Bringing the group together during Session 0 can take a lot of forms, but it ultimately boils down to figuring out why this specific group of PCs is going to stick together and go on adventures / solve mysteries / get in trouble / work with each other week after week.

Whatever the modus operandi of the campaign might be, one of the most reliable ways to make this happen is for the PCs to have existing relationships with each other: If they’re family, friends, and/or coworkers, then they’ll care about each other, routinely be in the same place together, and/or be pursuing the same goals. That makes it a lot easier to explain why they’re all at the ski lodge where the murder happened or taking a freelance contract to raid the Salem-Watts biolabs.

The nice thing is that you don’t need all of the PCs to have the same relationships with each other, nor does every PC need a direct relationship with every other PC. As long as there’s a web of relationships weaving everyone together, the events of the campaign will slowly draw everyone closer and closer to each other.

The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game had an ingenious method for setting up these relationships which was, sadly, stripped out of the current Dresden Files Accelerated version of the game. Fortunately, it can be easily adapted to almost any game and setting.

SHARED HISTORY

Once the players have created their characters and have a firm grasp on who they are, you can plug this module in by creating an Adventure for each PC.

Note: This assumes, of course, that the start of the campaign won’t be the PCs’ first rodeo: They’ll be coming to the table with some experience under their belts.  If that isn’t the case, then you may need to make some adjustments. (For example, maybe the campaign takes place on the UCLA campus. Rather than adventure, you could create a Freshmen Year event for each PC, establishing some big, dramatic event that happened to them.)

To begin creating your PC’s adventure, start by grabbing a notecard. This will be your adventure card.

STEP 1: TITLE

Write a title for your adventure at the top of your adventure card. If you’re having trouble coming up with a cool title, think about books, movies, and short stories from the same genre as the campaign and then give them a twist:

• The Bourne Identity could become The Sampson Identity.
• Gone With the Wind could, with a twist to both noun and verb, become Arrival by Sea.
• The Lord of the Rings, by similar process, becomes The Duke of Swords.
• Escape from New York just needs a location shift to become Escape from Casablanca.

Alternatively, you might use any of these simple title formulas:

• The [Adjective] [Noun] (e.g., The Black Prince or The Remarkable Mr. Smith)
• The [Noun] of the [Place] (e.g., The Anxiety of Mars or The Uncle of London)
• They [Verb] (e.g., They Dream or They Hunt)
• A [Noun] [Past-Tense Verb] (e.g., A Crow Murdered or A Funeral Bound)
• The [Adjective] and [Adjective] [Noun] (e.g., The Macabre and Tragic Vision or The Gruesome and Forgotten Murder)

You can also create your own title formulas like this by taking many existing titles and breaking them down by word type.

Like any title, your goal is to create something evocative and intriguing. You might already have a premise in mind for your adventure (as described in Step 2) and craft your title to it; but starting with a cool title and then figuring out what the adventure for it is can be equally effective.

STEP 2: ADVENTURE PREMISE

Next, write down a simple premise for your adventure. The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game suggests this template:

When [something happens], [your protagonist] [pursues a goal]. But will [your protagonist] succeed when [antagonist provides opposition]?

For example:

When SpaceX engineers start turning up dead with blood streaming from their eyes, Jack Hammer is hired to discover the dark truth. But will Jack Hammer succeed when it becomes clear Elon Musk wants to shut the investigation down?

But there are a lot of different premises you could use. For example, S. John Ross’ Big List of RPG Plots is a fantastic resource, including entries like:

MANHUNT

Someone is gone: they’ve run away, gotten lost, or simply haven’t called home in a while. Somebody misses them or needs them returned. The PCs are called in to find them and bring them back.

Which can give you a premise like this:

Duchess Scarlet Madara is kidnapped from the Cannes Film Festival! Jack Hammer is at the festival attending the opening of a film written about his life. Can he solve the case even while standing in the limelight?

In writing up your premise, make sure your character’s role in the story is clear and phrase the conclusion as a question, leaving the ultimate outcome uncertain. You’ll also want to keep it short: ideally no more than two or three sentences.

