I've been waiting anxiously to reignite my Broken World campaign, but alas, it remains on hiatus. Why? Mostly because of the new edition. When I started my campaign, I decided to take the D&D Next rules and basically make a heavily house-ruled version of the game. But I found that it was too much work and once the new edition was released, and I found that I liked it, I decided to change to the new edition. One problem, though, is that the new edition hasn't released rules for the Warforged yet, and I have one in my game. I hesitate to house rule it as I don't want the player to have to rebuild their character yet again, so I'm waiting patiently for it. Hopefully it will be released soon as the folks over at WotC have suggested.
In the meantime, I'm working on fleshing out some of the areas of my campaign that I have not yet given thought to. I'll go into more detail in a separate post. Luckily, I have my Greyhawk game to keep me occupied (see my One Shot Classics blog posts under the DNDMW blog).
Game on, friends!
Friday, December 12, 2014
Friday, October 31, 2014
A Work In Progress
In my first post I stated that this campaign was being developed so that I could fit allof my future campaign needs into it. Well, that's mostly true, but I have another campaign that I'm developing that wouldn't really fit into my Broken World campaign (see the One Shot Classics post in my DNDMW blog). That campaign is set in the World of Greyhawk because of the way I intend to use classic adventures to mold the campaign from. This is an itch I needed to scratch. But my true love is in creating original material, which is where my Broken World comes in. Since I have two separate gaming groups, I will keep one in my home brew setting and the othe one in Greyhawk.
The Broken World is still a work in progress, despite the fact that I've already started running games in it. A have most of the setting mapped out, but there's always room to bring in new ideas and/or modify existing ones that haven't quite worked as I originally envisioned.
For example, it occurred to me the other night while I was watching Supernatural, that my campaign would benefit from an angel/devil aspect that I didn't originally consider. So now I'm thinking how I can fit this concept into the game as though it had been there all along.
I don't think that any campaign setting should be completely fleshed out, as you always need room to grow and expand on ideas as the campaign is played through. Still, you need enough of a solid foundation so that the world feels complete, even though it's really not. But that is art of the illusion that the DM must create to make the world come alive.
The Broken World is still a work in progress, despite the fact that I've already started running games in it. A have most of the setting mapped out, but there's always room to bring in new ideas and/or modify existing ones that haven't quite worked as I originally envisioned.
For example, it occurred to me the other night while I was watching Supernatural, that my campaign would benefit from an angel/devil aspect that I didn't originally consider. So now I'm thinking how I can fit this concept into the game as though it had been there all along.
I don't think that any campaign setting should be completely fleshed out, as you always need room to grow and expand on ideas as the campaign is played through. Still, you need enough of a solid foundation so that the world feels complete, even though it's really not. But that is art of the illusion that the DM must create to make the world come alive.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
The Broken World - a campaign to end all campaigns.
The Broken World - a campaign to end all campaigns.
I've been playing D&D for nearly 30 years now. I mostly run games as the Dungeon Master, or DM, and so I've had exposure to many published campaign settings and I've played around with creating my own. Each time it has fallen short of my expectations, but I feel that I've learned something from each attempt. In the last year I've tried to start several campaigns, but due to various scheduling issues with my gaming group, they have all fallen flat, which is actually good as I wasn't really happy with any of them. They all had good ideas, but they just didn't come together for me like I wanted them to. The problem is that each campaign world was too restrictive. I need a campaign world that allows my imagination to go crazy.
The Broken World is designed to allow me the flexibility to do whatever I want in my campaign.
The premise is that there was once a fantasy world that was destroyed over a thousand years ago by some terrible cosmic threat. The gods of the world saved the pieces of the world that remained, and all of the life upon them, but in dealing with the cosmic threat, the gods disappeared. Now the world is made up of islands floating in the aether around the sun like an asteroid belt, or as they refer to it in the campaign, an archipelago.
So, what does this set up allow me to do? Pretty much anything I want! There are thousands of islands, each separated from the others, which means that each island can be it's own campaign setting if I want it to be. If I want to do a series of adventures in a Dark Sun-like setting, all I have to do is make one of the islands a desert ruled by dragon kings. If I want to do a Ravenloft-like game, an island can be customized to work like Barovia. There is really no end to what I can do. And the best part for me is that I get to incorporate one of my favorite campaign ideas from 2nd Edition AD&D, which was Spelljammer. I use the concept of spelljamming to allow the people of the world to travel from island to island. It's perfect and makes so much more sense to me than the original Spelljammer concept of flying to different planets or even to different universes. I don't want that much sci-fi in my fantasy.
I'm pretty happy with the concept. On my next blog, I'll discuss some of the details behind the campaign world.
I've been playing D&D for nearly 30 years now. I mostly run games as the Dungeon Master, or DM, and so I've had exposure to many published campaign settings and I've played around with creating my own. Each time it has fallen short of my expectations, but I feel that I've learned something from each attempt. In the last year I've tried to start several campaigns, but due to various scheduling issues with my gaming group, they have all fallen flat, which is actually good as I wasn't really happy with any of them. They all had good ideas, but they just didn't come together for me like I wanted them to. The problem is that each campaign world was too restrictive. I need a campaign world that allows my imagination to go crazy.
The Broken World is designed to allow me the flexibility to do whatever I want in my campaign.
The premise is that there was once a fantasy world that was destroyed over a thousand years ago by some terrible cosmic threat. The gods of the world saved the pieces of the world that remained, and all of the life upon them, but in dealing with the cosmic threat, the gods disappeared. Now the world is made up of islands floating in the aether around the sun like an asteroid belt, or as they refer to it in the campaign, an archipelago.
So, what does this set up allow me to do? Pretty much anything I want! There are thousands of islands, each separated from the others, which means that each island can be it's own campaign setting if I want it to be. If I want to do a series of adventures in a Dark Sun-like setting, all I have to do is make one of the islands a desert ruled by dragon kings. If I want to do a Ravenloft-like game, an island can be customized to work like Barovia. There is really no end to what I can do. And the best part for me is that I get to incorporate one of my favorite campaign ideas from 2nd Edition AD&D, which was Spelljammer. I use the concept of spelljamming to allow the people of the world to travel from island to island. It's perfect and makes so much more sense to me than the original Spelljammer concept of flying to different planets or even to different universes. I don't want that much sci-fi in my fantasy.
I'm pretty happy with the concept. On my next blog, I'll discuss some of the details behind the campaign world.
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