Real life commitments and work schedules have changed for my group. So we are putting Strahd on hold until we can work out how to get everyone back at the table. So in the mean time, those of us who can get together for game night are beginning a new campaign in an entirely new setting.

I've always wanted to run a game with a colonial style setting. So that's what we're gonna do. The settlement the players will arrive at (by ship) is a very small village. A handful of farms, a tavern/bunkhouse, a few fishing and woodsmans shacks... that's about it. Not even a dock. Supplies and settlers have to be towed to shore. The people there are just beginning to get a handle on thier basic needs.

Enter the Players. As they adventure and celebrate victories (and level up) they will be contributing to the economy. NPCs will prosper, and be able to build more infrastructure. The town will grow and give the players a feeling of actually making a mark on the world. At least that's my hope.

This settlement is chartered by a not yet named Kingdom and semi-financially backed by The Smallfellow Trading Co. (a trade monopoly run by Halflings. Think East India Company meets The Godfather). STC is mainly concerned with gold, and the unnamed Kingdom is mostly concerned with land (but gold as well). There will be other colonies, chartered by other kingdoms or empires, (as well as other "native" groups I will leave out in case any of my players make thier way here to the forums) that will create an underlying political tension.

As for the player who can't make it... I am letting them influence the game sort of as NPCs. One player will be in control of a different settlement with a goal of competition to the STC. And another player will be in control of one of the "native" populations.

I think it's going to be a lot of fun. And everyone seemed excited after explaining that they'll be able to name land features they    discover. I will be creating a map as we go, so I don't even know what's where yet.

I'll try to update as we go along.

TLDR; over-enthusiastic about a new campaign

I'd love to hear about how it goes, I've been thinking of running the exact same style of campaign once I finish my current one (which admittedly may take another 1 year or so. Kinda stuck on the proverbial Namek here).

Session Zero: Welcome To The New World! Or The Trouble With Fish-Men!

So our players have rolled their characters. We have Guillaume, the Human Paladin. Finnin the Shiv, the Human Rogue. Lillith, the High Elf Druid. And Shivers, the Gnome Artificer.

After a lengthy and uneventful trek across the high seas, the PCs finally sight land. The captain orders his crew to drop anchor, and to ready the longboats and load supplies. As the crew rows the PCs to shore they fail to notice movement at the shoreline (even though I described it to them) of figures climbing out of the water and running into the village. As the longboats ahead of the PCs land they do notice the sailors beaching the boats and quickly abandoning them to run into the village. They also notice a large plume of smoke rising from somewhere behind the largest building. As the players make their way into the settlement, they find the settlers, and a few of the sailors, in a heated and scattered battle with Kuo-Toa!

A few of the huts and small barns have been set on fire, Fish-men menacing the villagers. As the players (and NPCs) lay waste to the Kuo-Toa, reinforcements come from out of the sea! Of course, its an easy fight for the PCs, and luckily, my dice hate me so all the villagers survive, mostly unscathed. One of the villagers, was running around the map, trying to get herself and her two small children away from the two fish-men chasing them. After the skirmish was done, and the players were checking on the NPCs to make sure they were OK, the woman marches up to her husband and begins to tear him a new one verbally for dragging her and their children to this "god-forsaken hole in the middle of nowhere". I did this to kind of set the idea that not all the NPCs are happy about being here.

The players also learned that this is the third colony backed by The Smallfellow Trading Company. However, they don't know yet that the first and second colony were in this same area and didn't survive for one reason or another. Also, winter is soon approaching and the ship that the players arrived on is the last shipment of supplies as the winter seas are too tumultuous for passage. It will be months of in game time before another supply ship shows up.

TLDR; Attack of the Fish-Men! No way back! Winter is coming!

As someone who has played in a New World-type setting, there is one gaping plot hole that you'll need to solve, or at least think about, beforehand: Teleportation Circles. It becomes rather hard to justify why X is taking a perilous, month-long journey to Y, when it would be much easier for X to travel (with the help of a spellcaster) via the Teleportation Circle spell. It is fairly reasonable to assume that the overseers/architects of these outposts would commission some sort of permanent circle, which would allow use of the spell without the risk of ending up way off course.

With that said, you'll need to come up with some reason that the party cannot simply 'port back-and-forth from the New World to the Old, or simply plan your plots around the fact that the party will find a way to have this capability. I promise you that this will be one of the first things your players ask, so best to be prepared.

I hope this helps!