STEP 3: GUEST STAR

Everyone should now read their character’s adventure premise out loud and place their notecard in the center of the table. Then, taking turns in whatever manner seems appropriate, everyone should select an adventure belonging to a different PC. (Alternatively, everyone could pass their card to the left. Or you could shuffle the cards and deal them out randomly.)

However the decision is made, you should now be holding the notecard for an adventure starring a PC other than your own. Your character will now be guest starring in this adventure!

To do this, simply add one or two sentences to the card explaining your character’s supporting role in the story. When brainstorming your contribution, it can be a good idea to talk things over with the player of the starring character and make sure you’re both on the same page and happy with the outcome. Your character should be significant — either complicating the situation or aiding the protagonist (or possibly both) — but not usurping the role of main character. (You don’t want to be a Mary Sue.)

It can be useful to think of a single dramatic situation involving your character, the protagonist, and, optionally, the antagonist(s). For inspiration, you might want to check out Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations by Georges Polti. (You can find of Polti’s original book here, but it may be easier to consult of the hundreds of summary lists scattered around the internet to glean the essential idea.)

For example, one of Polti’s dramatic situations is:

13. ENMITY OF KINSMEN

“Hatred of one who should be loved” is a powerful antithesis.

(…)

(3) Hatred Between Relatives for Reasons of Self-Interest: “La Maison d’Argile” (Fabre, 1907). Example from fiction: “Mon Frere” (Mercereau).

Which might lead you to:

Rick Cuthain, the bastard brother of Duchess Scarlet who has always resented her, is the #1 suspect of the Gendarmerie! But after convincing Jack Hammer of his innocence, Rick helps him discover Scarlet’s connections to the strange Cult of Serpents.

Once you’ve added your character to the adventure card, take a moment to jot down the title and other details in your own character’s background. This is, after all, part of their story, too! Note, for example, how Rick’s player has discovered not only a sister, but an entire family wrought with drama through their participation in Jack’s story.

STEP 4: SECOND GUEST STAR

Repeat Step 3, with each player selecting a different character’s story and casting their PC as a guest star. (It’s okay to guest star in someone else’s story if they’re also a guest star in yours, but you shouldn’t guest star in the same story twice.)

For this step, it’s okay if your contribution also wraps the story up, but it doesn’t have to.

Once you’re done with this step, everyone should (a) have an adventure starring their character and guest starring two other PCs and (b) be the guest star in two other PCs’ adventures.

(If you only have two players, skip this step.)

STEP 5: WRAPPING UP

If your second guest star’s contribution to your adventure didn’t provide a conclusion, add one now.

You can flesh your adventure out a bit if you want, but you don’t have to. The capsule descriptions should provide you with a fundamental understanding of what happened that you and the other players can riff on and develop during play. (“Remember that time we broke into the Starlink facility in Bastrom and hacked the whole network?”)

If they don’t already, make sure everyone involved in your adventure has a copy of it. (Or, at least, their part in it.) You want to make sure everyone knows the canonical version of events.

Back to Session 0 Modules

So I’m revisiting Aaron Allston’s Strike Force, the legendary campaign supplement for the Champions roleplaying game, and he’s talking about the PCs’ Hunted. But he’s talking about it in a really weird way: As if obviously every PC is going to have a Hunter. He’s built it into his character creation checklists. It’s baked into his campaign planning.

If you’re not familiar with Champions, let me explain a little bit: It’s a superhero RPG which would later grow to become the generic Hero System. It’s one of the earliest point-buy character systems, in which players are given a budget of points and can use them to buy various abilities, skills, and powers. There are also disadvantages: weaknesses players can pick for their character to give themselves more points to spend on stuff.

One of these disadvantages is Hunted, which means that there’s someone or an entire group of people hunting the PC. But, as I say, it’s just one character option among many. So why was Allston writing not only as if every PC would have this specific disadvantage, but that this would be self-evident to the reader?

My introduction to Champions came through a review of the 4^th Edition of the game in Dragon Magazine, and I later scooped up a copy of the same edition at my local gaming store. Although I was never been able to play or run it as much as I would’ve liked, I immediately loved it and it had a major influence on me as a gamer.

