A Raven Calls: going Dungeons and Dragons (5E)

Okay, so this has been brewing for a while, and since I have my Ender and as such access to print what I need, I really wanted to DM a group.

And so I send out notes to some friends to ask if they where intrested, because Noshi certainly is.  

But this did bring a bit of fun-packed problem with it; baby Thorin.  The idea was to run a session once a month at TSA once the covid-19 pandemic is a thing of memory.  But with a baby, one can never be sure if we could actually get both there.

So I came up with the "free agent" idea.  While I will indeed run the sessions over at the club with the party, I will, in parallel, also run "duets" or DM and a single player, sessions with Noshi at home, shortly after the monthly game.  That way, she kind of becomes a free agent that can join the table when she can come to the club, but she will also be staying "on level" with the other players as a result as she has to solve her own solo adventures in the meantime.

I went through DriveThruRPG to grab each and every free adventure module suitable with DnD 5E as a result, including some "low prep" and "one shot one night" adventures to that end.  And those are also handy when someone of the party has to cancel last moment.

The campaign world itself will be totally of my own invention, with a "growing map" as players travel the lands, and I kind of will be basing myself on the sandbox model of the very first Elder Scrolls videogame from the mid 90s, Arena.  To that end, I can exchange and intertwine hack and slash, puzzle or dungeon crawl adventures as needed, and let the campaign and the players grow from there onwards as I devellop my campaign world "sort of on the go".

The planned start is somewhere around summer break, as this gives me ample time to print up dungeon tiles, monsters, npc's and the likes as well.  As it will be held mostly at the club for the bigger games, this also gives the benefit that for the sessions taking place in forests or villages, I have all the club scenery at hand to lay out the "lay of the land" as an added bonus.

I did impose upon myself two "DM Rules", things I will adhore to while adventuring:

a) No-one dies before they reach level 8, unless of their own insane stupdity (so no, your not immortal, but that goblin spear through the chest will put you out of the adventure, but you'll recover as it missed any vitals).

b) not ONE FOOT will be put down in Ravenloft (blame our old GM, we always ended up there from the word go... even when we weren't playing the setting).

But for now, I`m first going to sort through all the files and adventures, and as a result already prepare some print maps for the Ender-3 to have a go once the first batch of dungeon tiles, whom I`ll be start printing this week, is ready.

This will be fun hopefully, and let's see how I manage on my first outing as DM instead of as a player... it,s not like I can`t tell a story, or have an immense mental and fysical library of books, series, novels and games to draw from to create campaings.

Because I can`t count how many times I though with a book or series "heck, that would be a great adventure to play"...