Something this sweeping and broad-scale should be a quest in its own right - and sure, the investigation skill is INT-based, but this is a big investigation, too big for one mere skill check.
So should I just declare the investigation as a smaller quest to go along with the larger one of finding the stone? We do only have a short time before the solstice to find it.
At this point Real-Time is not feassible, we have to go back to game-time now. I'm saying for our next session (the last until after Christmas) 3 days have past from the last session. It is a big investigation and it's going to be a complicated one because frankly, no one knows where to start with it. I did it this way on purpose to make the players use their skills and knowledge to figure out 1. How did someone steal something that was locked away in a cavern 100 ft underground that only two Fairies knew about and knew how to access. 2. After they did gain access to the cavern, the stone was protected by a special "force field", how did they get past that. 3. How did they get in and out of Bristwood Forest unseen. Bristwood is guarded by a detection spell that alerts the Guardian Fairy that someone (or something) has entered the forest without permission. 4. who took it? 5. Where did they take it? and finally 6. How do they know how to use it? The stone can only be used by a fairy, but manipulating the 12 sides to do any specific thing takes knowledge of how it works, use the wrong sequence and you could do some major damage. All of this has to be done before time runs out.
Our DM will return in January and take over this game. I want to go out on a limb and maybe start my own campaign over on Discord. But I don't want to do a homebrew, I'm not experienced enough for that. I would like to start a Pre-Made game to gain more experience as some have sugested on here. What would be a good and relatively easy Pre-Made to start out with? I don't want something with a bunch of complicated stuff like my current game I'm in. I want to move to something more streamlined and already established. Once I get more experience, then I can think about going Homebrew. I just don't have the experience needed right now. So what would be a good one to start with? I know I will have to purchase the books and all, but it won't be until after all these hollidays anyway, and I will have more money to be able to spend on this sort of thing.
The Icewind Dale one is good. Plus, you might just find the weather stuff useful if that ever comes back up.
I highly recommend against Icewind Dale. It It is a truly terrible campaign. A thin plot, a big bad that has no depth (D&D Beyond once even did an article entirely about how Auril is a dull bad guy in the campaign), and a story that ends 2/3rds of the way through the module and then kind of limps along after that.
The setting is pretty cool, but the actual campaign is terrible and requires a lot of heavy lifting from the DM to be halfway decent.
Curse of Strahd is generally considered the gold standard for premade campaigns. I have never played it (I only DM my own worlds and do not tend to play in premade campaigns) but I know lots of people who have and have never heard a bad thing about it.
I briefly played in Descent into Avernus - I found it far too linear for my preferences, but that might be exactly what you are looking for based on your asking for a “more streamlined” campaign.
If you can get the original lost mines of phandelver, it was really good, and great to help teach you how to DM. I‘ve read over the new Phandelver and Beyond, but I’ve heard most folks don’t like it, as it feels like they just kind of glued on more stuff to make it longer.
That's more of the line I'm looking for. I want something with a learning curve to get me some more experience before moving on to creating my own. The one I'm in now is hard enough, thankfully I'm only standing in as DM until our real DM gets back.
Also, I'm starting to become a more pronounced character ,so when she gets back in Jan, I'm going to ask if she will take back over the NPCs, it's too much for me to run NPCs, the game, and my own character all at once. That's why after this weeks game on Friday, I'm putting a hold on the game until she returns. I can't handle all that work. I simply want to go back to just a character and nothing more. I also want to revise some of my fighting skills as they are a bit low for a character that is a Human Fighter and diplomat. You could say I am the Queen's Champion plus her adviser. I plan on volunteering for the Quest.
Which leads me to a question, what types of characters would we need to go on a quest like this? I know we will definately need someone skilled in combat since most likely we will be going into enemy lands. I'm thinking maybe a wizard of some sort in case there is any magic needed. Not sure if my diplomatic skills will be needed or not. I am thinking possibly someone with Nobility Ruling power (Just in case diplomacy can be established). The rest ,I'm not sure, what do you guys think, what kind of 'group' should I put together for such a dangerous quest. Of course the pirates will be there to aid us well. I know it will be a MUST to bring the fairy queen along as she is the only one capable of correctly operating the stone.
If you know the terrain ahead, Circle of the Land Druid. Otherwise, I have little other than maybe a ranger if there’s a lot of wilderness. I would recommend anything capable of taking shorter or interrupted long rests, because enemy terrain sounds like a recipe for midnight battles.
