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What is your campaign setting?
Do you have a campaign setting that you've created? Whether you've actually played games set in it or it just lives in your head, what is it?
Do you have a campaign setting that you've created? Whether you've actually played games set in it or it just lives in your head, what is it?
My homebrew system is called trailgoblins. It’s played on long hikes while the players are traveling through wilderness in real life.
To play, choose a loadout before you begin your hike. Spear and shotgun is popular. Then sometime during your hike (either from a timer or upon arriving at a spot that looks good for a fight) the players roll for type of monster and number, and also the monster’s disposition and tactics.
Each fight usually only lasts a few minutes. But huge set pieces isn’t the point. It’s attrition. Once I played on a solo three day hike through the Santa Cruz mountains. By the final day “my character” was down to 3 hp and had nothing left but a broken sword. Then three hobgoblins appeared on the trail ahead and I rushed heedlessly to my death.
Sometimes in my hikes I like the structure a narrative like trailgoblins provides.
This sounds so creative (though,Ill admit, I dont know much about rpg/dnd type games).
How do you handle the physical parts of the game, like dice rolling and keeping track of character info?
Thanks! The current iteration of the game is a random number generator app on the phone combined with tables in a six page pdf. I’d like to make it an app with cards, when you turn them over you have to act on them in your setting. Eventually, it would be best done as an AR game when we actually use functional glasses that can paint animated goblins and ogres charging down the path toward you.
Physical dice and pen/paper are nearly impossible on a trail. Flat spaces are hard to find and loose items have a habit of getting lost in the underbrush or off a cliff.
This feels like a great idea for a mobile app.
If I still had some interest in programming (I'm at that stage of my career in which i just want to not have to see code except the one i need for work) I would try and make an mvp for it.
Thanks. That’s the ultimate plan. If anyone reading this wants to help out, I’m all ears.
I'm new to DMing so I started with the D&D 5e Essentials Kit, but I couldn't resist tinkering. I've basically ditched the main story and have just been trying out different ideas, using the town of Phandalin as the setting. And sometimes I remember there was a dragon... It's a bit messy, but the group knew going into it that this was an experimental campaign while I learned how to DM and they relearned how to play (we hadn't played since before COVID).
But I've begun working on a nautical, pirate themed campaign for our next one. Many years ago, for fun, I started making maps of this place called "The Greschen Isles". I even started writing a short story set in that world, but it never really went anywhere. It was basically just my first attempt at making a map. But when I got the idea to do a sea-faring adventure, I decided to take that map and some other island-centric ones and combine them into a new map, which doesn't really have a name yet.
It's all very much a work-in-progress, seeing as how I only started on it a week or so ago. I've mostly taken to drawing islands and then coming up with ideas for them later. Like, for example, the lazily named "Haresehead Island" is going to be a community of Harengon simply because the island ended up looking a little bit like a rabbit. Not the most creative thing, but given that one of my players is a Harengon, it could be fun when the time comes. I also don't care for the scale that I've set for the map. A square is 4 miles, but that means a lot of these "small" islands I drew are substantially larger than I'd envisioned. Might be worth applying a larger grid or decreasing the area they represent a bit. It's a hard balance to find between large/small islands and large/small distances between them.
I haven't really figured out what the overarching plot of the setting will be though yet. I know that Lehren City will be the starting point, as it's clearly the political power house of the area, given that it controls most of the islands in the Bay of Lehren. Maybe some sort of quest to explore and document each island...or just keep it loose where the group is just a crew of pirates and I do an "Island of the month" approach where each session is a different island that they can choose to befriend, plunder, or simply explore. I'm sure if I keep drawing islands it'll come to me :P
One of the trickiest parts of doing a nautical campaign in 5e is that the boat rules kind of suck (really, it's more like they don't exist.) I have found success doing two things: adding a sort of rules supplement for the occasional granular ship battle and, far more often, describing the ship bits narratively and waiting until there's a boarding action to roll initiative.
I tend to create a new world for each campaign, but the one that's most uniquely mine is a sort of Shadowrun/cyberpunk hybrid that I've created for use with DnD's 5e rules. Perhaps because this one is the most uniquely mine (and thus there's always more things I feel I need to fill in), we've barely ever played in it.
