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While playingDungeons & Dragons, you quickly discover that the possibilities are endless. If you picture your favorite RPGs, there are invisible walls and rails you can’t see that keep you within a certain bounding box. But when you’re a Dungeon Master (DM), you can do anything you want. That includes crafting campaigns based on things as grand and far-reaching as Disney.
However, deciding what to do when planning, or even where to start when you’re dealing with so many excellent franchises, can be confusing or tricky. But this guide will help you narrow your focus and set you up for success in running your Disney-themed campaign.
Homebrew Disney Creatures
The very first thing you should know going into planning a Disney-themed campaign is thatyou’ll need to homebrew. Depending on what you decide, you may have a lot of homebrewing to do or a much smaller amount.
For instance, you can decide you want touse official D&D monsters but re-skin them when describing them to your players. That’s simple enough and doesn’t require you to alter any stat blocks.
Or, you might decide tocreate new monstersthat wouldbetter fit into the Disney world or worldsyou want to make. Ultimately,it is up to you to decidehow much you want to pull from the rules and stats of D&D and how many changes and alterations you decide to make to more accurately replicate a Disney story or adventure.
Knowing thatit will take some homebrewingon your part, you can now start to do a deeper dive into what it is you want to accomplish withcrafting your Disney-themed campaign. So, where do you begin? By choosing how wide you want your scope to be.
Answer The Basic Questions Regarding Disney
As withany homebrew campaign, there are some answers that you need to thefive basic questions:
Who are the characters in this story? Are they the heroes, the villains, or bystanders who rise up to resolve the conflict? What is the conflict? What is going wrong in this world?
When is this happening,before, during, or after the Disney telling of the story? Where is it, andwhich Disney world is this taking place in? Why is there conflict, and why is your party made up of the people who can resolve it? Before you can start to put your campaign down on paper, some of the biggest answers you need are what and where.
Choose A Disney Plot And Location
For a Disney-themed campaign, there aretwo avenues you can gowhen it comes to these decisions. Are you going to be basing your campaignon one movie, show, or franchise? Or, will you be going the path ofKingdom Hearts,Lorcana, or any other Disney IP thatblends the worlds of their characters?
Using One Franchise
Let’s use Encanto as an example for picking just one movie from the large library. That willnarrow down your focus significantlybecause you already have a skeleton, of sorts, to work with.
Your campaign takes place in a magical village with, maybeinstead of a family, at the heart of all this magic and wonder is your party, whatever it is that has brought them together.
You know that one of themajor conflicts is that something is threatening the magicof not only the village and your home but of the players too. Now you can decidewhat is threatening them,where the threat is coming from,if it isa person behind this, and so on down the line.
Blending Disney Worlds Together
If you decide youwant to create a crossoverof the Disney worlds and bring in pre-existing characters, thenyou’ll have a lot more homebrewing to do, though thankfully, you can stillborrow story and location aspects.
Now, the more challenging part iswhat’s the conflict at the heart of this storyand is this merging of worlds something that has always existed? Is it new? Is it good or bad?
This route would be best explored bymore experienced DMs who have handled large worldsbefore because it can get out of hand quickly, especially with some of the stories being set in vastly different worlds.
For instance, Neverland, while magical, is a place whereall of these boys have never grown up.Merging that with something like Tangled, whereaging is at the very core of the story,could get messy if you aren’t sure why one person ages rapidly while everyone else stays young forever.
Although this is best for experienced DMs, if youkeep it small and only mergea few similar worlds,you can still pursue a crossover-like campaign.
To make it a bit easier, you cantreat each world as a plane of existenceand use the Dungeon Master’s Guide for how to plan for and run these different planes and dimensions.
you may alsostart with or keep a list of the locations and stories that will be explored. After all, it’s your campaign. So, if you only want five of the Princess movies to be the backdrop of your story, you can keep to those five andmake it more manageable.
Make The Setting Before Or After The Movie
Once you’ve decided between one story or blending the worlds of Disney together,you can figure out the when.When is this happeningin relation to these different stories?