Ok one of the players gave the idea of using a "Dungeon Crawl" to find this stone. Problem is, I have no idea how to create a dungeon crawl. I know the 'basic' idea behind it, but how the heck would you create one? Is it complicated? If so, I may not want to go that route and just let the real DM handle that if that's what the players want. We're trying to come up with a good session idea before we break for the hollidays. I really don't think we'll make the Quest before then. There's a lot of work to do to make that quest a reality right now. And I just am not experienced enough to do it, so I'd really rather wait for our DM to come back. We just want something exciting before we break. Any ideas? Something that can be wrapped up in one session or can lead up to something else, maybe something intentional to delay the quest before time runs out.
I would go through all the puzzles and traps in Tasha’s, Xanathar’s, the DMG, and any adventure books you have that you think the players could handle, put them on a random table, and grab a sheet of graphing paper.
Make a grid of decent-sized rooms with semi-random connections, all leading (eventually) to the final destination. In each room, roll up a trap or puzzle from the table. Every now and then, give them a straight-up fight or even just a room with only loot, so they can take a break. It gets wild, but it gives you a solid enough dungeon that will absolutely give the players what they want. If you need a little more intentionality, consider glancing through an existing dungeon crawl to find a rhythm or structure you want to emulate.
Thanks, I do have a couple of adventure books, I really haven't read through them, but I will use the break time to look through some of them. We had our last game last night until the DM returns next month. I talked to her on the phone yesterday and she definately wants to put in a dungeon Crawl to give players a break from the situation we are facing right now. She wants to add some excitement.
The game is on hold now until she returns. The game last night was nothing but a little RP and not much action stuff, just setting up for the next round pretty much.
Hope it all goes well! I’m gonna run a two-shot myself over break, and I may end up with some experience helpful to here, or maybe not. In any case, I forgot to mention that a random encounter table will be your best friend in a dungeon. You might have to assemble it yourself, but those things are lifesavers when you need to stall for time (in or out of game) or things are just getting a bit tedious.
"we thought of using a premade campaign, but, and here's why we didn't.....We had our own story in mind and none of the premades came even close enough to our world."
Oof.
If you want to write a story, write a novel.
If you want to DM an RPG, all you can do is create a world with people, places, and things, the NPC's are trying to do various things...
and then, this is the important bit....
you have to let the players decide what happens.
If you've got a campaign mapped out in your mind from levels 1 to 20, and it has important NPC's doing important things, and then players try to affect those things in ways that completely derail your plot, you either (1) let the players derail your plot and story and rewrite the story or (2) railroad the players and don't let them have any effect on campaign plot.
I've actually played in a campaign where it eventually became clear that the players had little control over the world. The DM just basically had his story happen to us. The DM thought it was a cool story. But that meant we, the players, had no power in that world. It was his world, and we were just npc's. As a player, that sucks.
It’s not up to you to create every aspect of a D&D campaign. Players contribute through their characters’ actions and by directly sharing what they want to see in a campaign.
The time Angel has left us as the "time War" has branched to other places. The time council recalled her and she left today. (Not the player, just her character). Now during her time with us, the Empire has moved to a "Elven Empire". Every known Kingdom has at least one Elven resident in it. These elves act as I guess you could call them Ambassadors for the Kingdoms. Some of the Kingdoms are actually ruled by a High Elf, in fact, our Svereign Queen (She rules the Empire itself) is a High Elf. Now, that's things in a nutshell, or as simple as I can make them. Anyway, me and the DM are kind of stuck on something, We all know the Elves have a connection with Nature and even the weather in some instances. Elves are very emotional. So, when Keira (The Angel) left today, the entire elven community all over the Empire was greatly saddened. This Angel had been part of our lives for many years even before we were sent to this "Realm" by an evil force. We all came to love her very much. It is the beginning of Winter now, and the Dm wants to use house rules to reflect the sadness of the Elves by having their connection with nature cause a temporary "Snow Storm" over the whole Empire. This storm would only last a day or maybe two max.
Is this all backstory of the world? I mean, it sounds like backstory, because at no point do you talk about "how do the players get involved?" or "how do the players affect this?" or anything like that.