I'm currently running my first proper campaign, and I've made a custom world for it called Enceladus. It's a pirate setting and the world is a vast ocean with many islands spread throughout. My players are sailing with Captain Grom in pursuit of the 7 Orbs of Power, aka the 7 Orbs of Namissual, which grant a wish when collected together. The players found a magical map which gives them riddles one by one leading to each orb. When they found the map, they also found a suicide note from the last person to have their wish granted (around 30 years ago, players don'thave this info). They learned that he and his wife were unable to conceive, so they sought out the orbs to have a child. The wife died in childbirth and genie who is bound by these 7 orbs saw this as a potential opportunity to escape, so he claimed the child (a water genasi) as his progeny. Unknown to the players, this child was raised to become a ruthless pirate instructed to seek out and slay anyone searching for the orbs, but more importantly she is to try and collect the orbs herself to use them to free the genie. They players just acquired the first orb last session by defeating a medusa and freeing her from her curse. The next orb is held by an undead pirate captain named Morgrim in a sunken ship graveyard. Feel free to ask any questions, it may help me develop the world more.
First of all I love the story you've outlined! I'm working on putting together a pirate/ocean themed campaign as well and it'll be my first fully custom campaign. Any advice on running a campaign on the open sea? Are you doing anything mechanics-wise for the ships? I was thinking I'd let the group pick a ship at the beginning and each ship would have different advantages and disadvantages that would aid them in their travels. For example, a small ship is faster and keeping a crew fed/paid is very cheap. But the downside is that it has low storage capacity and few canons. Then there might be some ways to upgrade...I guess I'm basically taking Sid Meier's Pirates! and trying to apply it to D&D :D
I haven't done ship to ship combat yet, but they potentially will next session if they make it to Morgrim. I'm still working on it, but the idea is they will go down beneath the ocean where his ship sank and there will be dozens of ships there. Morgrim had 6 other pirate captains under his command and they were eventually all sank together in a great battle. Fighting these pirates will be optional for extra gold and loot, but after Morgrim is "defeated" and the players return to the surface with the orb, the waters around them will start to churn and they'll hear a hollow, cackling laugh as Morgrim's ship rises to the surface in pursuit. The other 6 pirates will also rise to the surface if their captains are undefeated. My plan for ship combat is I bought 8 miniature 1inch ships on etsy and I'm going to roll initiative for the players like normal, then on initiative 20 they'll be able to give instructions to the deckhands to make ship actions like maneuvering and firing cannons. It's something I have to workshop more this weekend.
And I plan to make stat blocks for all these ships as well with each pirate captain having a unique ability of some kind. The ship the players are on is pretty basic, but they've been to a shipbuilding port before so they know upgrades are available if they want to pay for them.
We've only had 4 sessions so far, so I don't have much in the way of tips. I made a random table of 20 encounters (mostly non-combat) for them to roll on while traveling and I also made a completely homebrew random fish table for them to roll on during travel time which you're welcome to steal if you like, but I'll have to wait until tomorrow to post it. The table is designed in a way where 10% of the time they catch a fish with magical properties. If they catch a magical fish they roll a d100 to determine which fish they get, and the top 10 fish on this table are more valuable and several provide permanent effects. Last session one of my players caught one of these fish with permanent effects, the Tenacious Ray whose heart is the main ingredient in a potion which grants the Athlete feat (STR choice is required).
I like the framing of this. Do your players have a home port?
They found the map in an old abandoned mansion on small island that used to be owned by the elf who made the last wish. As they left, one of them left a mark in an attempt to claim the island, but they haven't pursued the idea further yet. I let each player give as much input as they wanted into their characters home island as they wanted, but the ship is where they stay most of the time.
This is such a neat idea. I hope you don't mind, but I think I'm going to steal this, or at least the core of it, for my own game. I've found myself also running my first proper campaign. After a fun little one-shot the team wants to keep playing so I need some sort of core conflict.
I've been trying to come up with a villain, and a motivation for that villain but I keep finding myself running into tropes I don't really have a desire to replicate.
Have you written up the suicide note? I'm curious as to what details the players know compared to what you've shared with us.
Yeah no problem, it's not like I didn't steal the idea from DragonballZ. And yeah, I printed out a note on tea stained paper. Basically they learned everything I posted before. They know his wife died in childbirth and that the child was claimed, but they don't know when it happened and they don't yet know who the child was raised to become.
