Dungeons & Dragonscampaigns frequently take place in this void, where the seasons move at the Dungeon Master’s convenience, and time usually isn’t your enemy. However, basing a campaign around a single season has a certain compelling nature to it, where you have a time limit - it gives a palpable sense of tension to keep going.
Spring seems like one of the more idealistic seasons, with calmer temperatures and colorful flowers, but it can hold its own dangers in its beauty. A springtime campaign might seem limiting, but it can have plenty of opportunities waiting in those fields of blooming flowers.
9Prepare Your Descriptive Skills
You’ll Need To Get Those Spring Vibes Right
Part of what is going to firmly establish your campaign as based in the springtime is if you may properly describe the weather, the environment, and the general vibes of spring. Talk about how players can smell petrichor in the air, and they can feel the cool breeze of spring, the rain clouds slowly rolling in to douse the world around with rain.
you’re able to even describe the people celebrating that the weather has finally cleared up from a harsh winter, and the elation that comes with the changing of the seasons.
8Have A Weather Table
Wind, Rain, Shine, or Snow
Spring isn’t sunny days with occasional sprinkles of rain - it can have some really drastic weather that can impact how your players progress through the campaign or what they do for the day. As such, you should consider putting together a weather table to dictate what kind of weather your players might come across and how that will impact them, be it heavy rain, high winds, or sunny days.
You don’t need to roll on the weather table for every single day of the campaign, just when it suits you the most or when you think it might throw your players for a loop and push them to get creative with their solutions.
7Spring Festivals
Winter’s End Means Celebration
It’s pretty traditional that as winter winds down to an end and the flora and fauna start to come back to a fully active and living state, people are going to be prone to celebration. Putting together festivals that your players attend can make for an interesting change-up in the campaign, or as a good starting point.
Having flower festivals, dances, celebrations, and the like are also really good ways to establish a culture and its people. Perhaps you could consider starting your players out in a spring festival, only for spring to be delayed or, perhaps, for a monster, freshly awoken from hibernation, to ruin it.
6Spring-Based Ritual Quests
Help The Druids Make Flowers Blossom
If you want your players to get really involved in the “seasonal” aspect of the campaign, you could have them participate in rituals that help to bring spring to its full glory. Perhaps, without the player’s interference, a ritual cannot come to pass - or, maybe, the ritual seeks to end springtime, and players must find a way to stop said ritual.
Maybe it’s not so much about creating or ending spring, but about ensuring thatdruids can continue to stay connected to nature, able to utilize Wild Shapesand elemental forms. Without the success of this ritual, the druids could risk becoming cut off from nature altogether until the next season and, in turn, the forest and local villages lose their protectors.
5Spring Themed Monsters
Get Attacked By Allergies, Literally
Most of the monsters you’ll come across in the Dungeon Master’s guide are made for any season, given that they’re meant to be pretty universal - if not meant for specific types of environments. However, there’s nothing stopping you from modifying these monsters to lean more into a spring aesthetic.
Give them abilities that cause pollen attacks or incite springtime allergies that your party needs to combat with higher constitution scores. Perhaps, the closer they get to a monster’s den, the more they start to sneeze or smell intense floral scents - like flowers freshly blossomed.
4Utilize The Feywild
The Court Of Spring Makes For Compelling Spring Allies
Time is weird, especially in the Feywild, which means that the seasons all seem to exist at the same time, depending on where you are. You also happen to have different Fey Courts that all hinge on different seasons, andthey and their cohorts can make excellent encountersand set pieces in your grand story.
Thankfully, the Spring Court isn’t actively malicious and seeking out the destruction of the other seasonal courts, which could make them useful allies. Here you may explore a perpetual spring-like environment or, perhaps, offer your players the goal of making spring a much longer-lasting season, which, while it would earn the favor of the Spring Court, would likely earn the ire of the Winter Court or Summer Court.
3The Fear Of Perpetual Spring
The Season’s Great… Until It Never Ends
Spring is a great season and is often touted as many people’s favorite season, given that it’s a good reprieve from winter, where the weather is harsh and the sun is rare. However, a perpetual spring, as nice as it sounds in theory, would actually be quite horrifying.
Flora and fauna rely quite heavily on the changing of the seasons to maintain themselves and keep flourishing, and even people rely on the changing of the seasons to keep track of time and never grow entirely weary of the weather. Spring is beloved… until the rain rarely stops and the weather never warms up enough that you long for winter.
2Great Beasts Begin To Awaken
Hibernation Is Over
As winter fades and things begin to gradually warm up, albeit while remaining cool, so do many animals who hibernate the snowy days away. While your players likely won’t find bears to be fearsome adversaries, they might find a no-longer-hibernating dragon to be absolutely terrifying.
Perhaps it’s not a dragon that has awoken from hibernation, buta family of giants who are famished from the long winter. This makes springtime a double-edged sword because while it’s a reprieve from the harsher weather and temperatures of winter, it comes alongside big and dangerous threats waking up and returning to their hunting grounds—or possibly being forced to find new hunting grounds.
1Put Your Players On A Timeline
The Campaign Ends With Springtime
You’ve made an entire spring-themed campaign, so it should, obviously, end when springtime ends. Putting an end date on your campaigns can be hard, but it also gives you a tangible goal to work towards when you’re building the story, which is appealing for both players and Dungeon Masters alike.
It also means that there’s a genuine sense of tension with each day that passes, and while they might find ways to prolong springtime just a little bit, all things must come to an end eventually.
