Follow the Campaign 2: Meet the PCs

There are 5 players in my gaming group. All 5 are friends or relatives of mine. All of my players are there to have a good time, and we mix a fair amount of in game banter with out of game banter over the course of play.

A/Mia'thos: A has been playing since high school but is in the bottom half of the group in terms of raw hours played. While he did spend some time in college playing, it did not last for very long. A tends to play characters with big personalities and does an excellent job of describing how his characters cast their spells or swing their swords.

Mia'thos is a tiefling warlock. Mia'thos was raised in a life of slavery in The Fingers. He is a good character but he made a pact with Dispater, the lord of the second level of Hell, to give him the power to break his shackles and affect change. Unfortunately, he now owes Dispater 8 favors - so the question is will Mia'thos be able to walk the path of the righteous or will the lure of hellish powers and his tiefling heritage drag him into darkness?

E/Khart'ka: E is the newest player in our group, she started at the beginning of the last campaign. She started nervously, but has come to really embrace the game and is arguably the strongest roleplayer of the entire group despite being the least experienced. E also has a historical preference for science fiction over fantasy, mostly because she does not enjoy the black/white nature of Tolkien style high fantasies.

Khart'ka is a dragonborn cleric of Bahamut, god of Good dragons and the Tempest. E originally described the concept of Khart'ka as being "like a Klingon. A warrior-poet, but more awesome." Khart'ka hails from a matriarchal tribe in the Arak steppes, and she carries the dead ashes of their saint to give her strength. E likes approaching character creation organically, and we shall see how the character develops, but she has already established a hilarious blessing of "May Bahamut burn you" that garners strange looks and anger from strangers.

J/Dirk: J started playing some form of D&D in middle school, but didn't play terribly much in college. He has on occasion played with another group that he describes as somewhat more chaotic.  J is an avid reader and I think this helps him create characters in the sense that he tends to have the most fleshed out character concepts. On the other hand, J occasionally gets bored with his characters over time. He also accidentally has a reputation for being the guy who dies the most, because...uh, he dies the most.

Dirk is a dashing human rogue who has given up a life of piracy. The only Leyhaven local, Dirk returned to Leyhaven after being spurned by the only woman he ever truly loved. Good at heart but greedy at the surface, Dirk loves to tell tall tales. His desire to be free and wander the world comes from the simple life that his parents lead running a wand shop, Wanderland, in Leyhaven.

K/Cinder: K is the most experienced of my players, having played from a young age and throughout his entire life. K isn't a true min/maxer, but his familiarity with the rules certainly lends itself to building some of the most powerful characters. K doesn't general build 'group leader' characters, but often falls into that role or of relatively highly regarded opinion because of his experience.

Cinderbite is a "wood" elf ranger from the Wolom Ravine. Cinderbite is from a tribe of wandering scavengers that has a pragmatic view of the world. Tribes in the Wolom Ravine use undead for labor, but undead used for harm or evil are viewed as pure anathema to those such as Cinderbite. She left her home to travel the world.

V/Roderan: V has most of his experience playing from college with 4th edition, and I actually can't remember if that was his first experience or not. We like to tease V for playing characters that are just V with swords or spells, but he has actually become much better recently at playing out his character. Interestingly, V chose to randomly roll for his ideals, backgrounds, traits, and flaws in this campaign as per the 5e rulebook.

Roderan is a dwarven cleric of Ula, goddess of the hills. Roderan is a life cleric, devoted to saving others. He is a pilgrim of sorts, spreading the good word of Ula and helping those in need. His most notable quirk so far is his penchant for citing scriptures to advise action. Whether those scriptures are accurately remembered or not is a different matter.

Follow the Campaign 1: Evershift World

 My Pathfinder campaign, The Maelstrom, ended earlier than I expected, in a session that I described to another friend as having "only a 25% chance of the campaign ending."  I had had my eyes on 5th edition for about a month prior and figured it would be worthwhile to take the leap - the next campaign would be 5th edition.

Enter Evershift.

Evershift is a world loosely inspired by Magic: The Gathering's Zendikar setting, a world of dangerous terrains where adventure and travel were as dangerous as the monsters one might face. One thing I wanted to encourage in my new campaign was a sense of exploration and dungeon-delving, so I chose to design a world based that encouraged that basic premise.

One thing DMs tend to love doing is making maps, and I am no exception. I always tell my players they are welcome to add something to the world or modify it, but I like to come up with a wide, basic expanse of ideas that the players can draw from. Some of the regions I design will never be interacted with. I also don't force myself to stay strictly to the constructions of the map - I will happily fill things in in the middle and I purposefully avoid discussing scale to allow myself to distort the map size and length if it becomes necessary for the game. For me, creating the map is a source of inspiration for both myself and my players, and not limitation.

 I also told the players they would be starting in Leyhaven, a relatively powerful city-state that exercises a decent amount of influence over the world by being a powerful trading hub. Centrally located by land and by sea, Leyhaven is inspired by the concept of Venice during the Renaissance, and I decided that a Doge and a Council of Merchants would rule the city to add to that flavor. Unlike Venice, however, Leyhaven sits atop a mesa that borders the sea. Many theorize Leyhaven was created by magic: a large obelisk sits in the center of the mesa and some scholars say it was placed there to capture the magic of leylines (magical 'strands' that travel across the world), and when it did, it caused the mesa to rise out of the plains that Leyhaven is now surrounded by.

Leyhaven has a powerful crank that brings ships up from the sea into the city, but this is only for ships that can pay the port fees. Leyhaven Below is a shanty town that sits at the coast below the mesa, touching the sea, and is a dangerous place of cutthroats and sailors.

In introducing the campaign, I also included the map below, and a link to a Google Doc listing out some of the basics of the geography, politics, creation myth, and religion of the world. In some games I create my own pantheon, but in this one I chose to use a pre-established one as  my previous game has been heavily impacted by the home-brewed pantheon I used. I chose the Greyhawk deities because there were a fair amount relating to both travel and terrain: deities that would be notably revered in a world like Evershift.


Details of the campaign in this googledoc