that plants rumors about 10 local dungeons. 😀 But you are right, I do need to have a more concise write up for the start of my adventures.

    It is good to remember something that Voltaire once wrote – “I appologize for the length of this letter but I did not have the time to write a shorter one.” (at least that is how my college English teacher translated it for the class).

    My point is that writing a 20 page campaign write up is easier than condensing the material into a couple of pages. But I agree with Craig that it would probably be well worth the effort.

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