Monday, June 5, 2023

Status Update - Newest Gamer Arrives on Game Day!

This past Saturday, The Other GM and Marativy's player became parents!  Marativy's player delivered their son just before 6:00 PM Houston time.  Mother and son are both healthy by all reports, so Congratulations to them!


The child was not expected for another week, so this is throwing askew campaign plans.  Saturday was supposed to be the next Adventures in the Green session, but we switched to board games.  We were supposed to play the final session for Shattered Star Book 3 tonight (Monday) before transitioning to a 5E one-shot (meaning one adventure that we expect to take 4-5 sessions to play), followed my me starting a new campaign for a while.  This was to let the new parents acclimate to having a child and those demands on their time and life while the rest of us did something different until they can return.  This whole process has now been moved up, so we are working to adapt.

I have one more session to type up for Shattered Star Book 3 (Session 36) and that will appear later this week.  I have no idea when session 37 might happen or if we will hand wave it, but I expect it will be a month or two before that gets resolved.

Tonight, we are doing character creation for the new campaign.  What I know at this point:

  • Our characters will be 6th level
  • We are using D&D 5E
  • It will be an urban environment
I expect to learn more at tonight's session.

This also starts a countdown timer for me to have a new campaign in place.  I've chosen to revive an old campaign world after shaking things up a bit.  I'll be using HERO System, Fifth Edition, and the Fantasy Hero subset of rules.  I ran a campaign in a home-brewed world for over 12 years that has lain fallow for, um, 14 years or so?  I've always wanted to return to that world but never had a "campaign idea" to start a campaign there.  I recently decided I don't actually need a full campaign idea to start as that's not how I did it originally.  I started the world by borrowing it from a friend.  

I hankered to run a fantasy campaign and some friends and I were hanging out and bored one day and asked me to run something, so I said sure.  I needed some place to start and had a map a friend drew for a short campaign he ran to fill some time [I wasn't in the campaign but others I know were].  I took his continent map and general back ground and stole a city idea from another friend's campaign [which he "borrowed" from a fantasy novel] as a place to base three foot-loose adventurers.  I came up with a loose premise and we started.  The adventures for the next decade were the results of things the players did in game mixing with a back story I created as the campaign progressed.  The campaign ended after I ran out of ideas on what to do next.  The longest running PCs had doubled their point values by then [HERO System is a point-buy system for characters, not a level-based system] so were truly formidable.  Formidable enough that I was having trouble coming up with things to throw at them that wouldn't also level a city block.  We still tell fond stories about things that happened in that campaign, so I've always wanted to go back and I've finally found a way.

I'm advancing the timeline 30 to 40 years, dropping in an inland sea that didn't used to be there [whose source is a campaign mystery], and placing the new campaign on the shores of the Sudden Sea, hundreds of miles away from the city-state the original campaign centered on.  The Sudden Sea is at most 10 years old [I might make it younger - still working on this]  and covers lands that used to be the heart of an alliance that broke away from Imperial rule during the Horde Wars [still working on a better name for that] when the Emperor left them to fend for themselves while he protected his personal lands.  The Sea is unexpectedly deep and everyone is nervous about whether or not it will start expanding again, but in the meantime, new naval trade routes are needed and there are refugees everywhere and tensions about other powers looking to annex new territory while the Alliance is busy dealing with this crisis.

That's it for now.  More later!




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