Lmao. Yeah the first thing I thought was
'Holy shit.. The dragon balls. That's such a good idea'
Thanks for your blessing. I hope your group has a blast with the game.
I work at a Elementary School and do a homemade ttrpg with them.
Recently I've been playing Starfield so I thought I might as well use that world and lore since it's fresh in my mind.
It's been great. Makes improv very easy since you got a lot to draw from. Plus it helps that they don't know anything about the world so they get to discover it as we play.
And since I don't use guns in my campaigns it's easy to change all the guns to starwars style blasters to make it kid friendly.
There's two settings I've been working on and I've kept them open ended enough to allow for any sort of story or game types.
The main one is Enundra. It's a super earth that suffered so many apocalyptic events, the planet has split into pieces and is held together by magical laylines, the roots of a moon sized tree and the full attention of a few gods. There's stable chunks like Tegrin that's good for DnD/PF games, but there's also the magicless Boiling Seas that we use for steampunk/airship stories, the endless battle for Shorgraf that we've played war games on and plenty of other things we've shoehorned in.
The other one is Weird World. It started off as a joke game we played when players were missing important sessions but it turned into a setting we wanted to explore. It's a chaotic version of earth where every fiction is real and players can be/do anything. They just need to sell the logic to everyone else and follow their own rules. Do you want to play a 5e tech druid, or a Call of Cthulhu style flat-earth investigator, or a Ravenclaw cyberpunk or an uber driver with a tardis? It's all allowed and it's glorious.
I've not played in any of these settings since 2019 but after starting BG3 I've got that itch again.
I like both of those quite a bit!
So it's not one I created but I've modified some of the lore, tidied up the main story, added quests, NPC's and monsters in to the Thylea setting used in Odyssey of the Dragonlords.
Its an amazing campaign and the setting is wonderful but there's definitely errors and inconsistencies throughout the campaign that need ironed out and I think it probably could've done with another pass or two by the editor before it was released.
Last custom setting I ran was a "paranormal investigators in the '30s" storyline using the Savage Worlds system. Was very careful to let the players anchor key historical events and locations, and then diverge from there.
The absolute best feeling was when I could guide the story in a way that the characters' actions created events that the players didn't know actually happened, and that local urban legends contain the supernatural elements.
Example: they chase an arcane body-hopping evil down the Florida Keys, culminating in a mad gunfight against cultists. They finally force the evil "into the open" by killing its last host in a graveyard, where there's nobody to hop to. Big storm, rumbling ground, and the living dead erupt from the soil. Three waves of combat (to give the dice-rollers some fun), with the storm worsening each time. They finally vanquish the big bad, and the storm essentially wipes the island into the ocean. The survival part of the story provided an epilogue.
It was about a week later that the players learned about the Labour Day storm of 1935 and the associated urban legends.
My campaign setting was my own version of 1990s United States with a strong X-Files feel. The game was Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu. So yeah, not original at all for this game. But it was fun, you can put almost anything in a world like that.
I'm creating a setting inspired by Mage 20th, but black sub-subsaharan Africa is super powerful and the center of the world. All kinds of magic emanates from Africa, and the elite of every order originates from there. Different nations, organizations, beliefs, worldviews, ways to understand magic and the world, etc. I'll probably take if off-Earth, though. Makes my job easier research-wise.
Magical school residence hall where the real life RAs get to play Adventurer RAs for the night (the team loves it)
Dystopian Narnia where the Pevensies were betrayed by Mr Tumnus and it has been a thousand years of winter. I had plans for it to expand to other childhood fantasy stories gone wrong after they beat Queen Jadis via the rings and hopping into the puddles in the wood between the worlds.
Very interesting concept! What system are you using?
D&D 5e for both. Mostly due to when I'd built the world(s) and who I was building them for. My RAs were interested in playing D&D so I build that out. I could see using kids on brooms for it though.
Narnia has been kicking around since I got back into playing post 5e coming out. I made the adventurers from Faerun part of the deal rather than bringing them from Earth. If I dust it off again this would probably stay D&D but I could see other things working too.
Mid fantasy world that exists over top a super high fantasy/tech that was wiped out ages ago. As players find and figure out more of the old world stuff the chances of the things that wiped it out waking up increase.