UniversalMonster
Explorer
Ok, so to start out, I have to explain some terms:
Living Forgotten Realms (aka LFR) is the organized persistent Forgotten Realms campaign that is run by the RPGA. It consists of (currently over 100) adventures that are set in Faerun and includes several regions.. if you play D&D4e at a convention or at a game shop, there's a fairly good chance it is Living Realms.
MyRealms are a special type of adventure template that individual DMs can write on their own, and still have it count for the persistent campaign. Basically it consists of an XP and treasure budget and DMs can put together the details of what happens, and what the encounters are, etc. These are Living Realms adventures. You can play as many of these as you like, up to about level 14.
Adventuring Companies are creative player-driven and managed organizations in the Living Realms campaign (like guilds and mercenary companies and whatnot) that players actually create themselves. The only mechanical benefit of having an Adventuring Company is you get an extra "group" action point.
What I did last year, on the way back from GenCon was my friend and I came up with a new Adventuring Company (see above) based around the idea of having a magical school (ala Hogwarts or the X-Men Academy) set in Cormyr.. where the players all had the arcane power source (as a requirement for admissin) and IC were between the ages of 13-17.
So the entire company was arcane: Bards & Artificers (leaders), Swordmages (defenders), Sorcerers and Warlocks (strikers), Wizards (controllers). Yes! You can have an all arcane party.
Then I wrote a series of MyReams adventures that details stuff that happens around the school- for a while we even had grading tracked. School projects gone awry.. a certain dark arts teacher was discovered to be involved in sinister activities.. and in between the MyRealms adventures I wrote, we also ran some of the 'official' LFR adventures as "field trips". Later on, certain students eventually "graduated" or left the school in other ways (effectively having levelled out of the range where they could learn from the magic academy's teachings.. which we had arbitrarily decided was 7th level.) Using MyRealms you can detail out certain things like NPCs and locations, so we created maps of the school, a cast of NPCs including teachers, a nearby genasi village, recurrent villians, family ties..
Eventually the adventures shifted from school activities into "rescuing arcane artifacts", recruiting potential students (the way we often brought in new players was they would "recruited" from their mundane lives 'in character' after showing some sort of magical potential) or "doing field research"
So this was really cool, and we managed to get the start of what was actually a roleplaying and plot-oriented group together within the Living Realms campaign centered around the school.
This was really great! But we were only beginning to see the potential here.
This year, after DDXP, I was driving back home with three other longtime players that had been involved with the magic academy adventuring company, and we started talking about how many of the players we had met missed out on story elements that we had sort of "snuck in" via this combination of Adventuring companies and MyRealms. We eventually came up with a new project: An Exiled Drow House in the Underdark region of Great Bhaerynden. We wanted to make it super-theme-y, with only female drow having the divine power source, a whole storyline and adventures based around our exile and exploring the ruins of the underdark as our native environment.. and eventually surface raids and undercover operations that take place elsewhere in the Realms. At GenCon we plan on having a banner and coordinated shirts
We're going to kick the first adventure ("Exodus from T'lindhet"- I will be DMing it) off in a couple of weeks in Maryland. I think we would have done this earlier, but we got hammered by the snowstorm so gaming was a bit off this last week or two.
Anyhow, I want to mention it here in the hopes of inspiring some other roleplayers to try this with Living Realms. See you later!
Living Forgotten Realms (aka LFR) is the organized persistent Forgotten Realms campaign that is run by the RPGA. It consists of (currently over 100) adventures that are set in Faerun and includes several regions.. if you play D&D4e at a convention or at a game shop, there's a fairly good chance it is Living Realms.
MyRealms are a special type of adventure template that individual DMs can write on their own, and still have it count for the persistent campaign. Basically it consists of an XP and treasure budget and DMs can put together the details of what happens, and what the encounters are, etc. These are Living Realms adventures. You can play as many of these as you like, up to about level 14.
Adventuring Companies are creative player-driven and managed organizations in the Living Realms campaign (like guilds and mercenary companies and whatnot) that players actually create themselves. The only mechanical benefit of having an Adventuring Company is you get an extra "group" action point.
What I did last year, on the way back from GenCon was my friend and I came up with a new Adventuring Company (see above) based around the idea of having a magical school (ala Hogwarts or the X-Men Academy) set in Cormyr.. where the players all had the arcane power source (as a requirement for admissin) and IC were between the ages of 13-17.
So the entire company was arcane: Bards & Artificers (leaders), Swordmages (defenders), Sorcerers and Warlocks (strikers), Wizards (controllers). Yes! You can have an all arcane party.
Then I wrote a series of MyReams adventures that details stuff that happens around the school- for a while we even had grading tracked. School projects gone awry.. a certain dark arts teacher was discovered to be involved in sinister activities.. and in between the MyRealms adventures I wrote, we also ran some of the 'official' LFR adventures as "field trips". Later on, certain students eventually "graduated" or left the school in other ways (effectively having levelled out of the range where they could learn from the magic academy's teachings.. which we had arbitrarily decided was 7th level.) Using MyRealms you can detail out certain things like NPCs and locations, so we created maps of the school, a cast of NPCs including teachers, a nearby genasi village, recurrent villians, family ties..
Eventually the adventures shifted from school activities into "rescuing arcane artifacts", recruiting potential students (the way we often brought in new players was they would "recruited" from their mundane lives 'in character' after showing some sort of magical potential) or "doing field research"
So this was really cool, and we managed to get the start of what was actually a roleplaying and plot-oriented group together within the Living Realms campaign centered around the school.
This was really great! But we were only beginning to see the potential here.
This year, after DDXP, I was driving back home with three other longtime players that had been involved with the magic academy adventuring company, and we started talking about how many of the players we had met missed out on story elements that we had sort of "snuck in" via this combination of Adventuring companies and MyRealms. We eventually came up with a new project: An Exiled Drow House in the Underdark region of Great Bhaerynden. We wanted to make it super-theme-y, with only female drow having the divine power source, a whole storyline and adventures based around our exile and exploring the ruins of the underdark as our native environment.. and eventually surface raids and undercover operations that take place elsewhere in the Realms. At GenCon we plan on having a banner and coordinated shirts
We're going to kick the first adventure ("Exodus from T'lindhet"- I will be DMing it) off in a couple of weeks in Maryland. I think we would have done this earlier, but we got hammered by the snowstorm so gaming was a bit off this last week or two.
Anyhow, I want to mention it here in the hopes of inspiring some other roleplayers to try this with Living Realms. See you later!
