New Game: New Start

We are moving onto a new campaign miniseries with new characters. I enjoyed having the players have limited options last time so I decided to give them a few prompts for the game including factions and character species.

Since the Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition 2024 ruleset came out in September with the new Players Handbook, and Dungeon Masters Guide then we decided to move to playing #DnD2024 for this campaign and I decided I wanted to run the game rules as written {e.g. no house rules}.

While the last game was a dungeon delve I wanted to move this game back to an urban environment so I moved it to the capital on the Ghar Empire, Gharburx.

I imagine Gharburx as a mashup between many cities in Europe with old gothic stone buildings intermixed with a canal system and a large church ward abutting a large imperial palace. I gave the players a few options for characters and patrons.¹ They chose to be diplomatic members from the Zandian Magocracy in the city to open trade negotiations with Ghar Empire. Secretly, they would be part of the Library, which is a covert information gathering group with the Magocracy that collects artifacts and information for Zane’s benefit².

The game starts with the players being called into their immediate supervisors office and being assigned to help a fellow delegation member who had been picked up by the Gharburx Watch. They head to the watch station and find out their colleague is being held of suspicion of unaliving a monk who they met at a dinner party.

The game has some elements that I really enjoy and I hope the story ends up shaping.

1. I like the rule of 3 in terms of patrons. ↩

2. I first setup the Great Library almost 4 years ago when I first began running games and have rather enjoyed have the players interact and now work for the library. It is perhaps one of my favorite parts of running a long running game world; all the call backs. ↩