The Godless Lands: Genesis

We recently decided to start a new RPG campaign using the tools of D&D Beyond to give it a trial run (which I hope to write about too, soon.) My longtime player Franky jumped into Beyond’s toolset and made his first PC, a half-orc Ranger, the daughter of one of his favorite characters from a game we played way back in the late 90s.

That one decision was backed by the other players. We agreed to set the new games in the homebrewed campaign world we’ve played many fantasy campaigns in, across several games and editions. Some of my earliest blog posts recount the exploits of my friends’ characters in that world.

We established the characters from previous campaigns were either legends or still around but retired, much like 13th Age’s Icons.

As we settled on the core setting, my ideas of playing in a world were all the gods were violently snuffed still churned in my mind. It was a theme I really wanted to explore. I kept the concept near at hand while we continued our discussions.

My players were motivated about creating a party with deep roots in the setting and/or bound by relationships, obligations and common objectives.

Settings wise, we came up with the following:

A few hundred years ago, Jack the Harbinger of Doom, my son Nico’s character from our last two RPG campaigns, entered the world and announced the inevitable coming of the World-Eater.

As Jack walked the land, the Eater invaded our world’s corner of the Multiverse and destroyed the Outer Planes as well as most of its occupants, leading to millions of fiends, celestial and other planar entities to seek refuge on the Material Plane.

Nico’s new PC, a young rock gnome named Samhain Togdeboren, witnessed the destruction brought by Jack’s “Master”. He lost everything and everyone he cared about. To this day, Samhaim blames the Harbinger for the near destruction of the world. He has vowed to find him again and avenge the whole world.

(Yeah, Nico’s new PC wants revenge against his last, world-hopping PC. Tell Oedipus I said hi!)

As can be implied by the story so far, the Eater of Worlds failed to do its thing. Somehow, the greatest heroes of the time (read: my friends’ old characters) managed to banish, distract, or chase the Lovecraftian threat away in the nick of time, thus saving the world one last time before retirement.

Our new campaign starts roughly 500 years later, the Gods haven’t returned, the world is deeply scarred, and civilisations are slowly rebuilding themselves.

I’m so excited, this is one of the most promising campaign I’ve had in ages.

Up next: The Troupe.