Crit_Fail
A FreshHell to Contend With
Was thinking I'd put this in the project workshop, but this empty forum called out to me. If all goes according to plan the first actual session outside of character generation will be in two days on Tuesday May 20th. If things don't go as planned, well there is a reason I picked the name I did.
When 5e came out I ran my players through Lost Mines of Phandelver, and the Flame Skull in the titular mine hit them with a fireball that killed half the party. They've been terrified of me as a DM ever since. Cut to discussing the next campaign and I mentioned the 3rd ed Ghostwalk campaign setting with the core concept that if you die, you come back a "solid" ghost and keep adventuring. They loved the idea of every character having a built in "extra life".
That resulted in running a campaign based on the Ghostwalk concept in 5e. Real life happened, and that game came to a close. Since then I got tired of 5e; mostly the massive monster stat blocks and having more pages of notes devoted to monster stats than actual content. I've switched gears to a house rule set based on The Black Hack and I've also reworked the unused elements of my original campaign into a point crawl based around the idea Graphite Prime had for running mazes, with three separate "mazes" linked together (https://graphiteprime.blogspot.com/2018/10/mazes-monotony-or-how-to-run-actual-maze.html).
Below is a google drive link to the campaign PDF I've cooked up for my own use at the table, nine actual pages of content packed as densely as I could, with one blank page for formatting, and one handout. (link removed).
So when I wrote up my house rules, I decided to put in a bunch of feat like options instead of stating out various specific races. I expected this would address some of the complaints my players had in 5e regarding why elves couldn't do X, and dwarves couldn't do Y. Instead, when given the option to make their own character race, my three players chose to play as a Battle-Toad Fighter, a Kitsune Rogue, and a Pandaren Ranger respectively. So now I've got a Journey to the West thing going with a pilgrimage to the City of Manifest. Assuming the first session doesn't end in a dumpster fire, this should turn into a weekly game.
When 5e came out I ran my players through Lost Mines of Phandelver, and the Flame Skull in the titular mine hit them with a fireball that killed half the party. They've been terrified of me as a DM ever since. Cut to discussing the next campaign and I mentioned the 3rd ed Ghostwalk campaign setting with the core concept that if you die, you come back a "solid" ghost and keep adventuring. They loved the idea of every character having a built in "extra life".
That resulted in running a campaign based on the Ghostwalk concept in 5e. Real life happened, and that game came to a close. Since then I got tired of 5e; mostly the massive monster stat blocks and having more pages of notes devoted to monster stats than actual content. I've switched gears to a house rule set based on The Black Hack and I've also reworked the unused elements of my original campaign into a point crawl based around the idea Graphite Prime had for running mazes, with three separate "mazes" linked together (https://graphiteprime.blogspot.com/2018/10/mazes-monotony-or-how-to-run-actual-maze.html).
Below is a google drive link to the campaign PDF I've cooked up for my own use at the table, nine actual pages of content packed as densely as I could, with one blank page for formatting, and one handout. (link removed).
So when I wrote up my house rules, I decided to put in a bunch of feat like options instead of stating out various specific races. I expected this would address some of the complaints my players had in 5e regarding why elves couldn't do X, and dwarves couldn't do Y. Instead, when given the option to make their own character race, my three players chose to play as a Battle-Toad Fighter, a Kitsune Rogue, and a Pandaren Ranger respectively. So now I've got a Journey to the West thing going with a pilgrimage to the City of Manifest. Assuming the first session doesn't end in a dumpster fire, this should turn into a weekly game.
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