Starting a New Campaign

My home group ended our last campaign at the beginning of the summer, bringing to an end our second full 1-20 campaign after 2+ years that saw us move from a virtual tabletop during the pandemic to in-person play again.
And now we’re preparing to start our new campaign, but we decided we wanted a break from 5e and are transitioning to Pathfinder for Savage Worlds, where I’ll try running the Iron Gods AP from Paizo. I forgot how much fun it is to set up a new campaign, staring at this metaphorical big, blank expanse of adventure. I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll reiterate here: I really like using published APs as a starting point, and building off from there. The juice for me in running a game is really getting established villains with clearly defined resources, allies, and motivations and then reacting to the players. I love having the players (unknowningly or not) interact with a villain before they actually get to meet them.

I had one battle in my last campaign where a powerful enemy caster had information about two of the PCs, so had contacted them via Sending a few times prior to the fight. Before the actual fight started, he made sure to invite the two PCs for a drink closer to him, then set up a Wall of Ice blocking their access to the rest of the party while his summoned demon attempted to attack the rest of the party, trying to bargain with the two friendly PCs. I mean, obviously they didn’t fall for the plan, but it seemed like a reasonable thing for the enemy caster to try, and made the whole encounter much more memorable than if it was just a straight-up fight.

So I look for situations like that. I want my fights to mean something in the game. I tend to skip the “filler” encounters that fill up a lot of dungeons (unless I’m trying to set up a Colville screw [https://twitter.com/mattcolville/status/822291876317274112?lang=en]) and so usually combine some encounters together to make a smaller number of more challenging encounters instead of many easy encounters. I think Savage Worlds is built around that assumption, actually, so it might end up working out better than 5e for my games.