Homebrew: The Background

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

So, let me tell you about the game I’m running for family.

Along with my playtest for Intervention, I’m running a D&D 5E game and am about to start on a second. The first was requested by my youngest daughter (17 . . . I am so old). She and my eldest (19) had been downtown in Ottawa where we live and went to Imaginaire, a game/hobby store. They both picked up dice.

Many years earlier—when they were 7 and 9—they would join the first hour of my D&D game. The crew was always very welcoming, and we always started with a fight—no matter where the story had left off—so the girls could roll some dice. While I had tried to get my daughters involved in their own on-going game, it never stuck.

Well, they remembered. And they wanted to play. That is the primary focus of my creative energies these days. They wanted something like Lord of the Rings, so they are a small group fighting the return of a mythic dark lord. We have a half-orc druid called Gigglebutt (my youngest’s PC whose real name is Caoife), a tiefling Paladin named Gabriel (my eldest’s PC), and a dwarf Fighter named Porky (my wife’s character!).

I’m using pieces of a campaign from a pervious group created to introduce a friend’s fiancé (now wife) to RPGs. The PCs are part of the Blue Sashes, a mutual protection association led by a mysterious benefactor known as The Heron. This was a conceit I used because I’m kind of sick of PCs supporting the authoritarian status quo in these scenarios—for every good and kindly monarch, there are a thousand despots.

The family didn’t care, they just wanted action.

The action started when the Blue Sashes were called to the village of Split Tree Hill in the liminal space between the Northern Commandery—the northern province of the Kingdom of Haelmark—and the lands of the nomadic Uralgic culture. The villagers of Split Tree Hill were reportedly beset by monstrous creatures haunting the night.

I’ll share more later. I’m also going to be sharing some of the opponents I’ve built for the campaign using D&D 5E over at the SEP website.

All maps in this campaign (and almost anything else I do) are by Dyson Logos, who has a Patreon that is worth every penny for those of us who can’t draw maps to save our lives.

I use the Open Gaming Network 5E SRD page for almost everything while I’m working on the campaign. I also support its Patreon as well.

Financially support those resources you use if you can. It’s the only way to ensure they survive!