Disclaimer: There will be spoilers in the text – and please forgive my grammatical errors, English is not my native language.
I am the DM of a WOTBS campaign and have been toying with the idea for a while to post about it in these forums.
If you end up reading and following this thread, feel free to comment and leave tips for the upcoming chapters. Anyone going to DM the campaign in the future is also more than welcome to contact me for my input.
We started playing chapter 1 in January 2015, so the first many posts will be a retelling based on memory and notes, and will be posted over time. This takes a lot longer than I thought .
Background information about the game:
Our group consists of four persons, meaning that we are only 3 players and a DM. We try to balance this by giving the PCs heroic stats – they are supposed to be heroes anyway. This means that all PCs start with the following stat-array: 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13.
Sometimes the group also gets an NPC of lower level and/or inferior class like warrior. For this campaign I decided not to give them an NPC like this, as the first many chapters have a lot of NPCs involved in the story. I did however decide to give each player a good friend that I would kill off in the first session, just to get their blood up and give them more incentive to hate the Ragesian invaders, but more about this later.
Usually we have been playing a rather conservative game regarding the use of source books. We have most of them, except for some of the psionic books and we have none of the dragon magazines. Usually we have been limiting ourselves to the following rules:
Player’s handbook (PHB) races and spells only – at least for the first many levels, later on one spell per caster level would be open from other sources as a kind of research. The enemy would likewise be limited – usually this would be a rather given issue as most premade adventures have a limited selection of spells outside PHB. Classes, Feats and prestige classes would however be pretty open. We just haven’t really been experimenting with them or alternative class features.
For this campaign, where we would go from level 1-20, I thought it would be a good a time as any to open up for everything and test whether or not it would be balances and fun for us. So I did, though with one restriction. Based on the types of races in the story, I only allowed PHB races, but allowed using any kind of variation of these that the players wanted to try out. Only one of the three did end up doing that.
For some reason, I was the only one ever reading about the Divine persist spell priests, so this is the first time we have a character in the group with this approach. Previously the priests have been mostly inclined to use quicken divine metamagic. However, since we were testing things, I told the guy who ended up being the priest about this, and he loved it… who would have guessed, eh? I am not sure, however, if we ever will allow it again, it is pretty powerful after all.
I gave my players the PC handbook beforehand and asked them to read it through and then give me a call when they had and had thought about which kind of character they would like to play. I told them that the one common element they all had to implement in their background stories was that they all lived in the same town, Gate Pass, and felt a strong connection to the town. To reduce the amount of names thrown around, I will refer to the players by their in-game names even in this section.
The Party:
Galion – Elf ranger
Shaith – Fire elf fire domain wizard
Killian – Human priest of Heironious
MrPereira - DM
Background stories for the party members:
Galion
First up was Galion. He wanted to play an elven ranger with a strong focus on archery. His basic idea was that he was a loner by nature. He didn’t have many friends and loved the wood and outdoor life, but saw Gate Pass as his home and would die for it, if threatened. That gave me the idea that he could actually be Taranesti originally, which would add a lot to the flavor later on in the story.
His background ended up being that he and his parents had hailed from a now conquered area in what is now Shahalesti. His father was on the royal guard and had to surrender and bend his knee to the conquerors to safe his family. This happened some 80 years ago when he was just a wee little elf. Shortly after they ran away from Shahalesti and settled down in Gate Pass. When the Ragesians attacked about 50 years ago his father was a part of the resistance. He told his son, that the last time he had given up to save his family, but had sacrificed his soul doing it. This time he would fight to the bitter end to ensure a safe future for his family. He died defending Gate Pass. As the Ragesian army is getting closer to Gate Pass, Galion has entered the Resistance, for a large part because of his father.
Based on his background Galion has very little regard for either Ragesians or Shahalesti.
Shaith
Second up was Shaith. He wanted to play a wizard, and spent quite a while looking at a lot of different races and prestige classes, but not really being happy with them. At some point he read about the domain wizards in Unearthed Arcana, and decided that this was what he wanted. So he settled for a fire Domain wizard and decided to go all in on fire, becoming a fire elf.
I told him that there was a forest not far from Gate Pass that had been burning for 50 years without end. I asked him if it would be fine for him to come from that place, and that they had originally been normal elves, but due to magical burning forest they had changed into fire elves. He loved the idea.
It is hard to be unsatisfied when your players more or less write themselves into the background story of the world This means, that in my campaign all surviving Innenotdar elves are fire elves.
In his background story his parents are loving and caring people, but sad because of the loss of their homeland. They seldom fight about anything, but the one thing they do disagree on is who to blame for the loss of their home. His father blames the Ragesians for torching the place, while his mother blames the Shahalesti for not stopping them – one can’t blame an orc for being an orc after all. Shaith also decided to be a student at Gabal’s School of War in Gate Pass.