I've already got that covered. There are a few spells that just won't exist until the players are at the level to be able to use them. Teleportation Circle is one of them. The current Wizard Masters just haven't had the spark of imagination needed, or maybe just been unlucky in research and experiments, to create certain spells. Of course, once the players demonstrate some of these abilities publicly other mages are going to be quite interested... as well as other factions. So a convenient plot point to keep the players in this new world at low levels could become a convenient plot device later on at mid/high levels for other adventures ;)

The bare bones plot/setting that you describe here reminds me of the Northern Winds campaign that Wolfsgorawr had been streaming on Twitch and uploading to YouTube.  It was a West Marches style campaign.  I found it interesting while it lasted, but some segments sort of got drawn out and the players lost interest in playing.

I'll have to check that out.

I do have a few back up plans in my pocket in case things get bogged down. A number of of old 1E and 2E adventures I'm working on converting to 5E as well as old homebrew material that never saw play. I just drop bread crumbs all over the place and see which trail the players follow.

Session 2: The Kobolding

For some reason, the players decided not to try and locate the Kuo-Toa nest menacing the village. So, that's going to be a thing later. They decided to figure out what these strange markings were on the trees around the village. Of course none of the players speak Draconic, Goblin, or even undercommon. They are able to catch a Kobold in the forest, avoiding various traps, and subdue it. However, language barrier. They don't even have a spell to allow them to communicate with the poor thing. So the entire interrogation I played a frustrated and terrified Kobold. I really thought the party would just get frustrated and kill the little guy, but I was happily surprised when the paladin finally cut him loose and let him go. I've decided, in a very TellTale games kind of way,  that Tchik-Tchak will remember this. They may have made a friend assuming they don't try to exterminate the tribe. Also, they found a pair of pseudo dragons, which thanks to a little light bribery and the parties Druid being nice to them, were able to tell the party that those symbols carved into the trees usually signified "danger ahead". Which the party took as "they believe the settlement is dangerous" which is true, but also the Kobolds have trouble with the local Kuo-Toa tribe.

Banished is a nice game that would inspire me to do a campaign like this as building a new settlement can be quite challenging!

Last time on D&D at my place:

Our intrepid adventurers found that some of the villages children were not children at all... replaced by some sort of vile simulacrum. Where are the real children? Does this have something to do with the previous settlements disappearance? What was that weird loud sound? And why did everyone suddenly stop what they were doing?

All these questions will be answered... if my players follow them through. lol

It's always the unplanned things in D&D that make it fun for me as a DM.

This session, the PCs Descended into the underdark to rescue the missing children. All I ever had planned was "go into underdark, fight stuff, eventually find who or what took the children and why". Literally. Those were my whole game notes for this story. I'm using a few of the the maps from Night Below as my dungeon maps, which I doctored and changed in photoshop. Aside from the maps, the only thing from the adventure books I'm using is some of the flavor text for descriptions.

They poked around last game and had a couple of random encounters. Just me throwing things at them to find out what they could handle. A grey ooze here, a couple of Darkmantles and sturge's there... Nothing too big or scary... Just enough to help our new player learn game mechanics. The real test is to come.

I decided I liked the idea of the Cat rock formation. It's a cool little quirk. And it piqued the players curiosity. They decided to investigate it in detail. I described to them that it was a natural rock formation, and it only resembles a cat when viewed from one side, thinking they would move on exploring the rest of the cave. But one of my players thought it might be important, magical, or some sort of shrine. I didn't intend for it to be, but it sounded way cooler than being just a set of rocks that when viewed from one angle looks like a cat. So I had them roll investigation. I decided that if they rolled a 18-20 that yeah, they found evidence of offerings being made to some god. One of my players decided to burn some herbs from his herbalism kit. I had him roll a religion check with disadvantage, and he still managed a 20. So, what god is like a cat? Cats are fickle. Luck is Fickle. So... he feels his belt pouch get just a little heavier (a few gold pieces). Tymora be praised!

Later, the same PC stirs up a nest of orcs. They are climbing up chains from below. I decided to really test the parties limits here. The party cant see well in the dark, so the druid casts Faerie Fire. I thought, oh cool I'll add a Duergar to the fight here. I had got a huge "WTF!" moment when I put an invisible dwarf mini on the table. The orcs are now slaves of the Duergar. The slave master finally drops his invisibility and casts Enlarge, he knocks out one of the PCs, who failed his first death save, so of course, the duergar stomps the fallen PC. Auto crit. Thats all 3 saves lost. I explained to the party that have one last chance to save their friend. But they have to be able to use a medicine kit and roll a successful medicine check within 1 minute (10 rounds). Or else he gone. I also asked that player, the same one who made the offering to Tymora, to roll a percentile. I figured, if he rolls under 20% Tymora will give them advantage on the roll. However... he rolled 3% so I decided that partially because the player likes to take risks, and the fact that he blindly made an offering to her, She would grant him another chance. The party was able to finish off the Enlarged Duergar and his orc slaves with just a little time to spare and rushed to his body. But before I allowed them to do anything, I began to narrate the PCs death experience... and his brief meeting with a Goddess... which ended as he took a desperate breath of air and opened his eyes.

