I rarely run Dungeons & Dragons campaigns where I know in advance who the Big Bad of the campaign is. Well, that’s not true – I do know when I run published adventures. However, for my homebrew campaigns, it is something that I work out as the game progresses.

This is not the only way to do it. I know many of my friends know exactly the shape of the campaign when they sit down to first play. But, I prefer a more organic campaign where I can react to what the players do – and how I can emphasise stuff that goes well and turn that into the main attraction.

So, for my current Greyhawk campaign, we started from the point where the last one ended – St Cuthbert had been summoned and overcome Xan Yae in a duel, the forces of the Kingdom of Ket were defeated, the Archclericy of Veluna stood triumphant, and a new era of peace and prosperity was ready to start in the western Flanaess.

(If you believe that last bit, I have a bridge to sell you!)

The initial starting part of this campaign was a group of kobolds causing trouble with giant bats in the area. Initial investigations revealed that the kobolds were using a potion to grow regular bats to unusual sizes and were letting them loose on the populace. The intention was then to reveal that the kobolds were fleeing from a more powerful force, and that’d lead onto the next part of the campaign.

Unfortunately, I made those kobolds just a bit too strong. How strong? Well, enough to kill one of the PCs. It was a critical hit from a chromatic orb, so there was quite a bit of unluck involved, but even so, the party retreated and went looking for easier foes.

That was the right thing to do. It’s how I’d play it myself.

So, the next few sessions saw the party took on other missions around the place – dealing with goblins, small bands of kobolds, and a few other threats. I introduced a few non-player characters that I thought might be interesting, and slowly started detailing the world as it exists for this campaign.

Then, amongst all these little quests, I started one that shows promise for providing the Big Bad of the campaign. Will it end up that way? I don’t know – but at the moment this is speaking to me, so I’ll keep developing it.

I do a lot of random generation of quests – which I then add more details to – and the quest I generated was to help a priest with a temple. A little consideration of the current state of play allowed me to develop this further:

• The temple in question was a new temple, built on the spot that St Cuthbert had defeated Xan Yae
• The quest was to rescue it from desecrators – that is, someone had killed the priests and summoned undead to walk within its bounds
• The temple was not, in fact, well attended. While it’d be a place of pilgrimage, it actually was in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps after fifty more years, a community would build up around it, but it isn’t there yet.

Which faction raised the undead? I put in an evil priest the party could capture – and thus provided a hook to the next adventure. I considered a few options for the priest, and eventually decided he’d be a priest of Incabulos, the god of pestilence and famine in the World of Greyhawk.

And with that, we got the Big Bad for this section of the campaign. For the entire campaign? It’s entirely possible, though we are still in early days. The characters, after interrogating the priest, have headed north to where other servants of Incabulos are lurking. They’ll be facing them tonight (as I write this), and from there I guess we’ll see how I can keep spinning up Incabulos and his servants into a worthy Big Bad for the campaign.