Is it taking placebefore the main conflictis known? Does itstart when the movie(s) do? Or is itafter the major events of the story, making players deal with the fallout?
Starting before is afantastic option for a group of adventurers who don’t know each other. It gives them a chance to explore the world, get to know one another, and find hints and clues as to what will happen next. you may alsouse it as a toolfor them to meetimportant characters or NPCs.
Starting right as the conflict begins to become clearallows you to dive straight into the actionand can make for a very compellingone-shotorshort campaign.
Although your group doesn’t need to know each other, this is a great option for having a party with ties to each other. Are they the guardians of Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty? The faithful guards of Arendelle, attempting to maintain order while Elsa and Anna are gone? Or are they charged with finding the Ice Queen?
Ordoes this start after the main conflicthas ended? While more uncommon, this can bea good way to start a short or long campaignfocusing on what would happen after the Princess is saved, the villain is slain, or whatever you plan to have as the resolution.
As you can imagine from the scenarios painted, once you have your when, you focus on the remaining two aspects. Who and why.Although just as important as the other questions, these ones are a bit easier to plan out if you knowwhere the story is taking place, what is happening, and when it is happening, or when it has happened if you’re making the main conflict past tense.
Choose Who Is In The Party
Who isn’t only about your party, though of coursethat is the biggest componentin all of this. You have to decidewhere your party fits into this story. Do they replace the main cast, like in the Encanto example? If you like that choice, it would make them the main characters that the entire village depends on and the sole focus of the conflict.
Or,they can instead be side characterswho rise up to save the day. In the Sleeping Beauty example,you can have them act as if they were Aurora’s fairy godmothers, using magic to help everyone cursed before taking on Maleficent.
They could insteadpose as guards, unaffected by the spell,and be able to go to Prince Philip’s place to slay the dragon form of this mighty foe.
If you decide to make them side characters, keep in mind, as a DM,the players are meant to be and feel at the heart of your story.
So you will still have to be surethey can shine and have challenges and opportunitiesthat make them feel like heroes (or villains).
If you go the crossover avenue, you can have themcome together from separate worlds, knowing they all have to work together to figure out what’s happened and how to either reverse it or preserve this blending of lands. Perhaps they’ve evenbeen chosen by the leadersof their worlds to go on this quest.
This section is aboutthe Disney characters as well. Do you remove some characters? Do they become NPCs instead? These decisions come easier once you’ve envisioned your party’s role.
Decide Why The Conflict Is Happening
Now, you have all of your key information, not just from your decisions as a DM but also from the characters and their chosen or provided backstories. With all of that in the palm of your hands, you can really flesh out a compelling why.
Why is the bad or strange thing happening? Why are the players and their village losing their magic? In Encanto, the story explores generational trauma, that your mental and emotional state can impact the powers within.
Do you keep to this? Or do you create a new why? You couldhave anti-magic present, a disease that feeds on the arcane, or your players were pulling from a source of power they didn’t know or didn’t understand, and that’s running dry now.
You can get so creative withwhy the conflict is happening. Changing just this answer alone can completely alter and shift any Disney storyline. And, of course, you can use this to instead focus onwhy bad things are happening when the Disney worlds collide.
World Building And Beyond
Once you’ve come up with all the answers to those basic questions,world-building for a Disney-themed campaign is much likeworld-building for any other campaign.
You may evenstart in a better placebecause you will have so many references to use and choose from. You will know what the world looks like; you will know what the struggles are.
Some of the trickiest things will be inwhat you alter to make it funfor your players, as well as ensuring you aren’t making them trapped on rails, just passing through the story without being able to impact it.Some ideasof what the alterations could be are:
Some of these thingsrequire much less work, like adding side quests. Others, like potentiallyaltering how spells work,will take a lot of timeto mull over and implement, so keep that in mind.
But, at this point, it is up to you to craft the world. Finding maps, fitting characters into your world, and making all the final changes to your telling, or re-telling, of these stories.