Based on his background Shaith is not a big fan of the Shahalesti, but he does not hate them. He does not like the Ragesians at all. The scourge does not help either.
Killian
The last player, Killian, didn’t really have many preferences, but didn’t want to play a character that was a clone of one he had played recently. He ended up becoming a priest with focus on persist spell, aiming to become an ordained champion. Originally he too wanted to be an elf, but I asked him if he wouldn’t mind not being on – I felt that to keep a good in-game balance it would be more fun to have them come from different races. He agreed to that.
His background is the weakest since he didn’t have time to come up with much until we started playing. He is a native from Gate Pass and has inherited a very rational and logical approach to things from his father. He knows that Gate Pass’ neutrality comes more from being a buffer between to strong nations, than from being strong and independent. His mother is the complete opposite; she is very emotional and has strong feelings about loyalty and independence, which he also has inherited. This gives him a quite fun approach to things since he will want to be rational and get all the information he can, but in the end he does what his heart tells him, even if it is not the optimal thing.
Based on his background Killian does not really like either Ragesians or Shahalesti as they threaten his hometown, but currently Ragesians are the bigger villains as they are there with an army.
Setting up the campaign
I took a lot of time making sure that everyone had a good understanding of Gate Pass and the commonly known history, to give the feel of a place they knew, and not saw for the first time. I also spent some time setting the stage for the campaign.
I spent a lot of time of time structuring the information about Gate Pass and the world into knowledge everyone would have and knowledge who could be acquired with the right knowledge-related skills, so the players with these skills would have a broader understanding of the world and the area than those without them.
This campaign has a lot of information, so I gave each player a task during the campaign. One player is to record all the NPCs they meet and hear about. To give them a better chance of keeping track of the many names and persons. The second player is to keep track of the movements in the world, who is at war and who is allied, as well as keeping track of places, missions and things they hear about. The third player is tasked with keeping a journal – in as many/few details as he wants to - to make sure that important details are not lost to the pcs because of long breaks between sessions. At first they were a little critical about this, but after the first two sessions they both accepted and appreciated it. They would have lost track of a lot of things otherwise.
A final thing I took some time discussing with the players before we started was the concept of good and evil in the campaign. One of the best things for me with the campaign is that the classic good and evil concepts are secondary as all parties in the campaign have their own justification for doing what they do. I made sure that the players knew about this and that the story more often is a question of friend/foe – ally/enemy than a question of good or evil in the classical sense.
I am the DM of a WOTBS campaign and have been toying with the idea for a while to post about it in these forums.
If you end up reading and following this thread, feel free to comment and leave tips for the upcoming chapters. Anyone going to DM the campaign in the future is also more than welcome to contact me for my input.
We started playing chapter 1 in January 2015, so the first many posts will be a retelling based on memory and notes, and will be posted over time. This takes a lot longer than I thought .
Background information about the game:
Our group consists of four persons, meaning that we are only 3 players and a DM. We try to balance this by giving the PCs heroic stats – they are supposed to be heroes anyway. This means that all PCs start with the following stat-array: 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13.
Sometimes the group also gets an NPC of lower level and/or inferior class like warrior. For this campaign I decided not to give them an NPC like this, as the first many chapters have a lot of NPCs involved in the story. I did however decide to give each player a good friend that I would kill off in the first session, just to get their blood up and give them more incentive to hate the Ragesian invaders, but more about this later.
Usually we have been playing a rather conservative game regarding the use of source books. We have most of them, except for some of the psionic books and we have none of the dragon magazines. Usually we have been limiting ourselves to the following rules:
Player’s handbook (PHB) races and spells only – at least for the first many levels, later on one spell per caster level would be open from other sources as a kind of research. The enemy would likewise be limited – usually this would be a rather given issue as most premade adventures have a limited selection of spells outside PHB. Classes, Feats and prestige classes would however be pretty open. We just haven’t really been experimenting with them or alternative class features.
For this campaign, where we would go from level 1-20, I thought it would be a good a time as any to open up for everything and test whether or not it would be balances and fun for us. So I did, though with one restriction. Based on the types of races in the story, I only allowed PHB races, but allowed using any kind of variation of these that the players wanted to try out. Only one of the three did end up doing that.
For some reason, I was the only one ever reading about the Divine persist spell priests, so this is the first time we have a character in the group with this approach. Previously the priests have been mostly inclined to use quicken divine metamagic. However, since we were testing things, I told the guy who ended up being the priest about this, and he loved it… who would have guessed, eh? I am not sure, however, if we ever will allow it again, it is pretty powerful after all.
I gave my players the PC handbook beforehand and asked them to read it through and then give me a call when they had and had thought about which kind of character they would like to play. I told them that the one common element they all had to implement in their background stories was that they all lived in the same town, Gate Pass, and felt a strong connection to the town. To reduce the amount of names thrown around, I will refer to the players by their in-game names even in this section.
