Greetings, adventure seeker, and welcome to my little blog!
If you're wondering what this is all about, let me give you a little background. Like a lot of people, I played Dungeons & Dragons throughout most of my adolescent and teenage years. For almost a decade, I ran an a few different AD&D 2nd Edition campaigns, and always loved it. But as adulthood crept in, friends started moving away, responsibilities started piling up, and the games fell by the wayside. I tried the new editions as they came out, but none of them pulled me back in the way 2nd Edition did, and no game ever made it past two or three sessions... until I discovered Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
I purchased the 5th Edition starter box (with the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure) because it was reasonably cheap, and I'd heard really good things about the new edition. After just a couple of sessions, I was hooked, and so were my players. To anyone who's played D&D in the past, but never gotten into any of the more recent editions, I strongly encourage you to check out 5e - Wizards really did knock it out of the park, and for the first time in almost two decades, I'm finally starting to feel like the Dungeon Master I used to be.
Our game has now been running for about four months. We play at a very leisurely pace - one night a week, typically for just a few hours per session. But we've played through the starter box, the players are past level 5, and the game has survived a fair amount of out-of-game social upheaval without falling apart, so I think we're in it for the long haul.
Which leads me to this blog.
Playing D&D in the age of the Internet is awesome. We play in Forgotten Realms, and the Forgotten Realms Wiki alone provides me with endless time-saving resources and depth (even though most of it hasn't been updated for 5th Edition yet). I also use Roll20 to build dungeon maps, track details on monster stats, and generally run the game. We may even be adding a remote player in the near future, who can connect in through the Roll20 interface just as if they were sitting at the table with us. And Deviant Art is an incredible resource for those of us who (like me) have zero innate fine art talent, yet still want to drive the vision in their head into something players can see with their own eyes. Some of the best artists in the world are on there, and they're offering up their work for free (note: specific licensing varies from image to image, and in no way am I encouraging anyone to steal artwork; these artists deserve every penny they earn, and then some, so please treat them fairly). In fact, the beautiful background image on this very blog comes courtesy of Deviant Artist Kerembeyit.
But for all the new tools and resources that are available, one thing hasn't changed - the DM still needs to come up with new and exciting adventures for his party. This has always been my favorite part of D&D - I love creating rich, living worlds, full of mystery and adventure, and then watching how players react as the story unfolds. It's basically the reason I DM.
So I've been spending a fairly large portion of my free time designing adventures for my group, often to truly unnecessary levels of detail. I like to know the complete backstory on almost every NPC the characters meet, so I can portray them in as realistic and multi-dimensional a manner as possible in game. If the PCs head into a town, I want to know the location, layout, and occupants of every inn, tavern, shoppe, temple, and stronghold they might visit while they're there. If they're going to pick up a traveling companion or square off against a villain, I don't just want a stat block, I want a full character sheet. I feel that the dungeons I create should be every bit as full and vibrant as the professionally produced dungeons that come out of a boxed adventure, complete with rich maps, graphics, and props. It's a lot of fun for me to build all of this. But I've been noticing that after spending all the effort to put this content in place, my players will typically enjoy it for a game session or two, and then it gets relegated to the dusty corners of my hard drive, never again to see the light of day. That seems like a shame to me.
So, I've decided to share all this extra content with the world, and this blog is the place where I'm going to do it. To be fair, my intentions here aren't totally altruistic - uploading documents, notes, and character details to this blog gives me an online backup, and lets me maintain a linear timeline of events within my game. I strive to create as high-quality content as possible, and I like to think that with a little effort and polish, any of my quests could be cleaned up and sold as commercial out of the box adventures. However, these were all created specifically for my campaign, and often under time constraints that don't allow me the opportunity to go back and clean things up, fix every typo, or correct every inconsistency. A lot of times during play, things will get left out, put in, re-arranged, or just changed outright on account of player actions. Because of this, events referenced in long running campaign adventures may be inconsistent from previous sessions. And while I try not to reference specific characters too much so that the adventure can be kept generic, I won't do so at the expense of making the game enjoyable and unique for my players, so occasional references to our specific party will sometimes make it into the final product. The point is that I want to make this information available to other DMs for their players, but this blog is ultimately supposed to support my campaign, not distract from it. So expect to use this content as a "jumping off" point for customization, not necessarily a finished product. How much you need or want to customize it is up to you.
But with that caveat out of the way, I hope you'll enjoy the resources that I post here, and that they can get some extra life in your campaigns, rather than going to waste on my computer. I'll probably be in here updating this blog after every game session with game notes, NPC character sheets, in-game histories from our scribe, and occasionally maps and adventure notes.
One final VERY IMPORTANT note: this blog is very much for Dungeon Masters ONLY. If you are a player character - ESPECIALLY ONE PLAYING IN ANY OF MY CAMPAIGNS - stop reading this blog and navigate away RIGHT NOW. Most of the stuff I write hinges on mysteries that unfold over many game sessions, or even an entire campaign. Knowing what's coming will completely spoil the game for you and the other players. If your DM is running any of my campaigns and you want to cheat by reading ahead, I can't stop you. But just like Christmas wasn't fun if you sneaked a peak at what your parents bought you before it was wrapped, knowing what's coming in any of my adventures will only remove the challenge and short-circuit the game.
So there you have it. Stay tuned for easy to implement adventures and DM resources. Every thing I post here can be considered to be under the standard Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (except for content or graphics which I did not personally create). But if you end up using anything I post here in your game, I'd love to hear about it. Please leave a comment on any post with questions, thoughts, or whatever strikes your fancy. I'd love to find out that I'm making life easier for other Dungeon Masters.
Happy Trails & Grand Adventures,
Talis
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