Oops.
Sometimes in June, I mentioned on Discord how it’d be a lot of fun to try my hand at Game Mastering. And, being surrounded by talented and fantastic writers who are always eager to find another way to procrastinate, I got a bunch of people wanting to play.
To be more precise, it started a little like this:
Continued on to:
And ended with a bunch of excited:
Up until this point, my only proper experience with TTRPGs had been participating in one campaign (which was amazing, by the way), and watching bits of Critical Role. It always seemed very exciting, but also horribly daunting, because rules and numbers and what if I mess up? So when I ended up framing the whole thing as if I was just trying to run a crack campaign, no strings attached, that initial apprehension kind of went poof.
Because what could possibly go wrong with that plan?
I’ll tell you what went wrong:
I got carried away. Not just a little, either. Within the span of a week, I turned my hehe, this crack idea will be a laff into And here is a homebrew continent, a homebrew campaign, and now there are two epic quests too, because why not.
@#!*
Tools were important too, of course. Oh, and the rule system. Can’t forget that. I’d considered Pathfinder at first, but there was that little problem of me still flailing around uselessly about pretty much everything, and so I picked DND 5e. It seemed like a choice easily backed up by tools that’d make my life easier and were accessible without too much hassle.
Like DnD Beyond. Took about one Hmmm said out loud and then I had suddenly nabbed almost all the rule books from there. How else was I going to make characters for my future players but in this shiny new toy I just got, huh? I like toys.
Then I had to decide on a Virtual Table Top platform, too, because Taff not only likes toys, she also likes maps. Likes them so much, she dug out her old Campaign Cartographer and started making her own, but that’s a topic for another post. For the virtual table top platform I chose Roll20. This one took me a bit longer to decide on, especially since I gave both Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds a try. Ultimately, I decided Roll20 was going to be easier for my players and me. Especially since the majority of playing and rolling is happening on Discord anyway while we have our character sheets stored on DnD Beyond. Fantasy Grounds is a much more complete package and its features would probably be mostly wasted on us.
So. Yeah. Here I was. Armed with DnD Beyond and books and a virtual tabletop, stars in my eyes and ears burning… and with a bunch of amazing friends who were willing to put up with my crazy.
Two weeks later, we started and Homebound was born.
It’s not what it was originally supposed to be. Not entirely, anyway. Where I was first shooting for lots of laughs and very little coherent story, I now have a complex campaign in front of me that my players will need to navigate if they want their characters to return home. It’s scattered all over a large continent and up to them to figure out, and I can’t wait to see how it all unfolds.
Or if they’re going to decide to settle down and try corner the donuts market. Are there donuts in DnD?!
Anyway. Welcome to my Campaign Diaries for Homebound. In our next post we are going to meet the cast and find out just what they’ve been up to in our first few sessions.
Though I am also going to be talking about the resources I been finding, what YouTube channels I been hooked on, and where I dig up maps and adventures to seed the world with. It’ll be exciting.
Writing. Reading. Dreaming. 