Hello everyone and thanks for reading my post,

I am a new DM and have run 3 sessions with my group and everyone has had a great time so far. We have our next session planned for 3 weeks and I am really struggling with how to proceed with the storyline. I am hoping that the super creative people that visit this forum will give me some ideas. 

Four of the five players are brand new, and the fifth is the DM from my normal session. He is the one who convinced me to start DMing since he hadn’t ever been on the other side of the DM screen. 

If you are one of my players don’t read any further. This means you James! 

So for the characters there are:

The players are level 6 now. They started as level 5 and after the last session I leveled them all. This was probably a mistake but they are all much better now and still enjoyed themselves.

So for the storyline: I started with the Mind Blast campaign which has the characters approaching a secret monastery called the Brotherhood of Dreams. They were sent there to collect information regarding the destruction of the Ashars home village. But upon arrival they find the monastery under attack and on fire. The team went through a couple combat encounters and quickly realized that all the drow baddies were mind-swapped with the good monks and so they couldn’t really kill anyone till they found a way to reverse them. The monastery held a lot of Dream Jars that contained months and months of memories from a person/being and when the fog from the jars is inhaled the character relives all the memories from that person/being. It was really interesting and a good cause for the mind swaps to occur. So ultimately they saved the monks that they could and in the process accidently set loose a fire elemental into the forest surrounding the monastery.

The next session started where that one left off. They chased the fire elemental through the woods and to a mountaintop. They realized the fire elemental was a Tiefling noble from the Plane of Fire who was trying to get home. So (even though he was evil, he hadn’t done anything to hurt them) they assisted him in completing a Fifth Element themed puzzle where they put an element on each pillar and opened a portal to the planes. Through it came a flying ship (inspired from the movie Stardust) and the crew stopped to let on the fire elemental and the characters. At this point the fire elemental paid the price for transportation across the planes in the form of a years labor (inspired from A Spell from Chameleon) and a spell made him the source of power for one of the ships cannons.

Now the crew turned to the characters and introduce themselves as the crew of the The Rising Wolf who are the last remnants of a large force called the Upper Alliance. They describe how they are cursed not to leave the ship (AKA Pirates of the Caribbean) and this is probably the only reason they are still alive. I had several paragraphs describing the history of The Blood War (Chaotic evil demons vs Lawful Evil devils) and how the Upper Alliance was a large force that had been working for hundreds of years to prevent a conclusion to the war that would unite the lower planes and create an unstoppable force that would wipe out all the good planes. I slid the cards into a book Azolla would have on her since she is an anthropologist and she read from it to the other characters. I really enjoyed them RPing amongst themselves and asking her to reread sections so they could understand it all.

So they are on the ship, in the Material Plane and the crew challenges them to a test to become honorary crewmembers of The Rising Wolf and after some discussion they agreed. So I bust out my first real homemade map which was awesome and everyone went “Ohhhh” with the appropriate amount of interest J I also explain the rules of the challenge. There is a shield that seperates the front from the back of the ship preventing any of the crewmembers from interfering. The ship moves forward of its own power during the test. Each character must step up to a control board with tons of buttons and levers with astronomical symbols on them (Think Dr Who Tardis style) and that is when I pulled out all the stops! I turned over an astronomy Sudoku puzzle and said that when a character approaches the control board then the player would get the Sudoku puzzle to solve. When they solved 10-15 squares then a portal would open and they would travel to another location. So by the end each character would know a certain address in the planes (think Stargate addresses) and the Sudoku puzzle would be complete. It was a great idea and certainly challenging for me bc I didn’t know how fast they would solve the puzzle at all!

So the first portal opens and the ship goes through into the Plane of Earth. They are in a large canyone and Earth Golems jump from the ceiling and walls trying to land on the ship. One does and smashes to pieces making the entire deck difficult terrain. Several others hang onto the sides and the rogue slashes their fingers to great effect. Everyone laughing and having a good time till one gets on the deck and hulk smashes the barbarian. Everyone hears me say 20 points of damage and look over at the player with the Sudoku who only has one square accomplished and gets really serious about resources. I made a new rule on the spot that if the character at the control board sacrifices their action in combat they can get a free square on the Sudoku to prevent anyone from getting stuck. It worked really well with much discussion as to whether they should help or keep working on the control board.

Next portal sends them to the Cinder Sea outside the City of Brass. They are sailing along it and two Fire Salamanders jump onboard and battle commences. Ashar makes a few good animal handling rolls and gets a Fire Bat to stay onboard the ship for a new animal companion during downtime. She was very happy.

