An introduction! · Game Master's Laboratory

An introduction!

I figured I'd better say hi, having been a member for months but only now getting the chance to really get to grips with the lab.

I'm running an epic and sprawling homebrew D&D 5e 2014 game that's been running since October 2023, and my players are all getting their teeth into the deep lore of the world and their respective character arcs. The land is called the Cylvarine Isle. We started in Waterdeep, with me running Dragon Heist as a way to see how the party of 5 players worked together. We got a few sessions in, I lost one player because they were disrespectful and another because they started stalking me. The remaining three players decided that they didn't care about Waterdeep's criminal groups and wanted to play in my homebrew world already.

The campaign is, in a nutshell, chaos versus order. Expanding on that, throw in some discourse around subjective morality, how there is no such thing as 'good' or 'evil', right and wrong, black and white. The Cylvarine Isle itself is now 45 years post-the end of their Great Conflict, a long battle between the old gods and the new. The new gods, the Seven, won and the Isle is now a theo-democracy. Order presides over the Isle and the capital city is a shining beacon of democracy and faith. Definitely nothing else going on here. Nope. All is good and perfect.

The human druid is from the Isle, and has just last session discovered that she is the descendent of an ancient deity. She now understands that she has magic from both an old god, the Old One Ullafindra, and a new one, the Mother, and must make a decision about which to pursue, as neither can thrive whilst in competition.

The halfling bard (College of Stories) can speak to ghosts and spirits, and has come into possession of a magic book that records the stories of every ghost that he helps. He is another native of the Isle and believes he may be a descendent of the Old One of Ghosts, Spirits, and Funerary Rites - the same deity his adopted mother worshipped but hid from him until her death bed.

And the half-orc barbarian is new to the Isle. His mother died in childbirth, and he was cast out into the wilderness to die after his father was murdered and ended up being raised by literal wolves. When the wolves were slain by hunters, he entered his first rage and killed every single hunter. He was heading to the Isle to search for his human mother's family, and has just accepted the gift of becoming 'wolfkin' - a benevolent group of what is basically werewolves, but you can CHOOSE to accept the gift, rather than it being forced against your will with standard lycanthropy. He's now learning how to control that, and just got a wolf pup as a companion, whose name is Guilder. Gull is the Old Norse word for gold, and Guilder has golden prosthetic back legs.

Generally, my homebrew game is very descriptive, lots of NPCs and opportunities for role-playing. I've made all my players cry (with emotion, not by being mean) - they gave me a certificate for that achievement at Christmas! I also make a lot of terrain by hand, paint minis, and make props for my players. Basically, ADHD means that I've never met a craft I didn't like and wasn't almost immediately half-good at!

I also run a home game for my family, I'm running Death House for my teen son and his friends as a taster before doing Curse of Strahd. I run one shots for friends to get them into D&D, and I run games for local home-educated teens.

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