Allston’s Strike Force campaign, on the other hand, didn’t use 4^th Edition. It started as a 1^st Edition campaign when the game first came out. So I went back to 1^st Edition to see if I could figure it out.

What I found is that Hunted hadn’t actually changed much. In fact, it still hasn’t in the current 6^th Edition of the game. But the difference was that, by 4^th Edition, the Champions rulebook was almost 400 pages long. For me, Hunted was just one pebble on a very large beach.

The 1^st Edition of Champions, on the other hand, was only 56 pages long. So for Allston — and, I suspect other Champions GMs of that era — Hunted had a much more prominent position. Both the GMs and the players were much more aware of it, and the result was that it become somewhat central to how Allston ran the game. (I’ve also talked about this kind of mechanical “spotlight” that can emerge in barebones systems in Reactions to OD&D: The Influence of Little Rules.)

In Strike Force, Allston talks about how a GM can/should:

• Check during character creation to make sure you know how a Hunter will be used.
• Use Hunters to pace character arcs and set up campaign finales.
• Age Hunters by combining them, resolving and replacing them, evolving them, or creating spinoffs.
• Incorporate the Hunters from new PCs into a campaign.

It quickly became clear to me that this concept of being Hunted was something that could easily inject interest into almost any campaign, regardless of what RPG you were running. This idea was really the seed that eventually grew into the entire Session 0 Modules series.

HUNTED

During Session 0, ask the players to define their Hunter. This can be done either individually (so that each PC is being hunted by a different Hunter) or as a group (with a single Hunter pursuing all the PCs and/or the organization the PCs belong to). A mixed approach is also possible, with perhaps two or three PCs all being pursued by mysterious organization whose agents wear rose-tinted glasses, while another PC could have an NPC rival serving as their Hunter.

Option: In the spirit of the original disadvantage, you could instead offer Hunted as an option to the players in exchange for some boon or benefit. (Maybe if they choose to be Hunted, they gain a powerful Ally. Or a powerful artifact. Maybe it’s actually the artifact that the Hunter is seeking?)

CREATING THE HUNTER

If the players have a strong vision of their Hunter spring full-blown from their brow, that’s fantastic. They should write down every awesome idea that they have. But whether you’re looking to brainstorm a new idea or fleshing out an inspired one, you can use this semi-formal cycle of question-and-response to develop the Hunter.

GM: Who is the Hunter and why are they hunting you? (Player responds.)

Player: How often does the Hunter hound me? (GM responds.)

GM: What do you think is the most frightening or dangerous aspect of the Hunter? (Player responds.)

Player: What weaknesses does the Hunter have, if any? (GM responds.)

GM: When you think of the Hunter, what is your most powerful memory of them? (Player responds.)

GM: Who is the Hunter and why are they hunting you?

The GM will ask this question and the players should answer it. If you’re the players, you don’t need to produce a full dossier here. You just need to sketch in a broad concept.

If multiple characters are being pursued by the same Hunter, then the players should all have a part in answering the question. The GM can help them all have a creative stake in their Hunter by spreading some or all of these supporting questions around the table:

• What do they want from you?
• When did they first start hunting you?
• What’s their modus operandi? How do they threaten you?
• Why haven’t you been able to escape their pursuit?
• What do they look like?

The term Hunted lends itself to characters like Kraven the Hunter or the Black Riders from Lord of the Rings — i.e., characters who are literally hunting the PCs and want to kill them (or worse). But the stakes don’t have to be life-or-death. For example, being pursued by authorities who want to arrest them — like U.S. Marhsal Samuel Gerard from The Fugitive or Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard — are often a good fit. It can also include rivals like Gary Oak from Pokemon or someone obsessively pursuing the PC romantically like Lwaxana Troi from Star Trek. J. Jonah Jameson’s antagonism towards Spider-Man is another good example.

The important thing is that the Hunter makes things difficult for the PCs and/or impels them to take action (regardless of whether that action is fight or flight).

If it’s appropriate for the campaign, you might even be able to make the Hunter more abstract. Maybe there’s some strange plague that haunts the PCs’ footsteps, for example. Or the Nothing from The Neverending Story.

