The Campaign: Winning Delvers Make Base Camps

In the interest of raising the floor of the common gamer's competency, I shall explain the basics of succeeding in adventuring beyond the rules.

It is not enough to know how to make attack rolls, how to use your man's special abilities, how to handle Surprise Checks, or to manage his inventory. A lot of very stupid mistakes are made by people who ought to know better, and they do this because they lose sight of what adventuring to and from a dungeon actually: an expedition into hostile territory.

A full campaign of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has a significant logistics element to it. The mandatory rules for timekeeping, spell component consumption, food and water consumption, expense tracking, downtime requirements for common activities, and so on means that having to haul ass back to a walled city days or weeks away is a bad idea. As with real life, competent campaigners establish base camps.

Getting Started

You want to keep the space between where the action is and where you base your operations as short as possible. In real terms, this means establishing a base camp as close to the dungeon as is practical. You should be mapping the route taken from Civilization to the base camp, as there is the secondary--but necessary--objective of blazing a trail that becomes a road. That path is there to speed up transit of men and material to and from the camp.

As soon as your brand-new party arrives in the area, you find a defensible location with a water source. You set up a screen, a palliside, or both to keep prying eyes away. This--not the nearest town or city--is where parties retreat to when they retire from the dungeon.

Once an operation or two brings back some treasure, you use some of it to expand the camp. Upgrade the defenses, hire mercenaries to guard it, get some Expert Hirelings to do repairs, cook food, or deal with recovery from injury or illness. Inactive player-characters can also contribute in this manner, as can Henchmen.

The wise adventuring expeditions take what gold is left after expenses and put into expanding and upgrading the base camp into a fortified frontier fort (see above), with more than just a few Expert Hirelings on hand for adventuring retinues to access (albeit at a fee). Inactive characters as well as Henchmen can act as Trainers, or fulfill other functions, as needed to further cut down the need to go all the way back to Civilization.

The Thriving Fort

Like in history, a successful establishment of a frontier fort means that other parties will come calling. Now we have trade and diplomacy becoming commonplace, as others already present in the region seek to gain this new party's aid against their enemies or to trade for things they do not have that they yet find desirable. In addition, more adventurers from Civilization come out to the fort to seek their own fortunes; by now that dungeon is well tapped, but exploration is not exhausted and other entrances may yet be found- or even entirely new ones.

At this point, the fort will want to not only have a water source but also generate its own food supplies. Depending on local conditions, this will be some combination of hunting, farming, and trading with the locals. Land near the fort may become valuable in its own right if its arable enough to farm or ranch upon; if, instead, it's better used for some industrial capacity that too should be built out now and its output used as trade fodder for food. (e.g. a riverside fort building a flour mill and trading use thereof for a share of the product)

Hey, I think there's a video about a historical example.

This channel delivers.

The rules of the game replicate the taming of the frontier that Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Civilizations undertook to bring order to chaos and expand Civilization.

Note that ambitious adventurers can, like the Romans did, hire from local tribes- especially if the dungeon's denizens are a mutual threat. You will find this pattern repeat in both real life and in fantastic literature alike.

Only fools don't do this, and that's because they think dungeon delving is like the leisurely act that is contemporary camping- a thing you drive far out for, do over a weekend, and then drive all the way back from. No wonder they think it sucks when it's not that easy.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Again, this is a wargame. Winners master logistics.