As our campaign Against the Lord of the Pit draws to its undoubtedly dramatic close, I'm looking forward to the next high fantasy campaign, and giving some thought to where it will be set.
For the 5E game I play with my family, I'm totally content to stick to the Forgotten Realms for whatever prefab campaign we embark upon. (Currently, Hoard of the Dragon Queen/Rise of Tiamat, but I'm not thrilled with the balance issues that are rampant in the first book; we're still on the first chapter, so I might bail on it and switch over to Out of the Abyss or Storm King's Thunder. We shall see...)
But for my next epic campaign (which we'll be playing in 5E, as well - more on that system, later), I think the PCs might have to live here:
The next high-drama campaign is going to be based on an idea I've been toying with since the late '70s. (Yes, I said '70s. I'm old. Get over it.) The original seed planted itself in my head when I was 12 years old, long before I ever even started playing Dungeons & Dragons. It arose, of all things, while playing with my all-time favorite set of Legos: the original Lego Castle set. I spent hours playing with this set, many of them alone, as I had few friends living nearby (as I've mentioned before). As a consequence, I had to find ways to get as much entertainment as I could from my little brick-men. I wove intricate stories around a small circle of characters, stories featuring epic deeds of defiant heroism amidst a wave of vile evil. The stories were all structured around a pentad of magical artifacts (or were they divine avatars, gods in and of themselves?) and the characters' struggles to locate and possess these items of power and to use them to either free their world or to subjugate it.
So, for the setting, I need something I can populate with these characters and items, and the significant locations of the tales. Using a prefab world is fine for running a prefab campaign or a bunch of loosely connected adventures, but for something as epic as I want this new campaign to be, I need a world that's all my own.
So, it looks like it's time to raise Aerth from the ashes, brush of the dust of ages, and once again set a creative foot in those phantasmagorical lands...
For the 5E game I play with my family, I'm totally content to stick to the Forgotten Realms for whatever prefab campaign we embark upon. (Currently, Hoard of the Dragon Queen/Rise of Tiamat, but I'm not thrilled with the balance issues that are rampant in the first book; we're still on the first chapter, so I might bail on it and switch over to Out of the Abyss or Storm King's Thunder. We shall see...)
But for my next epic campaign (which we'll be playing in 5E, as well - more on that system, later), I think the PCs might have to live here:
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| A world I created a decade ago but which saw little use... its time has come! |
The next high-drama campaign is going to be based on an idea I've been toying with since the late '70s. (Yes, I said '70s. I'm old. Get over it.) The original seed planted itself in my head when I was 12 years old, long before I ever even started playing Dungeons & Dragons. It arose, of all things, while playing with my all-time favorite set of Legos: the original Lego Castle set. I spent hours playing with this set, many of them alone, as I had few friends living nearby (as I've mentioned before). As a consequence, I had to find ways to get as much entertainment as I could from my little brick-men. I wove intricate stories around a small circle of characters, stories featuring epic deeds of defiant heroism amidst a wave of vile evil. The stories were all structured around a pentad of magical artifacts (or were they divine avatars, gods in and of themselves?) and the characters' struggles to locate and possess these items of power and to use them to either free their world or to subjugate it.
So, for the setting, I need something I can populate with these characters and items, and the significant locations of the tales. Using a prefab world is fine for running a prefab campaign or a bunch of loosely connected adventures, but for something as epic as I want this new campaign to be, I need a world that's all my own.
So, it looks like it's time to raise Aerth from the ashes, brush of the dust of ages, and once again set a creative foot in those phantasmagorical lands...
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