[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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Sylvan World #2

use-with-dw-OnLightLast week we had our second session of the Dungeon World campaign. Since the first session was a Funnel adventure I decided to treat this as our “first session”.

To prepare for this I came up with two different adventures. I did not even call them Threats, yet, since neither had that much going on. I presented them to the players at our forum. They chose to defeat lizard centipede first and deal with the lost elven ruins later.

I’ll try to use this post to discuss the First Session of DW by thinking about what happened in our game.

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Sylvan World #1

use-with-dw-OnLightTwo years ago I ran my first Dungeon World-campaign and it was fun. But thinking back to it I might have not been familiar enough with the AWengine to make it the most memorable. I liked the basic idea in it though – it was a world entirely covered in forest.

This idea did not come up that too often in the few games we played. So when I started thinking about running a new campaign I realised I wasn’t done with that world. So last Saturday I got a new group together and started a new campaign with my favourite fantasy system. And this time we tried out it with Funnel World. Continue reading

From Kickstarter: Loot

9c551d727b15f475c09a3c7ab821a45f_originalWhile browsing our IG feed I came across an card pack that looked interesting – it featured a magic sword with stats and art. Since I was brewing a new Dungeon World campaign (more about that later) it sparked my interested and found out it was a part of a Kickstarter campaign. Since we have been occasionally discussing with Aki and Ville about occasionally reviewing Kickstarters I thought this would be a great place to start.

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Asking Help from Community

Roleplaying communities in internet are a beautiful thing. Back in the day when we played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay I was really active on Strike-to-Stun. I quickly learned that if I had a problem or wanted to change ideas an international community of likeminded players was a great place to start. Now we haven’t played WFRP in ages but I still visit the communities because I want to keep up with the people there.

There are a lot of rpg communities all around the web. There are dedicated forums, publisher’s forums, Facebook and (my personal favorite) Google+ for example. Combine them and you have almost unlimited resources of information and ideas. Ask help and you will get it.

Most of the time.

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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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New Games by Guild Redemund

kiltamerkki_peleihinI’m cheating with the topic but at least you are reading still, right? These games are not “new” per se but hacks and adventures. There is our newest collaborative Fiasco playset, an agnostic fantasy adventure (though it does have Dungeon World threat sheet) and a game that is built on Matthijs Holter‘s Archipelago.

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Starting “The Season of the Witch”

As roleplaying games go our “Sins of our Fathers” campaign is the longest I have ever participated in. Last Tuesday we started “the sixth season” and this time the action takes place in colonial America right after the raid on Joseph Curwen’s farm in 1772. As with the previous seasons we will use the refined version of my Eldritch Sigils game system that relies heavily on the AWengine.

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Horror in Dungeons

With all the OCR-stuff going on dungeons are getting better rep than in ages. Dungeon World is a certain classic and a game I would be willing to play at any time. Almost a year ago I talked about making dungeons on the fly and this subject raised its ugly head last Tuesday when the party descended into an ancient underground city in Egypt. Granted I was pretty tired then but I still think I had something good going on.

We are going to continue our descend into this forgotten tomb tomorrow and while I was searching the web for ideas and made notes about how to get it right I came into a conclusion that what I am actually doing is building a dungeon while I thought I was making a scenario for Call of Cthulhuish game.

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World of Dungeons: The Teachings of a Drunken Oneshot

birkin

We had a Chrismas party a week ago. Instead of board games, I said I could run World of Dungeons. It’s an ultralight hack of Dungeon World which I hadn’t run it before, so we took it on a spin. Because nobody believed that we could play entirely sober, I decided on a full improv session. It degenerated slowly, but inevitably—and undeniably gloriously—into player vs. player mayhem, which surprised me very little. Despite my mistakes as a drunken GM, we had a whole lot of fun, and I learned a few important lessons. These are my notes from the GM’s standpoint. Continue reading