If the Hunter is an organization, however, consider giving that organization a “face” — an NPC who is most likely leading the efforts to hunt down the PCs. This NPC might not be present every time the organization show up, but they show up often enough that the PCs can form a personal relationship and antagonism with them. Think about Agent Smith is the face of the Agents from The Matrix, for example, or Prince Zuko’s role as the face of the Fire Nation in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Player: How often does the Hunter hound me?

Will every session of the campaign be like an episode of The Fugitive TV show, with the only question being when — not if! — the Hunter will show up? Will they show up to complicate things every few adventures? Or are they more of a looming threat that will only show up (with likely catastrophic intensity) once in a blue moon or at major turning points in the campaign?

See “Triggering the Hunter,” below, for more details on Hunter frequency. Setting this frequency will be partly about what effect you want the Hunter to have on gameplay and partly about how interesting you think the Hunter and/or the threat of the Hunter will be to the narrative of the campaign.

(If you don’t think the Hunter is interesting at all, that may be a sign that you should veto the Hunter and try to come up with a new one that everyone is interested in.)

GM: What do you think is the most frightening or dangerous aspect of the Hunter?

The answer to this question may be emphasizing an established characteristic of the Hunter, but this is also an opportunity to raise the stakes by adding some new and terrible facet to the Hunter: Yes, the FBI is chasing us, but did you also know that Agent Keighley is secretly a werewolf?

If multiple players are being pursued by the same Hunter, have each of them give a separate answer. Ideally, each of them will come up with some new addition to the Hunter’s danger, but it’s okay if they both fear the same aspect of the Hunter, as long as they can give it a new twist or explain why it particularly resonates with their character. (Or both.)

If you’re struggling to think of an aspect, you might consider:

• Unique technology the Hunter possesses
• A supernatural ability
• Official authority and/or pervasiveness in the campaign world
• The minions they control
• What makes them so hard to kill
• How they threaten to transform/ruin/remake the PC

Player: What weaknesses does the Hunter have, if any?

Werewolves are vulnerable to silver. FBI agents can only directly pursue you in the United States. Prince Zuko’s ship is slower than the Avatar’s flying bison. The PCs have a double agent in the Hunter’s ranks. The Hunter doesn’t know the PCs’ true identities. After unleashing their Cerulean Minions, they have to recharge their lunar batteries in the light of the full moon.

Whatever the weakness may be, it should give the PCs a meaningful edge, loophole, or leverage against the Hunter. This also means that the more powerful or all-encompassing the Hunter is, the more significant the weakness should be. (On the other hand, the Hunter’s weaknesses probably shouldn’t turn them into a joke, either.)

Tip: If, during the course of the campaign, the Hunter manages to neutralize their weakness, this will likely make them FAR more dangerous to the PCs. This means revealing their plans to do so can be a VERY effective scenario hook: Give the PCs a chance to make sure their identities remain hidden; prevent the satellite network from neutralizing kryptonite worldwide; stop the ritual that will allow Agent Keighley to turn into her werewolf form any time she wants to. If they succeed? Great. If they fail? Have their Hunter push them to the edge.

GM: When you think of the Hunter, what is your most powerful memory of them?

Try to make this memory something specific. It should be a distinct, concrete event — maybe a fleeting moment (e.g., when Agent Smith caused your mouth to disappear); maybe a prolonged incident (e.g., the Texas Affair); but not simply a general impression.

Here are some supporting questions you might use if you’re having difficulty brainstorming a memory:

• When did you first learn that you were being hunted?
• What’s a time when the Hunter injured you?
• How has the Hunter affected the other people in your life?
• What major life event was ruined by the arrival of the Hunter?
• When did you receive a warning or realize something was wrong, giving you just enough time to slip out of the Hunter’s grasp?
• How has the Hunter scarred you?

Your primary goal here is to weave the Hunter into your character background, but you may also discover something new about the Hunter or add lore to them as you’re fleshing out this memory. That’s just fine. Ideal, even.