So you have a storm? Why do the players even care? is it good for them or bad for them? If you do things like debuff elf player characters during a storm, but not other players, ooof, that's going to suck. Is there something the players can do to affect the storm? Or is it all out of their control? And again, do they care?
And if this is all backstory, this is going to be a thing that you post somewhere that none of the players ever read, or a thing you read to the players during session zero where they all zone out because they literally have zero agency.
want to know the best way to go about setting this "storm" in motion. The mechanics of it are a bit confusing. We are in the beginning of a war between the Fairies and the Drow who want total control over the land. Would this "Storm" caused by the sadness of the Elves cause any henderance (sp?) to the Fairies or the Drow if they decided that now would be a great time for an attack? Like I said, the storm will only last for 1 to 2 days. Our story is now centering around the Elves.
??? How do the players fight a storm? How do they have any affect on teh storm? Do they even care that the storm is happening? What mechanics do you have for storm combat?
"Our story is now centering around the Elves. "
Oof. . The campaign should be centered around the PLAYERS. If this thing is centered around you telling the players your story about the Elves, then you've tricked a bunch of DnD players into being your captive audience for you to read your novel to them.
Eventually we will be jumping ahead about 10 years
You're going to jump ahead 10 years... Mid Campaign??? That says to me that NOTHING the players do up to this point actually matter to the campaign.
This is a high level campaign, no players are below level 7 now.
Every player better be the SAME level or something is really, really, wrong here.
We know about as much as we can learn about elves and are aware of the different 'lores' associated with them. It's this one thing that eludes us, not too much help on Google about how elves can control weather events due to emotional status. Our elves cannot intentionaly control the weather, but their emotions can inadvertantly cause weather phenomenon to occur. Right now they are extremely saddened at the departure of Keira (The Angel) and we want that sadness to be reflected by a snow storm over the Empire.
Again with the storm? Do the players actually care about the storm? And even if they do, is there anythign tehy can DO about hte storm? Or are they merely at the effect of this story idea you created and are now throwing at them? the entire population of the area is "sad" and that generates the storm? How do players have any effect on that? How do they stop it? Are they all bards who try to cheer up the continent with song and dance?
nothing you have described here, not one thing, do you describe as "and then the characters have to figure out the thing, and stop the bbeg and his storm machine." nothing you describe here is actually about what the players can do in your world. which means, in all honesty, it doesn't matter much to a dnd campaign.
Nothing you've written here says "they all are trying to understand what is causing the storms and figure out a way to stop them. and when they figure out <thing> then they can fight <bbeg> and stop the stomrs" Nothing you've written mentions player actions or player choices.
and a 10 year jump, that's gonna be rough. Do a few levels now, and then oh hey, everything you did doesn't really affect anythign because we wanna jump you 10 years ahead where other cool thing you have no control over is happening.
If you really want a storm thing, you 're going to have to give it some sort of thing that is causing it, and its some thing the players can eventually stop. "the continent is sad" isn't going to cut it.
watch the 2008 animated horror/comedy "Igor" for a storm that affects the entire continent, but is something the party can do something about.
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Something this sweeping and broad-scale should be a quest in its own right - and sure, the investigation skill is INT-based, but this is a big investigation, too big for one mere skill check.
Phantom Menace to Society
So should I just declare the investigation as a smaller quest to go along with the larger one of finding the stone? We do only have a short time before the solstice to find it.
At this point Real-Time is not feassible, we have to go back to game-time now. I'm saying for our next session (the last until after Christmas) 3 days have past from the last session. It is a big investigation and it's going to be a complicated one because frankly, no one knows where to start with it. I did it this way on purpose to make the players use their skills and knowledge to figure out 1. How did someone steal something that was locked away in a cavern 100 ft underground that only two Fairies knew about and knew how to access. 2. After they did gain access to the cavern, the stone was protected by a special "force field", how did they get past that. 3. How did they get in and out of Bristwood Forest unseen. Bristwood is guarded by a detection spell that alerts the Guardian Fairy that someone (or something) has entered the forest without permission. 4. who took it? 5. Where did they take it? and finally 6. How do they know how to use it? The stone can only be used by a fairy, but manipulating the 12 sides to do any specific thing takes knowledge of how it works, use the wrong sequence and you could do some major damage. All of this has to be done before time runs out.
