Setting for the Vorpal Chainsword Chronicles

As some of you know, I recently started a Sword & Sorcery 5th edition D&D campaign with my local crew. Thing is, as a fancy-pants weekly business-traveling responsible sad adult I can't seem to get enough productive creativity-time these days to actually flesh out a solid campaign world. One that is internally-consistent and that would allow the players the ability to sandbox-explore like they deserve. I mean, I can type up blogposts in hotel rooms easily enough, but I can't as easily sit back and fully-immerse myself into the fantastic worlds of the mind and create fantasy realms as much as I could in my youth.

Dramatization: Me circa 1988.

So far its just been a city and a dungeon I've had to design/build, which is fine for 1st and 2nd level characters, but I feel like it would be better if I could describe the landscape in a more detailed fashion, without having to build it all myself. Basically what I need is a campaign world template that I can place my own individual dungeons and such on top of if I want, or that the players can explore on their own. It needs to be a good fantasy setting, but not one that's full of elves and hobbits and whatnot. It can't be the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or anything normal. It needs to be something post-apocalyptic, and yet full of alien magic.,,

Carnage of the Blade Demons! - Behind the Screen

So last Saturday I wrote up and ran my first 5th edition D&D game, set in a new Sword and Sorcery world. I mentioned in that post that since I only had a couple hours to write it that I'd be utilizing the charts in the new DM guide to get the brain-juices flowing by randomly rolling up the dungeon adventure bits. I also said I'd let you guys know how it turned out. Well, here's the beef on how I went about creating the adventure from the random-generator charts.

Chronicles of the Vorpal Chainsword begins!

When it comes to D&D, I haven't run anything other than an over-the-top one-shot games in a long time. Its just so easy to keep on prepping terrain and painting minis and never stop, as the ideas keep rolling in even as the original stuff you wanted to make for the game gets finished. So often I'll just keep building and prepping for a one-shot until something actually forces the stars to align and I finally admit its ready to run at a convention or wherever.

However, a couple of my local gamers talked me into actually starting the 5th edition campaign I've been thinking about, and against my instincts of saying: "I want to play 5th, but first let me build the village and orc keep, should only take a couple more weeks..."

Instead I said: "Sure! Come over at noon. Here's the title of the Adventure we'll be playing..."

Chronicles of the Vorpal Chainsword, Episode 1:

Carnage of the Blade Demons!

...the thing is, I don't actually have an adventure written yet (nor have I completely worked out what the 'Blade Demons' are going to be). But I believe that the first step of writing an adventure is coming up with an epic title, so I randomly put three words I thought were cool and mashed them together, which I think sounds pretty solid. Step one completed.

So now I've got three hours, the new DMG and its random dungeon-building tables, and all the terrain and minis I've built/painted over the last ten years. We'll see how it goes. In my next post I'll let you know what I rolled up using the DMG, how I interpreted those results into the adventure, and how it ended up working out.

But for now ...I'd better get rolling!

Game On!