Option: If you’re creating a Hunter who will only be introduced after the campaign has begun — as part of the first session, for example — then simply skip this question.

TRIGGERING THE HUNTER

Hunters should, of course, show up during the campaign. They are, after all, pursuing the PCs.

In some cases, you might have an entire scenario dedicated to dealing with the Hunter when they show up, but it’s usually more effective to add the Hunter as a complication to other scenarios:

• The PCs need to find the Ruby of the North in the Labyrinths of Omarrat, but now the Blightborn have entered the dungeon, too, and are trying to track them down.
• Melissa has been kidnapped by the Mystic Triad and the PCs need to save her! What a terrible time for Quartz to show up and pick a fight!
• The Maltese Falcon has appeared in Hong Kong in a 1980’s pop-up juncture and now the PCs, the Eaters of the Lotus, and all four of the Four Monarchs have teams scrambling to nab it for themselves. Of course Gorok the Cyber Ape, who has been hounding the PCs for months, is getting in on the act!

Procedural Check: Instead of or in addition to arbitrarily deciding when the Hunter will show up, you can make a check once per session or once per scenario. Think about how often you want the Hunter to appear and set the odds of the check accordingly.

If the group have three or more Hunters, I recommend having a 1 in 1d6 chance to trigger the Hunter.

If the group only has a single Hunter, I recommend using a 2 in 1d6 or 3 in 1d6 chance.

Having the Hunter show up as a procedural element in the campaign is fun because (a) it provides you with a cool creative prompt and (b) it can really enhance the feeling of the Hunter adding complication to an existing situation. Keep in mind that a Hunter’s presence doesn’t have to hog the spotlight: It might even be entirely incidental (a letter from a PC’s friend mentions strange men asking questions at their old school; they see Quartz fighting a different superhero on the TV news; etc.).

Of course, if circumstances dictate that the Hunter couldn’t possibly show up at this particular point in time (e.g., the PCs have been teleported to the far side of the galaxy by the Neutron Crystal) or vice versa, then you can obviously ignore this check.

Design Note: The Hunted disadvantage in Champions defaults to a roll of 8 or lower on 3d6, but a player could increase this target number to 11 or 14, causing the Hunter to appear more frequently (but also earning them more points to spend in exchange).

The Omnipresent Hunter: Hunters will generally be a light spice for the campaign, but in some cases you may find them so compelling — or so overwhelming in their scope — that the whole campaign becomes about them. As an extreme example, consider the players proposing that their Hunter is a zombie plague which is slowly spreading across the land, with the inevitable conclusion that the campaign will turn into The Walking Dead.

If that sounds like an awesome campaign to you… well, fantastic! Leap at the opportunity! You’re never going to have players more invested in a campaign than that.

But if you, or the other players, aren’t okay with a Hunter dominating and/or defining the campaign like that, then you’ll need to either veto that Hunter or figure out a way to alter the Hunter to figure out a different path forward.

EVOLVING & RESOLVING THE HUNTER

Hunters, and the characters’ relationships with the Hunters, should ideally evolve over time: Yes, Lieutenant Gerard showed up at the end of every episode of The Fugitive and the Joker always pops back up with a new scheme to challenge the Batman, but even those characters have had their stories brough to a conclusion. (Even if they come back again the next time the franchise reboots.)

Escalation: If the PCs feel as if they have their Hunter under control or that the Hunter is no longer posing a threat, you can find a way to escalate the danger they pose. For example, a vampire shows up with a coterie of newly turned husbands in tow; Agent Keighley reveals that she’s a werewolf for the first time; the lich-king obtains the Crown of Sizzerak; the FBI puts the PCs on their Most Wanted list and now there’s a larger task force assigned to their case, plus they’re being recognized and reported by people on the street.

Combination. If the PCs have multiple Hunters, a specific form of escalation can be for their Hunters to team up. You might also reveal that these Hunters have always been working together, possibly as part of a larger organization. For example, Spider-Man’s foes team up as the Sinister Six; the Fey Queen who has been pursuing the PCs imbues their other Hunters with faerie magick to form a Wild Hunt; or it’s revealed that the Sith and the Trade Federation have been working together this whole time.