Next portal sent them to a demi-plane where an Githyanki Outpost was growing narcotics. They managed to fight off 3 Githyanki and steal a Skiff they had been using to collect the narcotics from asteroids in orbit around their outpost. At this point the Sudoku was being solved really fast but they decided to not complete the address until the boat was clear of enemies. Very smart of them!

Next portal send them to a set of floating islands on the Plane of Air. One island was a portal to the plane of fire and molten magma was spewing hundreds of feet into the air and created a type of permanent structure AKA floating volcano with magma dripping downwards into the endless sky below. There are a set of islands chained to this main one and they form a giant ring with a large icy glacier on the opposite end to the volcano. In between are perfectly spherical islands covered with trees so thick that you can’t see the land below. Druid got a chance to learn the wildshape Hippogriff. They are attacked by a group of Mephits that use their cone attacks and get close to the characters to maximize their death explosion thingies. It turned out to be easy because of the Thunder Step spell from the warlock who did enough damage to chain the explosions together without anyone nearby.

The last portal send them to the Plane of Water and the druid learned the wildshape Giant Octopus. The ship was surrounded by a sphere of air and traveling between two giant reefs that seem to go forever in all directions. The walls are 100ft apart and teeming with life. The life starts to thin out and no one makes a perception roll so they don’t see they are heading straight passed the mouth of a Kraken layer! The kraken starts with its ink attack and the ocean around the ship completely disappears in a cloud of inky blackness. I should have dimmed the lights in the room! I had the kraken grapple the ship so it wouldn’t move toward a portal even if they opened it. This solved the problem of the Sudoku puzzle that was completed within 5 minutes. Two tentacles were on their side of the shield and the main crew of the ship had to deal with the head of the beast and one tentacle. The objective was to deal enough damage to remove the tentacles or cause them to let go for an entire round and the ship would go free. They didn’t quite get the challenge and instead battled the tentacles until they dealt enough damage.

After the final battle the ship goes through a portal to the “homeport” of The Rising Wolf. Even though the crew can’t leave the ship they still have loved ones and kids and other interests. . . This is the function of the small seaside village in the Feywild where we ended the session.

So they got plenty of loot from the test including a set of Triumph Tokens that allow them to travel as a group to the ship no matter its location. A bunch of resources from the bodies of planar themed monsters and the narcotics from the Githyanki Outpost.

And. . .. I am at a complete loss for what to do next. I can’t even figure out if The Rising Wolf should be information rich, or information poor. Who decides where/when the ship makes portal jumps and if they take directions from someone higher up in the Upper Alliance.

I have a few key points to use as an overarching story for the campaign they are namely:

• Each character is in some way connected with the planes
• Ashar still needs to solve the mystery of the destruction of her village
• Yokar wants his Patron to somehow become involved which I am at a complete loss for
• The drow that attacked the Brotherhood of Dreams were led by an Illithid, if I wasn’t so confused by psionics I would make the illithid hive mind a super villain
• THE BLOOD WAR!!! Awesome!!! I really want them to somehow decide the fate of the multiverse by interfering with it or doing something to help/hinder one side. But this seems to be much farther in the future since they need to be lvl10 or so to travel to the lower planes.
• Solve the curse of the crewmembers of The Rising Wolf. Maybe enough of them decide to leave that the characters get the ship to themselves?
• Fixing up their skiff to be an awesome way to travel the planes and outfit it with cool toys
• The Githyanki Outpost has an entire asteroid that was breeding pixies so they could rip off their wings for pixie dust. This was a cool thing for them to investigate and uncover. One of the characters breathed in the fog of a Dream Jar and lived 6 months as a mad Pixie Queen and so feels very strongly about this.

OK! That is one of my problems. I think the game will be less interesting if I don’t somehow incorporate each of these things into a complicated web of intrigue for the characters to unravel. I am also terrified of a “sand box” style of play where I sit down and just ask them “What do you want to do now?” without a plan of how to lead them through the storyline that I devised. I think I am just having a bit of jitters because the sessions have gone well so far and I want them to keep getting better!

Also, there haven’t been ANY dungeons or dragons yet and so I am half tempted to throw in a dungeon crawl for a bit of classical play. But I really love a dynamic setting where the floor is tipping this way and that, with challenges, puzzles, difficult terrain and different metrics of success… . .

So what do I want from you? Well just tell me what you think of the story and where I can go from here. I can’t talk to any of my D&D friends or my wife about the campaign storyline because they all are playing in the game. Its super frustrating!