[DnD5e] Planning for the Campaign

I’ve been playing rpgs since ten and most of that time (24ish years) I have been a GM. And I have never ran Dungeons & Dragons. Sure, I started with ANKH that was in essence just a D&D clone in Finnish. But the actual grandfather of rpgs has been a bit of a boogieman for me. The Old School Renaissance introduced me to DCCRPG and most recently I tried out 5th edition while I participated in Out of the Abyss. But now I think I would like to try to run DnD5e.

In this post I share me ideas for my first campaign as well as my impression and thoughts on the subject of starting such a campaign and about DnD5e in general as a first timer.

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Review: A Dozen Dungeons by Miska Fredman

adozendungeons_cover_thumbnailLast November I stumbled on Miska Fredman‘s Instagram account and noticed he was drawing maps with #Mapvember. I got hooked. I even draw some maps myself too and Aki wrote about automated map generation.

Since then Miska has gone on Patreon and is drawing maps in addition to his job as the founder of Ironspine (Finnish rpg publisher). It seems like his map drawing has really paid off. At the end of August he published a neat booklet called A Dozen Dungeons (link to DriveThruRPG).

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Underdark Without Nightvision #6

Spoiler Warning! Underdark Without Nightvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign as a human ranger (deep stalker) and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

After a long holiday hiatus we got back into the Underdark. To solve the problems with the leadership amongst our groups and to (eventually) escape the abyss. Or in fact the group did get together but I was absent.

So this time I’m going to talk about player absence.

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Underdark Without Nightvision #5

spoilerSpoiler Warning! Underdark Without Nightvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign as a human ranger (deep stalker) and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

It took us four sessions (and then some) to get into the ages old question in a roleplaying game: Who is our party leader?
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Underdark Without Darkvision #4

Out of the Abyss #4Spoiler Warning! Underdark Without Darkvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

Thanks WotC for ruining my perfect blogging title. After the third session I reached the 3rd level. I was going to choose hunter for my ranger as an Archtype but Mikko brought to my attention that Wizards had published an Unearthed Arcana that included a new Archtype for rangers – Deep Stalker.

In essence this means that I got darkvision and the whole concept of my character was about to change. I even joked about not choosing this path but while thinking about my character it seemed like to natural way to go.

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Underdark Without Nightvision #3

Spoiler Warning! Underdark Without Darkvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

After the second session I was not that sure if I liked where things were going. I really do not have a lot of free time for gaming anymore and I usually like to spend it on games that are interesting and entertaining. And lets face it – random encounters are not high on my list of “interesting and entertaining”.

I was a bit hesitant about the third session but Sami (DM) had been telling me that he had been planing the upcoming session and was prepared to enhance the story aspects of the game. And since the undertone of Out of the Abyss is quite excellent I (luckily) came to my senses and took part to this third session.

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Underdark Without Nightvision #2

Spoiler Warning! Underdark Without Darkvision is a based on my experiences on playing Out of the Abyss campaign and will include a host of spoilers. Thread carefully!

IMG_2840Second session for my human ranger on his way Out of the Abyss was a bit different from the first session. Or for any other session I have played since high school for that matter. It was a series of random encounters of which only one dealt with something else than fighting the horrible monsters of the Underdark.

As there is not that much to tell about the session itself I think that this time I could discuss the nuances of the game. Which pretty much sum up into “Underdark without nightivision”.

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