Campaign Fronts + Depletion Dice = Devastation Dice

Last night, while working on campaign notes I came up with a brainstorm, and I wanted to share it here. It is a way to create a sense that your world is a living thing, with its own complications going on in the background.

Next to the 20  Quick Questions About your Campaign Setting entry on Jeffs Gameblog, one of my favourite tools for planning D&D campaigns is the fronts Dungeon World. I'd always used something similar, but it was really helpful to find a formalized way of making use of that planning mechanism.

Component 1: Fronts

If you are not familiar with fronts, essentially, they are a list of interrelated events that will bring horrible devastation to the campaign world if the player characters don't get involved. They work for any game that is designed to have a measure of plot, but wants to make sure that player agency is important.

Each front is a listing of several different dangers, that is, factions, events, places, magical happenings that, if left unchecked, will metastasize into a disaster. The faction attains its goals, or the magical happening take shape, or the disaster causes damage to life, property, and the economy. 

Each danger has a sub-list of grim portents: events that represent the danger getting one step closer to culmination, and having a visible effect on the campaign world. After every few adventures where the PCs did not address a given danger, one of the grim portents comes to pass. The PCs hear about what happened, and may ignore it for other matters, or treat it as a plot hook worth investigating.

Once the player characters decide to intervene, however, that danger can be averted or mitigated, and the rest of the front exposed so that the players can protect their Campaign World from whatever was going to happen.

Here is an example from one of my recent campaign documents.

Danger: The Necromatrix

Tanida the Necromantrix seeks the hidden tomb of The Rust King by raising and interrogating the Dead, leaving a trail of the Unquiet dead behind her. She known that her mistress comes from a lineage that includes the Mage-advisors to the Rust King, and who were involved in hiding his body and wealth after he fell. 

Grim Portents 

• Wights wander the Southern Woods.

• The Old Foebarrow Stirs

• Witch Lights in the Southern Pass

• The Necromantrix evades capture in the City of Randhelm

• Tanida reaches the Hidden Grave

Impending Doom: Rising Threat

Danger: The Legions of the Dead

Tanida misestimated the magic of her forebears. Breaking their seals frees a legion of the dead keen on collecting the sacrifice they need to restore King Rand: the blood of a king. 

Grim Portents 

• The Wraith Warlords Arise

• The Skeletal Legions Rise from their Tombs

• The Mists Make Civilians Prisoners

• The King of Lorland is Slain

Impending Doom: Chaos

Danger: The Risen King

Rand, the Rust King can command in death the legions that betrayed him in Life. He intends to avenge himself on the world. 

Grim Portents

• The Bone King Rises

• Shades of Necromancers head to the Necropolis

• The Bone King takes the Trone of Lorland

• Temples are Desecrated to create the Mist Everywhere

Impending Doom: Tyranny

As this front unfolds, a greedy Necromantrix, hoping to find the treasure of a failed conqueror accidentally unleashes a plague of the undead on the world. The PCs could stop almost all of it by simply keeping the Necromantrix from opening the tomb discovering its location. The first danger covers her and her quest for the wealth of the Lost King. The grim portents needs only be enough of a note to remind you of the possible adventure or the consequences of not taking it.

If the Necromantrix isn't stopped, she opens up the Tomb and releases a legion of skeletal minions and undead generals. If they aren't stopped they use a cursed fog to put most of the Kingdom into a torpor as they hunt down and kill the current king, then use his blood to raise their fallen monarch as a death knight. If the final danger comes to pass, the undead king will take the throne, desecrate temples and enslave mortal-kind. 

This was running in tandem with two other fronts, one about a plague that grants superhuman abilities but slowly drives people mad, and another about an army led by an evil cleric trying to free his Titan patron. This meant that the PCs were constantly needing to make hard choices about what events to investigate, and there is a constant sense of urgency.

If you want a great breakdown of how to use these, check out the Dungeon World Guide.

Component 2: Depletion Dice

If you aren't familiar with them, depletion dice are a mechanic currently in fashion with the indie RPG crowd that appear in a number of OSR retroclones like The Delve 2e and The Black Hack. They are a way of handling the tracking of resources like food, light, magical energy, or ammunition in a TTRPG. I have seen both a swift variant of depletion dice, and a slower version. We will talk about the swift version of the mechanic here.