Defeat. Perhaps the most natural resolution for a Hunter is their defeat: The PCs track down and kill the Man in the Silver Mask whose mercurials have been hounding them. Or they reveal General Lee’s crimes and watch him get hauled off in handcuffs.

If the Hunter is connected to a character, then the defeat of their Hunter is likely a major part of their story arc or even its conclusion. So you’ll want that to either line up with the end of the campaign or, in a more episode campaign, be prepared for that character to either retire or start a whole new arc.

If the Hunter is pursuing the whole group, then the same thing but even moreso.

Changing the Face. If PCs are being hunted by an organization, they can enjoy a measure of success by defeating the Face that’s been pursuing them. But even with the Face gone, of course, the rest of the organization can reorganize and redouble their pursuit.

Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to give the PCs a respite from their Hunters as a reward for the setback they’ve inflicted. But when the Hunters come back, you’ll likely want to escalate their threat and definitely set up a new Face for the PCs to build a relationship with. It’s best to not just retread the narrative beats the PCs have already experienced, though, so try to find some way of raising the stakes, letting the PCs get closer to a final victory over their adversaries, or transforming the nature of the threat posted by the Hunters.

Tip: As a variant here, you might introduce a brand new Hunter … only to reveal later that it’s actually the SAME Hunters with a new M.O.!

Spin-Off. Another variant here is that, after a Hunter’s defeat, the PCs might be confronted a spin-off Hunter: They kill Dracula only to discover that his wives are seeking revenge; a criminal discovers a cache of supplies left behind by the Hunter the PCs sent to prison and emerges as a new supervillain; or they discover that defeating one Predator only means that you’ve been identified as an even more desirable prey.

Success. Of course, it’s also possible that the Hunter succeeds: They kill the PC they wanted to kill; they steal the magical artifact the party was trying to protect; they arrest the PCs in a massive sting operation and lock them up in prison. This is definitely a subversion of expectations, but when we play to find out in RPGs, that happens all the time.

If the Hunter’s success takes the form of death, that’s pretty final. (Although not always, of course.) But other Hunter success stories may just post massive setbacks for the PCs or turning points in the campaign (e.g., I guess this game is about breaking out of prison now). Or maybe not: A tragic ending can be just as satisfying as a happy one.

Heel-Face Turn. For a more positive conclusion, maybe the Hunter switches sides. That might be a supervillain inspired by their PCs’ example and wanting to help the world with their powers or a dedicated U.S. Marshal who realizes the fugitive they’re pursuing has been wrongly accused.

Alternatively, maybe only the Face of the Hunter organization might perform the Heel-Face Turn, becoming an ally of the PCs in their fight against the rest of their organization. (This can be a great replacement character for a PC who’s died or a cool role for a new player to step into.)

Back to Session 0 Modules

When we sit down to play a roleplaying game, there’s always some amount of preparation we need to do before we can start slinging dice. What, exactly, that prep entails will depend on the game and the group, but we’ve come to call this prep — whatever form it takes — Session 0.

(The term originally referred strictly to a session dedicated entirely to prep without any actual game play happening. These days it’s often just referring to this prep in whatever form it takes, even if it’s only a few minutes covering the basics before diving into the evening’s adventure. For more on this background, you can check out The Evolution of Session Zero.)

For most RPGs, there are four core elements that need to be hashed out during Session 0.

THE GROUP CONTRACT

A group contract is the group’s formal and informal agreements about how the game will be run and played. This includes:

• Basic functions of play, such as the game rules and/or setting to be used. (Including the details of how the group will handle the other three core needs described below.)
• Narrative elements, such as script immunity, the rule of cool, whether genre conventions will trump simulation (or vice versa), themes, and tone.
• Safety tools, whether formal (X-cards, lines-and-veils, etc.) or informal.
• Real world logistics, such as “don’t leave the back door open,” “message the group chat if you’re going to be late,” how long game sessions will be, how scheduling will work, and “if you miss two sessions in a row, we sacrifice you to Bahlbaroth.”

