Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D keeps us trying to find new ways to start over again.

We’ve talked about starting campaigns from the perspective of setting expectations, getting buy-in, and incorporating information from your session zero, but what about one step beyond that? What does the actual beginning of the campaign look like, and how can you frame your beginnings in new and different ways? That’s what we’re going to look at today on the show.

The original Dark Sun campaign setting boxed set suggested that at the beginning of the campaign, players make character trees. AD&D 2e didn’t actually want you to play plants–character trees were a group of four characters that the player managed, which they could swap out between adventures or when one of the characters died. Each time the active character gained a level, they could pick one of the other characters in that tree for an additional level, which also encouraged you to rotate active characters. While AD&D 1e didn’t want you to share items with other party members, AD&D 2e didn’t want you to share with yourself. I wonder if characters in a character tree need followers to protect them from the other characters of the same player.