L
lostfaith
Guest
Original poster
I've been itching to DM a campaign for a while, and I was curious to see if there was anyone on Iwaku who'd be interested in a Discord based campaign (I might learn a little roll20, but only to do miniatures and maps). I run a homebrew setting called Empire's War. Most of the adventures I've written for it take place on a continent called Eletos centering around a theocracy and a magical autocracy at war with each other, but I've been developing the northern continent, Tenebra, and was thinking of a campaign where war refugees from Eletos flee northward to Lywin, a coastal Luskan-esque city-state on Tenebra. I have an overarching plot in mind involving the legend of a ghost called the Pale King, but the first few levels would find the players caught up in a racial gang war in Lywin between opposing street factions of orcs, elves, kobolds, etc, sort of like Shadowrun's Ancients or Sons of Sauron, if Shadowrun took place in a medieval fantasy world instead of a cyberpunk fantasy world.
I use some minor house rules (such as making ability score improvements based on character level and not class level), but nothing earth-shattering. My DMing style is focused on description and world-building; I love to write characters and settings. As far as combat, I pride myself in designing strategic encounters that require thought to defeat instead of brute force. Some examples of "boss fights" I've run in previous campaigns":
A fiendish Abominable Yeti with several Yeti minions supported by unkillable ice tornadoes that tried to freeze players, then ignored the PCs as the battle waned down in favour of healing the boss for his final stand.
A yochlol wielding a minor artifact called the Obsidian Rod that allowed her to create a demiplane of several floating islands where she had control of gravity, allowing her to skip freely between platforms while hindering the players.
A wind-sorcerer/warlock fought in a room with permanent gust of wind spells pointed toward the PCs, cutting their movement toward him while unaffecting his horizontal movement; he also had special actions to fly around on the wind (this one was fun because the players had a summoned air elemental that ended up getting a poetic kill on the boss).
The other most important thing to know about me as a DM is that I love to write character options. I'm in the process of writing an elemental spell expansion pack to fill in the gaps in the 5E spell list (for example, do you know that acid has only two spells? Yep, Melf's Acid Arrow Vitriolic Sphere. My pack adds quite a few more, such as Acid Mites to summon animated blobs of acid that attack things, Deadly Fountains which summons acid geysers at multiple points on the ground, and Water to Acid to do exactly what it says on the tin). Besides spells, I've written a lot of subclasses to tie into cultures in my world. Some examples include Fey Domain for clerics (uses charms and illusions), Giant Slayer for barbarians (gnomish technique that focuses on fighting larger creatures), College of Spirits for bards (tradition of harnessing dead spirits for magic from a culture of ancestor worship), and Shinobi for rogue (elite order of spies from a northern nation of mystics that uses magical techniques of stealth and illusion). If I do run a campaign, I'll post full lore and gameplay descriptions for all my subclasses and spells, but if all the new stuff overwhelms you, don't worry--none of it is necessary to know to play in Tenebra, and there's nothing wrong with just using vanilla spells and subclasses.
So yeah, this post ended up being way longer than I intended, but in short, anybody interested in a D&D 5E homebrew campaign? I'm cool with starting at any level from 1 to 5 depending on what the players want to do.
I use some minor house rules (such as making ability score improvements based on character level and not class level), but nothing earth-shattering. My DMing style is focused on description and world-building; I love to write characters and settings. As far as combat, I pride myself in designing strategic encounters that require thought to defeat instead of brute force. Some examples of "boss fights" I've run in previous campaigns":
A fiendish Abominable Yeti with several Yeti minions supported by unkillable ice tornadoes that tried to freeze players, then ignored the PCs as the battle waned down in favour of healing the boss for his final stand.
A yochlol wielding a minor artifact called the Obsidian Rod that allowed her to create a demiplane of several floating islands where she had control of gravity, allowing her to skip freely between platforms while hindering the players.
A wind-sorcerer/warlock fought in a room with permanent gust of wind spells pointed toward the PCs, cutting their movement toward him while unaffecting his horizontal movement; he also had special actions to fly around on the wind (this one was fun because the players had a summoned air elemental that ended up getting a poetic kill on the boss).
The other most important thing to know about me as a DM is that I love to write character options. I'm in the process of writing an elemental spell expansion pack to fill in the gaps in the 5E spell list (for example, do you know that acid has only two spells? Yep, Melf's Acid Arrow Vitriolic Sphere. My pack adds quite a few more, such as Acid Mites to summon animated blobs of acid that attack things, Deadly Fountains which summons acid geysers at multiple points on the ground, and Water to Acid to do exactly what it says on the tin). Besides spells, I've written a lot of subclasses to tie into cultures in my world. Some examples include Fey Domain for clerics (uses charms and illusions), Giant Slayer for barbarians (gnomish technique that focuses on fighting larger creatures), College of Spirits for bards (tradition of harnessing dead spirits for magic from a culture of ancestor worship), and Shinobi for rogue (elite order of spies from a northern nation of mystics that uses magical techniques of stealth and illusion). If I do run a campaign, I'll post full lore and gameplay descriptions for all my subclasses and spells, but if all the new stuff overwhelms you, don't worry--none of it is necessary to know to play in Tenebra, and there's nothing wrong with just using vanilla spells and subclasses.
So yeah, this post ended up being way longer than I intended, but in short, anybody interested in a D&D 5E homebrew campaign? I'm cool with starting at any level from 1 to 5 depending on what the players want to do.
