Terra Mare - A New Campaign - First Thoughts
As you may know I recently (well, end of 2018) finished a very long running 4th Edition D&D campaign. If you missed it, there are a series of articles on my other blog, starting here.
As we fancied a break from fantasy role playing, that group has gone on to play Call of Cthulhu, and there are blogs on here going over the process of constructing the first investigation starting here.
I am also running a mostly different group of players through the D&D 5th Edition starter set Lost Mine of Phandelver at my FLGS, and we are coming to the end of that adventure, so I'll need something to run afterwards. We had considered continuing with the characters, possibly going on to something like Storm King's Thunder, probably adapted for Mystara and starting at chapter 3. But several of the players want the opportunity to start from scratch, perhaps choosing a little differently for their characters. Although the Lost Mine set includes pregens and each has its level progression worked out in advance, I allowed the players who expressed an interest to make different choices. So it sounds like we will be starting again at level 1.
I could use SKT anyway, after all it runs from level 1, but I have grown somewhat disillusioned with Mystara of late, and I don't really know much at all about the Forgotten Realms, its default setting. I could come up with my own setting of course, but that seems a little pointless if I am going to run a published adventure series. So a new world and a new campaign.
If you know me, you might be surprised at my falling out with Mystara. I've used that setting pretty much since I got back into D&D in the 1980s. I found it had enough empty space for me to put pretty much what I wanted into it (I would use the vast wastes of Norwold for SKT, should I ever get round to running it) and it has a detailed history and plenty of areas for exploration. The numerous Gazetteers give plenty of background information, and in a way, that has become the problem.
Of course I realise I can change whatever I like, but one of the plus points of using an established game world is that there is a common understanding about it. There is a written history, and world shaping events are often determined before play simply by looking at that history. That became more and more of a constraint to me; in the last campaign I referred to several 'historical' events as background to the players' explorations (especially once they travelled back in time). Suddenly I had to explain to them many bits of information that I had absorbed over many years of reading. The also had a predictable tendency to assume that everything mentioned was directly relevant. Chekhov's gun at work again.
Perhaps it would be better to start from scratch? My own world where we could tell the tale of a (hopefully) epic campaign, and perhaps reuse in future games.
That just leaves me to design a world and a series of adventures, where to begin?
I've already had some ideas; in fact, this has been bubbling away in my mind for a while now. The post title should give some clues; I'm referencing one of my favourite video games, and a series of articles by Angry GM has given me more ideas, but the original seed goes back to before I played, or had even heard of D&D. Two of the big influences will be C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the Wizard of Earthsea series by Ursula K LeGuin.
As we fancied a break from fantasy role playing, that group has gone on to play Call of Cthulhu, and there are blogs on here going over the process of constructing the first investigation starting here.
I am also running a mostly different group of players through the D&D 5th Edition starter set Lost Mine of Phandelver at my FLGS, and we are coming to the end of that adventure, so I'll need something to run afterwards. We had considered continuing with the characters, possibly going on to something like Storm King's Thunder, probably adapted for Mystara and starting at chapter 3. But several of the players want the opportunity to start from scratch, perhaps choosing a little differently for their characters. Although the Lost Mine set includes pregens and each has its level progression worked out in advance, I allowed the players who expressed an interest to make different choices. So it sounds like we will be starting again at level 1.
I could use SKT anyway, after all it runs from level 1, but I have grown somewhat disillusioned with Mystara of late, and I don't really know much at all about the Forgotten Realms, its default setting. I could come up with my own setting of course, but that seems a little pointless if I am going to run a published adventure series. So a new world and a new campaign.
If you know me, you might be surprised at my falling out with Mystara. I've used that setting pretty much since I got back into D&D in the 1980s. I found it had enough empty space for me to put pretty much what I wanted into it (I would use the vast wastes of Norwold for SKT, should I ever get round to running it) and it has a detailed history and plenty of areas for exploration. The numerous Gazetteers give plenty of background information, and in a way, that has become the problem.
Of course I realise I can change whatever I like, but one of the plus points of using an established game world is that there is a common understanding about it. There is a written history, and world shaping events are often determined before play simply by looking at that history. That became more and more of a constraint to me; in the last campaign I referred to several 'historical' events as background to the players' explorations (especially once they travelled back in time). Suddenly I had to explain to them many bits of information that I had absorbed over many years of reading. The also had a predictable tendency to assume that everything mentioned was directly relevant. Chekhov's gun at work again.
Perhaps it would be better to start from scratch? My own world where we could tell the tale of a (hopefully) epic campaign, and perhaps reuse in future games.
That just leaves me to design a world and a series of adventures, where to begin?
I've already had some ideas; in fact, this has been bubbling away in my mind for a while now. The post title should give some clues; I'm referencing one of my favourite video games, and a series of articles by Angry GM has given me more ideas, but the original seed goes back to before I played, or had even heard of D&D. Two of the big influences will be C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the Wizard of Earthsea series by Ursula K LeGuin.
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