Let Me Tell You About My Campaign: Age of Awakening

About two months ago Dave decided to tell you about his campaign – the setting, world, how it all began, characters, planning, and some of his house rules. He set me up to share about my campaign also, as a large part of planning for both of our games was done together. In fact his game is being run in a world that I designed and handed over for him to take and expand upon as he saw fit. What I’d like to touch upon in this post is how I went about aging an old campaign world as well as the interactions of PCs and storylines between my game, The Age of Awakening, and Dave’s game.

Aging a World

As I explained in my post about being an inexperienced DM, my first attempt at running a D&D game was during my first year of college. After its very brief run I found myself with as detailed a back story for a group of long forgotten heroes as I had for the party  and time period that I’d just run. The campaign featured no empire or ruling nation and simply had a spread out collection of barely associated townships. One of the locations was a prominent port city on the edge of a sea, but the lands beyond and around the sea were never explored. For my second campaign, still in college, the game was set entirely within a thriving city and the surrounding lands of a single kingdom with only the hint of the nearby sea. If the two maps were put side by side, you could begin to see the larger continent that I’d started in pieces with only hints and clues for what lie beyond.

When I sat down with the serious intent to create an entire continent for Dave and myself to set our games, I turned to the early frameworks I’d set up in college. What I provided to Dave was a fairly detailed map of what existed before his game and a rough outline of events and names associated with that map. I tried my very best to not give off the impression of handing over a child of mine to Dave, instead I insisted that he was (and still is) welcome and free to modify things to his liking and improve upon the world as he saw fit. The next step was aging the world I’d just handed off several hundred years and setting up my own game world. Much to my surprise, the greatest challenge of the dual-DM set up also became an interesting tool for both of us to use in our games. As Dave’s game has already happened in my time line, but has not yet been played out, we needed a firm divide and neither of us saw any reason to not make it mysterious and undefined. So in creating my campaign I included an assumed reset of history and gave my game a slightly post-apocalyptic theme, no written history touches within a certain number of years of Dave’s game and any stories passed down of those times have long since become myth.

The Beginning

While Dave introduced a controlling power (The Inquisition) to help guide his players early on I decided to make the early portion of my game almost entirely location based. I developed a decent sized town that was once a grand gateway into a long forgotten empire and named it Portalis. The town had recently come under a series of misfortunes at one time seemingly by coincidence, but a more sinister intention sat just below the surface. I’ve never been a fan of starting a group of characters as friends unless the players ask me to, so I attempted to form the group by happenstance and proximity rather than force things or predetermine them. A few of the methods I used were mutual NPC acquaintances that either go missing or become involved in a situation they cannot handle, acts of kidnapping or trapping that cause the characters to interact, or a local event that draws a large crowd together and allows the PCs to interact either directly or indirectly.

Characters and Players

Original recurring characters include:

• Lel, Githyanki Spellscarred Swordmage, played by Joshx0rfz
• Teadora, Human Cleric of Pelor, played by Sucilaria
• Carric Rolen, Elf Ranger, played by Blumpkin
• Rex Trawkus, Human Ranger, played by Jacob
• Istarya, Eladrin Wizard/Warlock, played by DaveTheGame
• Gwrtheyrn, Dragonborn Paladin, played by Andrew
• McGwyver Cogwheel, Dwarf Artificer, played by Blogee

Mid-heroic tier several of my players decided they wanted to try out something new or a class from the PHB2, so Rex, Carric, and Gwrtheyrn left and the party was joined by:

• Nox Arg’Belkord, Hobgoblin Barbarian, played by Jacob
• Fargrim Morgran, Dwarf Warden, played by Blumpkin
• Oryn, Shifter Druid, played by Andrew
• Cyrra, Changeling Bard, played by Geek’s Dream Girl

Thankfully the shift in characters seems to have gone over well as all of the above characters are going strong into the paragon tier. While both my game and Dave’s have a large number of players, it is rare that more than six can attend my game so I haven’t had to split the party very much to date.

Historic Interactions

I could tell very early on that Dave and I were doing something very interesting when one of my players created the aloof and borderline-insane artificer named McGwyver Cogwheel with a large family tree and shortly afterward Dave’s party was buying items from a General Ulysses S. Cogwheel. We’ve reused a handful of locations from one game to the next, but for the most part things are fairly different due to the hundreds of years between games. As I aged the game world I took many of the names on the map I gave to Dave and changed them to derivative or partial names for my own game.

The region known as Tartarus in Dave’s world became Tarturia, Alexandren became Lesandria, and the Kingdom of Dusk flooded and became known as the Twilight Marshes. Perhaps more interesting is what I’m currently working on for paragon tier, Dave ran his party through the Thunderspire Labyrinth module in mid-heroic and now my party has cause to go there. I’ve aged a module before when I ran my party through the Ruins of Fell Keep, an aged, advanced, and sped up version of the Keep on the Shadowfell module that was adapted for my game. It’s a surprisingly simple and fun task, imaging what might happen to a dungeon over a hundred years after a group of adventurer’s tears through and ransacks the place.

A surprising development of this whole set up has been the promise from several of Dave’s players that they will do everything in their power to ruin my game world through their character’s actions in the past. I’ve assured them that such a thing would be impossible, but I surely welcome them to try! The Main Event can be quoted as saying:

I am only playing in Dave’s game to ruin your campaign world.

When we were originally planning everything out I believe we both imagined these glorious interactions between the games at every level of play, but the reality of it has left most of the heroic and early paragon tiers without much happening. However, it appears that mid-to-late paragon is providing several great chances for each of us to throw NPCs, items, or even the whole party over to the other DM to see what happens.

Moving Forward

As I planned out the general flow of my campaign, I decided that I wanted a definitive event to mark the party’s advancement into the paragon tier. I eventually settled on an invasion of the continent by alien forces, it allowed me to reset the party in a sense and despite their new found powers and familiarity with the game world they would yet again feel oppressed and downtrodden in the face of new and mysterious foes. To help build up to the event I sprinkled several strange but mundane items into my heroic adventures – the severed claw of an unrecognizable creature, visions of strange ships with black sails, and a newly formed nation with strange customs and suspicious motives. At the culmination of the heroic tier my party easily bested their longtime villain and seemingly saved the day, only to discover strange forces invading their homelands and changing the status quo. Perhaps in a later article I will touch on the details of the invading force and share some advice on how to run an invasion of your own game world.