Our DM will return in January and take over this game. I want to go out on a limb and maybe start my own campaign over on Discord. But I don't want to do a homebrew, I'm not experienced enough for that. I would like to start a Pre-Made game to gain more experience as some have sugested on here. What would be a good and relatively easy Pre-Made to start out with? I don't want something with a bunch of complicated stuff like my current game I'm in. I want to move to something more streamlined and already established. Once I get more experience, then I can think about going Homebrew. I just don't have the experience needed right now. So what would be a good one to start with? I know I will have to purchase the books and all, but it won't be until after all these hollidays anyway, and I will have more money to be able to spend on this sort of thing.
The Icewind Dale one is good. Plus, you might just find the weather stuff useful if that ever comes back up.
Phantom Menace to Society
I highly recommend against Icewind Dale. It It is a truly terrible campaign. A thin plot, a big bad that has no depth (D&D Beyond once even did an article entirely about how Auril is a dull bad guy in the campaign), and a story that ends 2/3rds of the way through the module and then kind of limps along after that.
The setting is pretty cool, but the actual campaign is terrible and requires a lot of heavy lifting from the DM to be halfway decent.
Curse of Strahd is generally considered the gold standard for premade campaigns. I have never played it (I only DM my own worlds and do not tend to play in premade campaigns) but I know lots of people who have and have never heard a bad thing about it.
I briefly played in Descent into Avernus - I found it far too linear for my preferences, but that might be exactly what you are looking for based on your asking for a “more streamlined” campaign.
If you can get the original lost mines of phandelver, it was really good, and great to help teach you how to DM. I‘ve read over the new Phandelver and Beyond, but I’ve heard most folks don’t like it, as it feels like they just kind of glued on more stuff to make it longer.
That's more of the line I'm looking for. I want something with a learning curve to get me some more experience before moving on to creating my own. The one I'm in now is hard enough, thankfully I'm only standing in as DM until our real DM gets back.
Also, I'm starting to become a more pronounced character ,so when she gets back in Jan, I'm going to ask if she will take back over the NPCs, it's too much for me to run NPCs, the game, and my own character all at once. That's why after this weeks game on Friday, I'm putting a hold on the game until she returns. I can't handle all that work. I simply want to go back to just a character and nothing more. I also want to revise some of my fighting skills as they are a bit low for a character that is a Human Fighter and diplomat. You could say I am the Queen's Champion plus her adviser. I plan on volunteering for the Quest.
Which leads me to a question, what types of characters would we need to go on a quest like this? I know we will definately need someone skilled in combat since most likely we will be going into enemy lands. I'm thinking maybe a wizard of some sort in case there is any magic needed. Not sure if my diplomatic skills will be needed or not. I am thinking possibly someone with Nobility Ruling power (Just in case diplomacy can be established). The rest ,I'm not sure, what do you guys think, what kind of 'group' should I put together for such a dangerous quest. Of course the pirates will be there to aid us well. I know it will be a MUST to bring the fairy queen along as she is the only one capable of correctly operating the stone.
If you know the terrain ahead, Circle of the Land Druid. Otherwise, I have little other than maybe a ranger if there’s a lot of wilderness. I would recommend anything capable of taking shorter or interrupted long rests, because enemy terrain sounds like a recipe for midnight battles.
Phantom Menace to Society
Ok one of the players gave the idea of using a "Dungeon Crawl" to find this stone. Problem is, I have no idea how to create a dungeon crawl. I know the 'basic' idea behind it, but how the heck would you create one? Is it complicated? If so, I may not want to go that route and just let the real DM handle that if that's what the players want. We're trying to come up with a good session idea before we break for the hollidays. I really don't think we'll make the Quest before then. There's a lot of work to do to make that quest a reality right now. And I just am not experienced enough to do it, so I'd really rather wait for our DM to come back. We just want something exciting before we break. Any ideas? Something that can be wrapped up in one session or can lead up to something else, maybe something intentional to delay the quest before time runs out.
I would go through all the puzzles and traps in Tasha’s, Xanathar’s, the DMG, and any adventure books you have that you think the players could handle, put them on a random table, and grab a sheet of graphing paper.
Make a grid of decent-sized rooms with semi-random connections, all leading (eventually) to the final destination. In each room, roll up a trap or puzzle from the table. Every now and then, give them a straight-up fight or even just a room with only loot, so they can take a break. It gets wild, but it gives you a solid enough dungeon that will absolutely give the players what they want. If you need a little more intentionality, consider glancing through an existing dungeon crawl to find a rhythm or structure you want to emulate.
