[3.0] Heavensward: Post may contain potential spoilers.

Sky High

Ever seen a panicked Lalafell never so gracefully find a spot to take a shot of their environments? You know what, ignore whatever the hell I just said. Look I forgot that there was scheduled maintenance tonight and I had literally less than 10 minutes to get a screenshot. Thankfully, after doing this over a hundred times. I’m fairly capable of getting a quick screenshot without much issue. Although, the only reason why I was able to get a screenshot today was because I forgot that I’m one hour ahead of PST. That allowed me to get a few moments to capture something.

Solarian

Alright, so this is just going to be some ramblings by me because I am currently conjuring up some ideas as to how I wish to describe the world that I am going to base the campaign off of.

As it stands, I am going to keep if fairly simple in terms of setting. Its a Fantasy world with “Adventuring Guilds”. Now the most interesting aspect about this world is whats known as the Rose. A Rose defines ones purpose or to put it more accurately, its a symbol of the bearers’ will. Without a Rose many will consider you unfit to lead. Roses are used to establish “guilds” the vast majority of the guilds are built with the intent to explore and adventure throughout the realms. A guild is kind’ve a physical embodiment of a Rose’s influence. The grander the accomplishments. The greater of the rewards. There’s a couple guilds that have achieved such a status that they are nations. However, they generally have an influence of only a few cities in their grasps.

One of the greater challenges with this whole guild thing that I have created is that its quite difficult to think of many guilds. While there’s 8 or so nations. There can easily be 30 guilds in each one. Making it 240 guilds that I have to consider. Now I can obviously give them names and call it a day, but I know that players will most definitely ask me for more in depth information about them. Another potential problem is the sheer amount of history I have to give to these flipping guilds, but I just now realized of a freaking solution.

A while back I made a program that automaticly generated houses for the Sword Chronicles Tabletop RPG. I could quite literally take the concept that that game does with houses and place it into my story. I can then generate hundreds of guilds that can also give me a rough idea as to what kind of history that guild experienced. The only problem is that I have no idea where that program is anymore. I might have to recreate it. It will probably take an afternoon, but I could rebuild it. Honestly, that might be the best solution for me.

Moving on from that. I intend to start the players joining a guild known as Vierra. The guild matches the name of the city (most guilds do). It was a guild that has suffered serious throwbacks in its growth and influence. There are many reasons why, but the main one being the fact that the prior guildmaster was defeated by an opposing guild known as Redvale. Shortly after the guildmaster’s defeat. They had given their position to an unknown man named Krawn. Krawn was a peculiar fellow. However, ones things for certain. He managed to stifle Redvale’s plan in making the guild go extinct and taking influence of the entire city and its surrounding area. Then again, Krawn can only do so much. As such he had recruited a few well-renowned adventures to help bring more influence to guild even if it buttheads with Redvale.

There are three main story paths that the players could take. To be quite frank, there’s really only two options and both of them deals with the Rose. Which is partly why I have called this campaign. Tales of the Rose. There are some frightening truths behind the Rose and it will make you wonder the purpose behind the guild’s existence. The only reason why I say that is because the Rose is only used as a symbol for a Guildmaster and nothing more. It really doesn’t have much value outside of Guild’s influence. However, I don’t intend to reveal all of these twists until further along the story. It will mainly revolve around a fairly typical adventuring story.

A tip for being a Dungeon Master

There’s one thing that I have learned from being a Dungeon Master (DM). To be more exact, my father me told that whenever I DM. I should always make the start and the end of a campaign. The reason for it is quite simple. Its because you can never predict what a player or group will do. It takes one non-player character, one sentence to divert the players attention onto a quest for cheese. I have personally experienced this once in my earlier parts of DMing. I wanted the players to be distracted by something in a prison for a bit so that when they get back on the path. They will realize that the whole place was slowly flooding. The problem was that I underestimated that they had keen an interest for a giant blue orb. It was three times their size, but they wanted the god damn blue orb. I think the mistake at the time was the fact that I told one of the players who rolled well on their perception check that it appeared that something was looking at them from inside of the orb.

The other problem was the fact that because of my desperate attempt to get them moving again before being swallowed up by the flood. I gave the orb a voice. I don’t recall the specifics, but I believe the orb told the players to leave it alone and they would not back down. One of the players said that they wouldn’t leave unless they take the orb with them. Eventually, I said fuck it and made the orb shrink into a pocketable size. I also forgot that in the first 10 minutes of the campaign is that the fricken players captured a goblin and tried to make it their ally. (Well one of the players wanted to do that) I have no idea why I allowed that. Even one of the other players told me that I could’ve prevented them from doing it, but I sad fuck it and let them make the goblin their ally (secretly).

I bet no one was expecting this wall of text today. To be quite honest neither was I. The main reason why I decied to do it was because I wanted to be able to spend some time conjuring some stuff for the campaign that I am working on for a few potential players. I hope you found the random tip to be of some interest or atleast some kind of forewarning. I will always advise any DM/GM to avoid “Railroading” players down a specific story. Part of the fun of DMing is dealing with the hijinks that the players create for you. Otherwise, you would be better off writing a book instead. I don’t mean to be rude there is a time that you need players to be back on track, but I suggest to make it as natural as possible (which isn’t easy to do). Because of that I suggest making only the start and end of your campaign and let the middle adapt to your player such that no matter what it will always feel seemless once they reach the end. (Hopefully, my father who given me that advice has also spent decades Dming himself, so its hard to say if its easy to do in the first place)

Regardless, I hope you all have a good day/night.