I love flying by the seat of my pants. Especially when a player can make that cool yet mundane thing actually mean something. Because now I have way more vague ideas to bring up in future games. Maybe Tymora has marked him as her champion. Maybe the gold he got has a magical effect. Maybe the the party can convince the orc slaves to revolt against their Duergar masters. Maybe the Duergar are agents of some other hideous entity or perhaps they are against the beings that took the children! I just dont knowand THAT is awesome.

Maybe wherever each of the coins are spent something happens, a windfall, or maybe some sort of crazy curse if the person is secretly evil. So the character goes to the blacksmith and buys some arrows with the coins, and then the next time the PC's are in town they overhear someone talking about how the Blacksmith had a major windfall after he took a bold chance on a mining contract and was able to upgrade his shop. Then the PC's return again and there's a scandal afoot after the Carpenter who upgraded the Blacksmith had attacked and killed him; you see he thought the blacksmith a warlock.  The Carpenter (who is not a good man) was paid with Tymora's Coins and he started to fall ill, or maybe ran on a streak of unbelievable bad luck. Ultimately the Carpenter has been taken into custody by the local authorities, and so his possessions, including Tymora's Coins passed once more into the Blacksmiths household, this time however to his Son who has taken over his father's shop. The son however has a horrible gambling problem and as soon as he is given the Coins goes to the local gambling Den and puts them all on the roll of a dice...

You see how this could continue, to where eventually the PC's have to track down the line of buys and sells with the coins as they continue to mess with the economy of the small village.

I was thinking something along those lines, however I'm not sure how far I actually would take it. Right now it's just an idea in my pocket for the future. I've also decided that Tymora and Beshaba are one and the same, and even in game while things were unfolding I told him that Tymoras favor can be a double edged sword. After the game I devised my own version of The Three Fates. Tymora being chance, Istus being the weaver of the Great Web, and The Raven Queen as both Birth and Death.

Its been a couple of sessions since my last post here. The players have had to retreat back to town. They have lost their Paladin, and two of the players have lost their gear.

Why? Partially because I'm an evil DM. Partially because of player greed.

I ran a sort of one off with the group where they ran through a gauntlet for the amusement of "The True Elves" which are my version of a Summer/Winter Court. Our Druid ended up "winning" the game and after being half-heartedly congratulated by the King and Queen were to going to be sent back to where they were plucked from. Of course a couple of players felt they should be rewarded somehow, and the Queen said, with more than a hint of boredom and a yawn "I suppose we have something laying around that would interest you..." and the Druid was presented with a small ornately carved wooden box. Whats in the box? WHATS IN THE BOX! Just a deck of cards. I told the Druid that the deck is HERS. She can do as she likes with it. She can allow the others to pull cards or not and we ended the session there.

Now we come to Wednesday night. The other players were anxious to pull cards, and the Druid allowed it. Our Paladin was first, he chose to pull 3 cards and his first card was... The Donjon. I went ahead and went through his other 2 cards, he got a couple of magic items and gained a level. However, it doesn't matter now, because his character is now trapped in The Void. I thought maybe the others would decide to forget the deck for a while, but no. The Thief and Artificer decide to pull cards as well. The Artificer lost a couple points of Intelligence and all his gear fell to dust. And, somehow, the Thief pulls the exact same card that causes you to lose your items (yeah I know, some cards don't go back to the deck, but it's my game and my deck... Risk vs. Reward, I like to keep the Deck as dangerous as possible, Risk vs. Reward).

So, our remaining party has retreated back to town to resupply. A day or two later, they see a massive ship on the horizon. A barge is deployed and rowed to shore. They are met by a Lizardman in fine, but threadbare garb who announces the arrival of Dr. Bekkler's Travelling Carnival. This ship is where the Paladin players new character is going to come from. And some fun carnival games and hijinks. 

Awesome! I love having Carnivals, Circuses, Travelling Bardic Shows, and the lot in my games. Gives a great chance for some awesome roleplay and mini games! Have the fortune teller read your fate? Or swing the hammer to ring the bell? Maybe you'd like to venture into the hall of mirrors...some say you could get lost in there for an eternity! >;-)