It’s in the title! What’s your current campaign or setting you’ve been playing in recently?
I’ll start:
I’ve been running a homebrew game that’s gone all over the place over the years. My group fought a doppleganger invasion, overthrew a local oppressive government, battled with a devil cult, and many more odd ball adventures.
Recently after one party member drew the Moon from the Deck of Many things and wished to become “God Emperor” I decided to overhaul the world as a space themed adventure. The party is now playing in an alternate reality where the party member who made the wish is now Emperor but the party’s old characters, twisted by some evil magic, are now working against them to bring down the empire.
I homebrewed a thing set on an alternate history future Earth where basically, there’s an alternate history divergence with Jimmy Carter not losing reelection and then the US basically turning into a demsoc utopia resulting in world peace and sustainable prosperity, and then three different races of aliens show up. At first things go well with humanity, but then there’s complications and tensions both between and within those three races, and the most advanced of the three ends up seeing humanity as a threat to them due to a bunch of other factors I introduced that would take way too long to explain and releasing a viral bioweapon that ended up killing most of humanity in the space of a year before a coalition of scientists and soldiers from all four species banded together to synthesize a cure and stop things. All of the game stuff happens well after, in the ruins of civilization, a la Fallout, but with a post-plague instead of post-nuclear aesthetic.
I have a whole novella detailing all of that lore on my Google Drive, most of which I wrote while unemployed in 2019. So you can imagine how weird 2020 was for me.
But that’s on the backburner at the moment because my group is playing through the one with Gundren Rockseeker on the Sword Coast right now, with someone else DMing, because my mental health wasn’t great in 2021 but we still wanted to play.
Currently running Dungeon of the Mad Mage after we finished Dragon Heist. We’re in level 3 and skull port in the dungeon. But the party has taken a way back to the surface of Waterdeep now to deal with their conflicts with the Xanathar guild which has escalated into all out war.
How has the transition been? I’ve played Dragon Heist, but Mad Mage is a megadungeon, right? It seems like a completely different gaming style, has your group adapted well? Do you see them finishing the megadungeon, or do you think their travel back to the surface means the campaign is going towards homebrew?
There is a lot of homebrew that I added in. I tied in NPCs from the PCs back stories. All the lose ends from the Dragon Heist adventure I’m also directing to down there such as the fleeing Skeemo Weirdbottle is making his way to skullport now. Some is already in the adventure like the Xanathar guild.
The gameplay is very different but the party said they wanted to try it and it’s a nice change of pace. But I make sure to expand some of the roleplay elements down in the dungeon to be more prominent. Overall the dungeon is pretty well designed imo so it all ends up working out well.
Currently they are back to Waterdeep to deal with the Xanathar once and for all.
