How Brennan Lee Mulligan Builds a Campaign

I think a tree is a really good metaphor for this kind of campaign building. Especially because trees adapt based on their environment in the same way GM can adjust their stories based on decisions from their players. Branches that the players care about grow while others can be pruned for the 'health' of the campaign etc.

This is super helpful. When I started running my first campaign I watched a bunch of interviews with Matt Mercer and Brennan. The thing that helped most was making connections between back stories both to link characters to the narrative but also to link player backstories together. Our fighter's dad's was a famous military hero. He was trying to hunt down a necromancer when he was a child and was never seen again. His big motivation was finding out what happened to his dad. The ranger's character was hunting down the murderer of his wife. She was killed by an assassin who has been terrorizing the country. The Rogue was trying to avenge his father's death (Literally he was basically Inigo Montoya). The guy who killed him was a pompous noble who after killing his dad then did everything he could to destroy the player's family financially. The way I put those together was that the necromancer is the BBEG. The necromancer's son is the noble who killed the rogue's father. The necromancer captured the fighter's dad and corrupted him (put a shadow demon in him that puppeted his body). He became the assassin who murdered the ranger's wife. That gave each of the players a lot of motivation to keep going. Gave a bunch of interesting decisions for the players to make and everything funneled up to the final battle with the necromancer.

Cannot wait for the return of the bad kids next year!

This is such a helpful video, especially for DMing my first campaign, I have played quite a few times here and there with friends and family from short campaigns to one shots here and there. But when it came to writing one for a first time I had an idea but wasn't sure where to go from there and the tree analogy was a really good way to visualize it for me. In a word doc I pretty much set up a tree and pretty much filled it in like a worksheet. Thank You So Much!

I love the way his mind works. Such a talented dm

Damned ! I don't use a tree form but I use the exact same steps ! can't wait to see the video :)

Loved that metaphor! Brennan’s so good at what he does.

Great video! I found this to be helpful in my own foray into DMing :)

thanks for another great vid

Great advice, great content - well presented too! Keep up the good work & you’ll go far!

My favorite of the branches is best Dad #1 aka jawbone

great video as usual.

Love that you warned for s1 spoilers and then proceeded to drop a s2 spoiler with no warning lmao thanks!

I was laughing so hard when i heard, "I have no pride!"

Great video! An interesting note is that Kristen wasn't actually planned to have any relation to the Harvestmen, Ally came up with that herself!

This is a really cool extension on your series on DM design styles. Would this work, or something akin for looking at Aabria's tendency to use her NPCs to challenge players' morals/morale? It's more apparent in Burrow's End but she does like the major NPC's to call out hypocrisy.

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Is there any chance we could get videos on Caldwell and Jake from NADDPOD? Your videos on the Intrepid Heroes are great, I'd love to see a similar sort of analysis for good ol Duncle Caldwell and the lowly, lowly, lowly, lowly, lowly, lowly, lowly bailiff.