Getting started

Ok, so I knew early on I wanted to create my own world and societies and things. The kit was all well and good, but I had some very specific things I wanted to be able to accomplish with this game and didn't feel like sticking to their script would work for me.

The main thing was that I wanted a completely open world, not a campaign. Welcome to Wherever, what do you want to do?

Of course there will be "quests" and challenges and things going on - but it is entirely up to the characters what to do or how.

So first thing I needed was a town.

I had bookmarked the medieval fantasy generator ages ago as a writing resource but for this it ended up being perfect. A few clicks and particulars later and we had Startead.

Line map of a small village with various buildings and a road through it.

I didn't come up with the name but I'm shite at naming things so off we go.

Now what?

Well, I'm a visual person and I realized after making this that I needed to know what was going on in the world before I could even think about this town at all. Is it in a forrest? Is it near mountains? How close is the nearest city?

Fuck. I need a bigger map.

Thankfully y'all are here for me on that too. Fantasy World Generator was also previously bookmarked as a writing tool but again, I was ready and soon had Harlinde.

Map of a fantasy world that kind of looks like a mushroom.

Doesn't look like much does it? Let's add some things.

We need general regions for our four main races to live on. I'm limiting the societies to human, elf, halfling & dwarf for my own ease of use.

Same world but with place names and some emoji on it.

Okay that's better. I've got two rival dwarven kingdoms in the mountains (Forlonde & Doridal) as well as a dwarven outpost in the south (Dorwine). Two elven lands (Nionengel & Gionevris). The main human Kingdom is Saunders up on its own penninsula. And the halflings live in the Parish.

Is this everyone? of course not. I'm not even sure this is the whole world. But it's enough to give my players some things to do and gives me an idea of what's going on.

I also started adding some emoji as you zoom in to give me an idea of what the terrain is.

Detail of fantasy map with the word "Tirine" and some various animal emoji.

For example, Tirine is a mostly human region that has some jungle and some plains. There's monkeys, snakes and lions. As well as crocodiles to the north.

I did this sort of scattershot, mostly as a general guide of like "wolves live here but not bears, maybe snakes."

So where is Startead?

In unincorporated lands near the sea. Between the Western Sea (as yet unnamed) and the dwarven mountains.

Oh yeah, and there's a dragon in them there mountains!

So this was the start of my world. I used the city generator to make maps of all of the cities you see above with a stash of other that exist in other parts of the world. As just the portion of this that is labeled covers about 30,000 square miles I should have a bit before my players wander outside of it.

But they are welcome to.

D&D Essentials Kit

I started my journey into this with the D&D Essentials Kit which was recommended to me by my friend Ben (@MarcianTobay). When I said I wanted to a campaign and didn't know anything he got excited. Comma very.

Link to Buy

The Kit includes dice, a basic rulebook, a quest (Dragon of IceSpire Peak), and a lot of cardboard cards. The cards are things like initiative order (1-9), some magical items, conditions, and sidekicks*.

All very useful for an in-person game. My game is not.

In retrospect, for my purposes, this was probably not a good buy but if you're pulling a new game together from nothing and living people coming over I would recommend it. Having a physical object to hold is great and helps sort out all of the differing things you need to remember.

I will say, and will go into this more later I'm sure, but with almost no background in D&D the manual only makes sense about 78% of the time. Maybe it's because there's so much to learn. Or maybe because it's meant to be referenced and not read cover to cover. Regardless, I immediately had to go online and do a google search for almost every term and mechanic.

Thank god you nerds out there are ready to answer my questions.

I'm gonna have a lot.

An Idea...

Back in late 2010 a friend in the Physics department of the University I was working at put together a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. He DMed - and we had an all-girl group otherwise. His wife, and three other friends of mine. We had a gnome named Gnomey who danced for money in the streets and I got killed by a crocodile in our first major encounter.

It was awesome.

We also only managed about 8 or so sessions before people drifted off to other things or, as in my case, moved. Since then, I've kept a passing eye on D&D and am familiar with all of the podcasts and vlogs and such that are going on but as I have the attention span of a gnat I haven't actually watched any.

So with 8 sessions of experience and no idea whatsoever of what I'm doing, I decided I wanted to DM. I emailed some people who are remote and asked if they wanted to do this with us and got a group of about four people together, two of whom are very remote and one only sorta remote. All women.

That was in July.

We're finally going to do this.

I'm going to use this blog to track our entire learning curve. Of us, one player has a lot of experience, one some, and the other two have none (or in one case she was in the original game with me in 2010 and hasn't done anything since). I have just enough experience to know this is going to be difficult but not enough to actually understand or I wouldn't be doing it.

Come along for the ride why don't you?