This mutual understanding of how this specific game with these specific players is going to work is, surprisingly, almost entirely unspoken and completely unexamined in most groups. It’s kind of just assumed that the group will do what’s “obvious” or just “the way we’ve done it before.” That’s OK if it works, of course. Not so much if it means the group is ramming their faces into the walls.

(Never great, you’ll notice. “Great” would mean checking in on your unspoken, and often unrecognized, assumptions to make sure they actually make sense for the game you’re getting ready to run. Or, even better, optimized for it.)

CAMPAIGN CONCEPT

The campaign concept, broadly speaking, is who the PCs are and what they’ll be doing. For example:

• They’re retired spies who now use their particular set of skills to hunt a global conspiracy of vampires.
• They’re CSI agents investigating crime scenes in Chicago, IL.
• They own and operate a boutique specializing in magical unguents (for which they must gather the required ingredients from fairyland).
• They’re the organizers of a science fiction convention, and somehow every year there’s a supernatural catastrophe and they need to prevent it from derailing the con.

Sometimes picking a game is the same thing as picking a campaign concept (or close enough that it makes little difference). For example, D&D comes with the prepackaged expectation that the PCs are going to be wandering heroes in a classical fantasy setting who seek treasure and fight evil.

In other cases, though, just picking a game will still leave large chunks of the campaign concept uncertain. Jonathan Tweet’s Over the Edge, for example, assumes the campaign will be taking place on the conspiracy-riddled island of Al Amarja, but the PCs could be almost anybody and doing almost anything. The most extreme example of this can be found in a universal RPG like GURPS, the selection of which will tell the group absolutely nothing about what the campaign concept is.

(On the other hand, John Harper’s Lady Blackbird – which features a specific campaign hook and pregenerated characters slotted into that hook – is a game with an even more specific and hardcoded concept than D&D.)

It’s not unusual for the campaign concept to be predetermined by the GM, but it’s also possible for the concept to be developed by the whole group in collaboration. This can be as simple as the GM saying something like, “I’m going to be running a Mothership campaign in the Onyx-S5 cluster. Who are your characters and what are they doing there?” and then seeing where the discussion goes.

SETTING

Setting is inherently connected to the campaign concept: You can’t be space pirates if the campaign is set in 12^th-century France, and if the campaign is set on Mars in the 22^nd century, you won’t be playing Roman legionnaires. (Well… unless your GM is Harry Turtledove.) Whether setting flows from concept or concept flow from setting – e.g., whether you decide you want to play space pirates and then building a setting around that or decide you want to explore the setting of Middle Earth and then figure out what you want to do there – is really a chicken-or-the-egg situation, and will be different for every campaign.

(And, of course, it’s not at all unusual for the both setting and concept to be basically built up at the same time in tandem.)

Whatever the case may be – and whether there’s an established setting, a setting the GM has created for the campaign, or a completely original setting that’s being collaboratively generated during Session 0 – ultimately what’s needed is a setting brief with enough information about the setting that the players can create their characters.

This is often a lot less information than you might think. In fact, it’s often ideal to keep this information as minimal as possible: An infodump that’s too large can overwhelm the group, resulting in them actually knowing less about the setting, in practical terms, than a tight, well-focused briefing.

Check out So You Want to Be a Game Master and Random Worldbuilding: Fast & Furious Homebrewing for tips on creating effective setting briefings.

Just like the campaign concept, developing the setting can also be a collaborative process involving the whole table. There are some games that will actually formalize this collaboration into a more expanded form of character creation. Luke Crane’s Burning Empires, for example, is about the PCs facing an invasion of alien parasites, and the game’s mechanics will guide the group through creating the planet they live on.

CHARACTER CREATION

The final core element of your Session 0 is for the players to create their characters. This includes both mechanical character creation and their character background, each of which will also generally be connected to a character concept. Some players will start with a concept and then figure out how to model that concept mechanically and flesh out the details into a full-fledged background. In other cases, particularly when using systems featuring character generation instead of character crafting, players may start with the mechanics and use them as a creative prompt for who their character is going to be.

