Homebrew: Chasing Papers

The second D&D game I’m going to be running is for three friends—including the best man from my wedding and his wife—who have been my core virtual gaming group since the pandemic. It started as a way to introduce RPGs—a key part of my friend’s life that his partner had not been exposed to. In other venues—like during my friend’s birthday party—we ran some other games as one-shots. That created interest. We then undertook a campaign in a system purpose-built to introduce new players to TTRPGs, and also to support the premise of the campaign, which was change—change from the normal to the abnormal, from the insider to the outsider.

That campaign went really well. We dabbled in a couple of ideas after that campaign and settled on fantasy Arthurian Britain, from the Saxon point of view. Britain faced a winter without end, while Arthur, Morgana, and Ambrosius Aurelianus all vied for power. The PCs got caught up in the political machinations while they tried to break the curse of the long winter. There were witches, wizards, faeries, the Wild Hunt, and a trip to Annwn/the Otherworld.

With that wrapping up, the players wanted to embark in a relatively episodic D&D campaign. I offered a few ideas, and the one that stuck was what I called Paper Chasers, in which the PCs will be freelance knowledge hunters, finding documents and artefacts not for power, but for study. This is something that had been knocking around in my head for a long time. I think it was a podcast about a decade ago that mentioned Renaissance individuals who made money finding Greek texts for European scholars, and that idea got stuck.

So, the next campaign will see the PCs working for Silence Frost—a key figure in the Sword Noir adventure Winter’s Silence—and their first goal will be to find rumoured ancient scrolls of a long-dead natural philosopher that appear to have surfaced on the edge of the world—in the city of Kingsport.

We’ll see how things evolve from there. There’s going to be a rival wizard who’s not evil but just competing to get the same items as the PCs. There will also be less savoury opposition that the PCs can comfortably beat the heck out of. And then there will be the dangers of the ancient locales to which the PCs travel—some of which might be haunted, others of which will have become the domains of monsters of all sorts.

Homebrew is going to encompass posts relating to my own gaming rather than gaming products—which will be posted over on the SEP site.