The Party:
Galion – Elf ranger
Shaith – Fire elf fire domain wizard
Killian – Human priest of Heironious
MrPereira - DM
Background stories for the party members:
Galion
First up was Galion. He wanted to play an elven ranger with a strong focus on archery. His basic idea was that he was a loner by nature. He didn’t have many friends and loved the wood and outdoor life, but saw Gate Pass as his home and would die for it, if threatened. That gave me the idea that he could actually be Taranesti originally, which would add a lot to the flavor later on in the story.
His background ended up being that he and his parents had hailed from a now conquered area in what is now Shahalesti. His father was on the royal guard and had to surrender and bend his knee to the conquerors to safe his family. This happened some 80 years ago when he was just a wee little elf. Shortly after they ran away from Shahalesti and settled down in Gate Pass. When the Ragesians attacked about 50 years ago his father was a part of the resistance. He told his son, that the last time he had given up to save his family, but had sacrificed his soul doing it. This time he would fight to the bitter end to ensure a safe future for his family. He died defending Gate Pass. As the Ragesian army is getting closer to Gate Pass, Galion has entered the Resistance, for a large part because of his father.
Based on his background Galion has very little regard for either Ragesians or Shahalesti.
Shaith
Second up was Shaith. He wanted to play a wizard, and spent quite a while looking at a lot of different races and prestige classes, but not really being happy with them. At some point he read about the domain wizards in Unearthed Arcana, and decided that this was what he wanted. So he settled for a fire Domain wizard and decided to go all in on fire, becoming a fire elf.
I told him that there was a forest not far from Gate Pass that had been burning for 50 years without end. I asked him if it would be fine for him to come from that place, and that they had originally been normal elves, but due to magical burning forest they had changed into fire elves. He loved the idea.
It is hard to be unsatisfied when your players more or less write themselves into the background story of the world This means, that in my campaign all surviving Innenotdar elves are fire elves.
In his background story his parents are loving and caring people, but sad because of the loss of their homeland. They seldom fight about anything, but the one thing they do disagree on is who to blame for the loss of their home. His father blames the Ragesians for torching the place, while his mother blames the Shahalesti for not stopping them – one can’t blame an orc for being an orc after all. Shaith also decided to be a student at Gabal’s School of War in Gate Pass.
Based on his background Shaith is not a big fan of the Shahalesti, but he does not hate them. He does not like the Ragesians at all. The scourge does not help either.
Killian
The last player, Killian, didn’t really have many preferences, but didn’t want to play a character that was a clone of one he had played recently. He ended up becoming a priest with focus on persist spell, aiming to become an ordained champion. Originally he too wanted to be an elf, but I asked him if he wouldn’t mind not being on – I felt that to keep a good in-game balance it would be more fun to have them come from different races. He agreed to that.
His background is the weakest since he didn’t have time to come up with much until we started playing. He is a native from Gate Pass and has inherited a very rational and logical approach to things from his father. He knows that Gate Pass’ neutrality comes more from being a buffer between to strong nations, than from being strong and independent. His mother is the complete opposite; she is very emotional and has strong feelings about loyalty and independence, which he also has inherited. This gives him a quite fun approach to things since he will want to be rational and get all the information he can, but in the end he does what his heart tells him, even if it is not the optimal thing.
Based on his background Killian does not really like either Ragesians or Shahalesti as they threaten his hometown, but currently Ragesians are the bigger villains as they are there with an army.
Setting up the campaign
I took a lot of time making sure that everyone had a good understanding of Gate Pass and the commonly known history, to give the feel of a place they knew, and not saw for the first time. I also spent some time setting the stage for the campaign.
I spent a lot of time of time structuring the information about Gate Pass and the world into knowledge everyone would have and knowledge who could be acquired with the right knowledge-related skills, so the players with these skills would have a broader understanding of the world and the area than those without them.
This campaign has a lot of information, so I gave each player a task during the campaign. One player is to record all the NPCs they meet and hear about. To give them a better chance of keeping track of the many names and persons. The second player is to keep track of the movements in the world, who is at war and who is allied, as well as keeping track of places, missions and things they hear about. The third player is tasked with keeping a journal – in as many/few details as he wants to - to make sure that important details are not lost to the pcs because of long breaks between sessions. At first they were a little critical about this, but after the first two sessions they both accepted and appreciated it. They would have lost track of a lot of things otherwise.
A final thing I took some time discussing with the players before we started was the concept of good and evil in the campaign. One of the best things for me with the campaign is that the classic good and evil concepts are secondary as all parties in the campaign have their own justification for doing what they do. I made sure that the players knew about this and that the story more often is a question of friend/foe – ally/enemy than a question of good or evil in the classical sense.