A journey through a land of fantasy…

The world and thrust for this campaign was born from many different sources.   The first and foremost was my own disappointment with the emphasis on hack’n’slash in most D&D campaigns.  D&D is honestly a strategic game; most of the rules are intended to adjudicate exactly what a character can and can’t do in a situation.  Role-play, while present, is very secondary.  While I do love strategy and combat, I felt that most campaigns only touched on roleplay and plot and character development.

Another thing that I wanted to bring to the game was the feeling that there actually was a world out there, one that went about its business no matter what the player characters were doing.  While the story should center on the player characters, I wanted the players to see that other things happen in the world that they do not influence and, in many cases, they could not even hope to influence, and yet still affect them in various ways.  As a corollary to this, I also wanted the characters to have their own goals, based on their backgrounds and personalities, and for the players to want to work with the group to accomplish both the personal goals and group goals (or, fight against the group if necessary).  I didn’t want characters that emerged from a vacuum to form the perfect adventuring group.

I also wanted to explore other game mechanics that I have not previously had a chance to use.  For example, at some point in this campaign, there will be warfare on the scale of armies.  I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to use D&D warfare rules, bring in a new system, such as Warhammer, or let the battle be decided off-camera, possibly influenced by the activities of the player characters.

The last thing I wanted to do was base the campaign on one of my favorite books, The Silver Sun, by Nancy Springer.  There are a number of scenes and plot devices in that book that are very fun, though I couldn’t use them verbatim because my husband, Robert (who is one of the players), has read the book and would recognize it (or at least, I thought so, though very recently, he mentioned the book and noted that he doesn’t remember the first thing from it).

One lesser consideration was that I wanted specifically to challenge the roleplay skills of one of my players, Nathan.  He is a D&D enthusiast, and is the type of person who loves roleplay and will create a less-than-optimal character in favor of creating a character that exemplifies the person’s history, skills, and personality.  Unfortunately, the games he’s been in have been light roleplay, and, with my husband creating optimized battle-machine characters, Nathan’s been very overshadowed.

These have been the motivations behind the creation of the world and campaign.  I’ll discuss how I addressed them in an upcoming post.