Current Status

So after a couple of shit weeks I have once more dived into doing RPG stuff.

So I had been nagging a mate to run a campaign for ages cause I wanted the chance to be a player in one. Consequently he had just started running one for a bunch of his work mates and a close mate of his. He offered me a spot, which I jumped on. So hopefully I will throw up a few entries about that.

Sadly the Starfinder campaign has gone on hiatus due to time commitment issues by a couple of the party. So in its place I volunteered to run a 5E campaign for a couple of the players who more consistently have the spare time. So for this I decided to run a pre-written campaign for the sake of ease. I have chosen Tomb of Annihilation for this purpose

Starfinder Placeholder

In terms of the work campaign I was running, I have had a couple more sessions (missed a couple of sessions because one or more of the players were sick). I will hopefully post a couple of recaps for this campaign as it progresses further. One issue I am having with it, is deciding what direction I want to take it. Writing some of the background has been fun, but it can be very counter productive to writing a story for the players. Especially when you know a lot of it may never even come into play.

Because I am now running more than one campaign and I have previously bought a Cheesex grid mat, I decided I needed some miniatures. However because I will be travelling with my stuff most of the time, I decided the I would go the easy mode and buy the pathfinder cardboard pawns.

The pawn bestiary box

All the pawns

More to come.

World building and Villains

So I am back on the world building bandwagon and I have to say it is one of the most disappointing facets of 5E. Unlike DnD 3.5, 5E severely lacks the scope of source books devoted towards world building. This had resulted in me falling back on reading some 3.5 books. However sourcing the physical copies of 3.5 books is next to impossible.

A group of books i would like to find physical copies of are Gary Gygax's world building books. He had a great one on just naming things. 

The final book that I have heavily relied on is a book about generating a magical medieval society. It explains how to calculate populations, design urban communities and even the layout of cities.

So for the campaign I just started for the fellow graduates at work, I have thrown together the region where the campaign will take place. I have used the above resources to populate the region and calculated the number and sizes of the cities and towns, the number of nobles and gentry, and a general outline for the first small town the players will gravitate towards.

The harder task at this stage is to come out with villains and plots for players to interact with. I have a little bit of an idea what I want one of plots to be, however I'm struggling to come up with bad guys I like. I think this is partly cause I want them to have personality. Towards this, I think I will base them off real people I know, but with slight twists to make them suitable for a fantasy setting.

Starting a New Campaign

So the new graduates at work have been talking about starting a DnD campaign and I drunkenly agreed to be the Dungeon Master. I decided to re-use some of the stuff I had previously written for the other campaign I briefly ran. Hence, I removed some of the stuff I previously posted from my blog so as to not spoil anything.

What I am starting from scratch is the Kingdom the players are starting in. I have started drawing up the map for this Kingdom, so I thought I would post a spoiler.