Campaign: Gharburx

We are moving onto a new campaign miniseries with new characters and we just had our session zero. 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 Zand’s benefit2.

This is session zero, which means I provide a basic overview of the game premise and we make characters. One player came with a character in mind, which ended up being a heavily re-flavored Monk while the other player made a character during the session and kept to a standard Wizard class.

Map of the city of Gharburx

  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. ↩