Works well enough for me.
Phantom Menace to Society
Thanks, I do have a couple of adventure books, I really haven't read through them, but I will use the break time to look through some of them. We had our last game last night until the DM returns next month. I talked to her on the phone yesterday and she definately wants to put in a dungeon Crawl to give players a break from the situation we are facing right now. She wants to add some excitement.
The game is on hold now until she returns. The game last night was nothing but a little RP and not much action stuff, just setting up for the next round pretty much.
Hope it all goes well! I’m gonna run a two-shot myself over break, and I may end up with some experience helpful to here, or maybe not. In any case, I forgot to mention that a random encounter table will be your best friend in a dungeon. You might have to assemble it yourself, but those things are lifesavers when you need to stall for time (in or out of game) or things are just getting a bit tedious.
Phantom Menace to Society
"we thought of using a premade campaign, but, and here's why we didn't.....We had our own story in mind and none of the premades came even close enough to our world."
Oof.
If you want to write a story, write a novel.
If you want to DM an RPG, all you can do is create a world with people, places, and things, the NPC's are trying to do various things...
and then, this is the important bit....
you have to let the players decide what happens.
If you've got a campaign mapped out in your mind from levels 1 to 20, and it has important NPC's doing important things, and then players try to affect those things in ways that completely derail your plot, you either (1) let the players derail your plot and story and rewrite the story or (2) railroad the players and don't let them have any effect on campaign plot.
I've actually played in a campaign where it eventually became clear that the players had little control over the world. The DM just basically had his story happen to us. The DM thought it was a cool story. But that meant we, the players, had no power in that world. It was his world, and we were just npc's. As a player, that sucks.
from the DMG:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/dmg-2024/creating-campaigns#PlayerInput
Player Input
It’s not up to you to create every aspect of a D&D campaign. Players contribute through their characters’ actions and by directly sharing what they want to see in a campaign.
Is this all backstory of the world? I mean, it sounds like backstory, because at no point do you talk about "how do the players get involved?" or "how do the players affect this?" or anything like that.
So you have a storm? Why do the players even care? is it good for them or bad for them? If you do things like debuff elf player characters during a storm, but not other players, ooof, that's going to suck. Is there something the players can do to affect the storm? Or is it all out of their control? And again, do they care?
And if this is all backstory, this is going to be a thing that you post somewhere that none of the players ever read, or a thing you read to the players during session zero where they all zone out because they literally have zero agency.
??? How do the players fight a storm? How do they have any affect on teh storm? Do they even care that the storm is happening? What mechanics do you have for storm combat?
"Our story is now centering around the Elves. "
Oof. . The campaign should be centered around the PLAYERS. If this thing is centered around you telling the players your story about the Elves, then you've tricked a bunch of DnD players into being your captive audience for you to read your novel to them.
You're going to jump ahead 10 years... Mid Campaign??? That says to me that NOTHING the players do up to this point actually matter to the campaign.
Every player better be the SAME level or something is really, really, wrong here.
Again with the storm? Do the players actually care about the storm? And even if they do, is there anythign tehy can DO about hte storm? Or are they merely at the effect of this story idea you created and are now throwing at them? the entire population of the area is "sad" and that generates the storm? How do players have any effect on that? How do they stop it? Are they all bards who try to cheer up the continent with song and dance?
nothing you have described here, not one thing, do you describe as "and then the characters have to figure out the thing, and stop the bbeg and his storm machine." nothing you describe here is actually about what the players can do in your world. which means, in all honesty, it doesn't matter much to a dnd campaign.
Nothing you've written here says "they all are trying to understand what is causing the storms and figure out a way to stop them. and when they figure out <thing> then they can fight <bbeg> and stop the stomrs" Nothing you've written mentions player actions or player choices.
and a 10 year jump, that's gonna be rough. Do a few levels now, and then oh hey, everything you did doesn't really affect anythign because we wanna jump you 10 years ahead where other cool thing you have no control over is happening.
If you really want a storm thing, you 're going to have to give it some sort of thing that is causing it, and its some thing the players can eventually stop. "the continent is sad" isn't going to cut it.
watch the 2008 animated horror/comedy "Igor" for a storm that affects the entire continent, but is something the party can do something about.