The mechanical aspect of character creation, of course, will be handled by whatever RPG is being played. Character backgrounds, on the other hand, tend to be more freeform in their development. (Although here, too, inspiration can flow from the mechanics into the background and vice versa. For example, if the player picks Sniper Training skill pack, that might inspire them to describe where the character got that training from. Or, vice versa, describing their character attending the US Army Sniper School at Fort Moore might prompt the player to pick the skill pack.)

Note: Another common point of debate here is the difference between minimalist backgrounds and expansive ones. This is really a spectrum, typically ranging from a couple of sentences to multiple pages of detailed character lore. Like everything else, the “right” approach will depend on the player, the group, the game, and the campaign. Regardless of length, though, the same basic creative process of concept, mechanics, and background will apply.

Whatever creative path players might follow here — and exactly what role the GM might take in collaborating with them to create their characters — there are a few key core tasks that need to be accomplished:

• Setting Integration. The players’ characters need to be linked to the setting. This is usually a two-way creative process: The players are drawing elements from the setting briefing — locations, people, events, etc. — to flesh out their character backgrounds, but they are also likely creating elements that the GM should be integrating into the setting.
• Campaign Integration. As characters are developed, the GM should begin the process of weaving them into the scenarios and campaign they have planned. In some cases the campaign will flow from the characters (e.g., the players decide their village was destroyed by someone called the Crimson Overlord, and the GM’s campaign planning is figuring out how they can pursue him for vengeance). In other cases, this will be about figuring out how to weave the PCs into the GM’s plan — e.g., the GM is planning a campaign in which the PCs are fighting a vampiric Triad in 1980’s Hong Kong, so when one of the players describes his PC’s martial arts master being slain by a mysterious man, the GM might decide to make the killer the undead Dragon Head of the Triad.
• Bringing the Group Together. Finally, the players should figure out why their PCs are a group (and, if necessary, the details of how that group will work in actual play). Maybe they’re old war buddies who’ve decided to open a detective agency together. Or maybe they all work for the same government agency. Or maybe they’ve all been framed for a crime and need to prove their innocence. Whatever the case may be, there should be a reason why all these PCs are sticking together. This may be something that’s discovered through play, but in most cases it’s better to figure it out as part of Session 0. (And even if you don’t, you’ll probably still want to have at least some indication of what trajectory the PCs are on that will cause their paths to collide and merge during the first session.)

Note how the setting, campaign concept, and the core tasks of character creation are all intertwined. Although you’ll probably want to lockdown some basic details about the campaign concept and setting before brainstorming character concepts, these generally aren’t tasks you can do one at a time. Instead, the group will be alternating between them, using setting to build concept and concept to build character and character to expand setting.

SESSION 0 MODULES

While we’ve looked at the core elements of a Session 0, it turns out there’s a nearly infinite number of different methods you can use to actually achieve them. I’ve previously laid out my default Session 0 procedure, which I’ve developed and refined over countless campaigns with a multitude of players.

But what I’ve also discovered while reading, running, and playing a bunch of different RPGs is that there’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do as part of Session 0. Some of these are highly specific and really only useful for the game they’re designed for. Others, though, have a near universal applicability: You could use them in D&D or Call of Cthulhu or Numenera or Apocalypse World.

The goal of this series is to share some of these techniques. I’m calling them Session 0 Modules, because they’ve been designed — or adapted — to be things you can independently plug into your Session 0.

This also means that the intention is NOT for you to take all of these modules and use them in every single Session 0 you run. That would be overwhelming at best, and not infrequently contradictory. Instead, when getting ready to run a new campaign, peruse these modules as if they were a menu, thinking about which ones would be most useful — or most appropriate — for your group.

You could also think of these modules as a spice rack. Start with a core Session 0 procedure that works for you and yours, but then toss in one or two of these modules to mix things up. This might be something you plan ahead of time as part of your campaign prep, but you could also find yourself reaching out in the middle of a Session 0 to grab a module that you never would have imagined needing until the players started creating their characters.

In other words, these tools. Use them when you need them. Ignore them when you don’t.

CHARACTER MODULES

Hunted
Shared History

This will be an ongoing series at the Alexandrian, with new modules being added over time.