Anything that you might represent as a limited supply or timer can use depletion dice to track it rather than keeping a specific count. It adds an unpredictability to the game that, in some circumstances is quite appealing. In the swift version of depletion dice, you represent a quantity as a type of die from the standard D&D set, such as a d8 or a d6. So, instead of saying "I have 60 arrows" you would say "I have d10 worth of arrows."

Each time you make use of that resource, such as at the end of a fight, roll that kind of die. If you roll a 1, you downgrade to the next lowest die type on a chain of d12 > d10 > d8 > d6 > d4. So if you had a d6 worth of arrows and got into a fight where arrows were used, you would roll a d6; if you rolled a 1, you only have d4 worth of arrows left. 

Once you roll a 1 on a d4 , you are out of that supply.

This tool is great if you are a strong visual learner, a dice hoarder, and have something like a tracking card in front of you where you can keep the appropriate dice next to a not on what it represents. For a lot of things - like ammo- it actually doesn't save much time compared to writing down how many arrows you have and subtracting as you shoot, however.

What it is really good for is moments when randomness adds significant tension. A depletion die used for Wandering Monsters, for example. The Delve 2e is especially brilliant on this front in that it uses it for light in a game that involves a lot of wandering in dark, terrifying places. Not having an exact idea of how long that salvaged torch or home-made candle is going to last adds a lot of tension. I  like it for the number of daily uses of magical powers as well, as it makes magic a little more unpredictable.

Combining them

It occurred to me, that when running a campaign with relatively few fronts, but where the game is put in a time crunch, such as in fighting an invasion or helping people in the face of a natural disaster, the two could work very well together.

In my current campaign, the PCs are trying to liberate their home valley from an ancient and magically corrupted dragon. I know what would happen if his reign of terror is left unchecked, and I want the player characters to feel a crunch as they have to go through multiple complicated steps to collect the weapons that they need to defeat it.

That is when I got the idea of using the depletion dice to measure the dragons progress. That way, I can give them a chance to did the first handful of Adventures clear, but always have uncertainty as to how fast things are going to go bad. And once the dragon starts pushing hard, The destruction will accelerate.

And so I made a table marking what would happen each time that died depleted to the next lower step. I will roll the die to check for depletion after every adventure. Given that it is going to take at least 15 game sessions for them to do everything they wish to do, barring being sidetracked, there is a good chance that they will be coming home to ruins if they don't stay focused and carefully consider taking shortcuts.

Meanwhile an exiled prince has returned to take his throne from his treacherous brothers, throwing the rest of the country into chaos. Adding another set of events that might throw obstacles in the PCs paths.

Here is a sample of how it looks in my notes:

Fronts

Micah's rebellion can be tracked w/ a (Delve style) usage die starting at d8. Roll once per session.

d6	He will have taken Aramais Bay and Two Valleys.
d4	He will be pressing the Capital as many of the Northern valleys back out of the fight fearing Erebus.
0	He will be king…  Then dealing w/ Erebus and Romilla are immediate risks.

Erebus’ Dominion likewise can start at a d12.

d10	The Tybern Valley settlements give up on resistance, their lords submit to the Dragon, giving up treasure and slaves; they offer up Brigands first, breaking the goodwill between the two peoples.
d8	The Cult of Tsathoggua joins Erebus. The Tybern Valley settlements are decimated.
d6	Erebus discovers the Party’s quest and sends agents to hunt them. He Personally begins to take the Kelmer Valley.
d4	The Kelmer and Toiron Valleys become his territory.
0	Tybern’s lords are destroyed, the valley falls to infighting and chaos whenever the Dragon is not there to terrify them into unity.

This takes much of the guesswork out of when and how to advance plots. The starting die determines both the complexity of the from and how long it will take to gain momentum and become a legitimate danger.

I am going to call this rule Devastation Dice, as Doom Dice is already taken, and it hopefully will inspire GMs using the tool to think big.