Thirteenth Rain…

The first Dungeons and Dragons campaign I ever ran began almost five years ago.  I wrote a small one day adventure based in a world I created myself and beginning in a little village called Turter.  I even sat down in front of MS Paint one day to try and whip up a little map for this world which I had envisioned.  I liked the idea of having a world at my own disposal.  I liked it that I didn’t have to fit my ideas around something which another writer had designed and I liked it that I could make my world bend and shift around the players without them having preconceived notions of how it ought work. 

I actually ran the first adventure within this world for two different player groups at the time.  As my first experience as a Dungeon Master, I’d rate it fairly highly.  I really enjoyed the way in which the two different groups handled the role-playing situations completely differently.  One of the first challenges the groups faced was meeting a contact in the outskirts of the Rammasad Forest just to the south of Turter.  One of the groups approached the contacts cabin stealthily and then proceeded to chat to him diplomatically.  The other group mistrusted the contact and threatened to set the thatched roof of his cabin alight.   One of the groups only lasted one session and then university commitments etc. took over and we were never able to revisit their adventure.  The other group, however, persevered and continued on through the campaign.

A few more adventures in to that particular campaign and my opinions on the setting changed.  While it was nice to invent the world and play with it as I pleased, it was often hard to ad lib the minutiae of the universe and, beyond that, maintain some kind of canon regarding the world.  I decided to lift the game which I had started and drop it into a world which had already been fleshed out.  Unlike many DMs, however, I looked past officially published campaign settings and instead went with the Raymond E. Feist popularised world of Midkemia.

After that campaign had run its course and it was time to induct a new group into a brand new campaign, I thought I would try something a little different.  The group I was playing with was split right down the middle between guys who had a little D&D experience and guys who had no D&D experience.  To try and ease them into the game, I downloaded a few premade modules to run through.  The first was an adventure called Wreck Ashore which set the characters up in a little coastal town called Seawell which had been plagued of late with a piracy problem.  A couple of the players commented that they really liked taking on these nasty human enemies and that it made a refreshing change from the standard Orcs, Goblins and Kobolds of the generic 1st level D&D adventure.  What I wasn’t sure about, however, was where to go after the adventure was wrapped up.  I liked the little small town setting of Seawell  but I had exhausted the adventure set there.  I decided to pick up a copy of the Forgotten Realms campaign guide for D&D 3.5 and set about integrating the little town into the Sword Coast.  I retrofitted two more pre-generated adventures into the setting and the campaign was progressing nicely.  Eventually, however, I craved doing something a little more epic.  I loved writing my own material but at this time I was in my 4th year at university and that was one resource I did not have.  Instead, I splashed out and bought one of the the larger pre-generated adventures set in the Forgotten Realms – The Twilight Tomb.  To this day, that still remains the best adventure I ever ran and I think that the players really enjoyed it as well.  After completing that particular adventure, given that I had finished uni and had a little bit of time on my hands, I set about writing an adventure of my own which placed the characters in an alternate reality version of their universe.  We managed to just about finish that adventure before one of our group headed off to America for a year which put a little bit of a halt on our proceedings but I do hope that we can come back to that game some day.

Regardless of the campaign halting, my love for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting endured and the next two campaigns I ran were both set in the Realms.  For one of them, I decided to do something completely different than the standard noble adventurers/swords and sorcery campaign so I set it in an area of Faerun called The Savage Frontier.  The basic idea for this story was that the characters were members of an adventurers guild operating out of a frontier town called Nevermeet.  This was a bleak, cold, savage place and the characters felt it.  It was a lot of fun to run.

As I said in my last post, however, I have, of late, started to slowly migrate into the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  Even though I bought the 4e campaign setting for the Forgotten Realms, I made a decision some time ago that if I ever started to write some material for 4e, I’d change up my campaign setting completely – new rule set, new universe.  A few weeks back I ordered a copy of the Eberron campaign setting and I have to say that I fell in love with it really quickly.  It is a world pervaded by intrigue and adventure and the tone is completely different from the atypical fantasy of the Forgotten Realms.  I only hope the players enjoy this slightly different tone of D&D as much as I am.  At the minute, I’m in the middle of an ongoing project, writing up material for my first D&D campaign to be set in the world of Eberron -  A campaign that I’ve come to know as…

 

 (The Eberron campaign setting and the images and maps associated with it all come from source material published by Wizards of the coast.  Some of the character artwork above is taken from the Pathfinder source material published by Piazo Publishing)

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