up and coming
….and so it begins
….and so it begins
by Gary Whitten
Many years ago, after school one day I went over a friends place to check out this new thing called Dungeons and Dragons. After much stretching of the brain over the concepts of this new thing, I believe we were going through B2 and ran into some kobolds. I proudly proclaimed ‘we kill them all and take their treasure’ and the GM looked at me and said ‘Umm, yeah, doesn’t work that way’. A short time later, my proclamation did end up actually happening but not quite as heroically as I’d envisioned and a more-than-hobby was born for me.
The last 10 or so years, I’ve pretty much been only GMing, some of it in the Forgotten Realms and some of it in settings of my own making. The campaign I’ve been running for the last several years is in a local setting of my own making called the Valley of Aesri. After many campaigns of having the party go here, there and everywhere, I decided to try something where the entirety of the campaign was in a very small setting. It’s allowed me to really add a lot of flavor and detail that really hadn’t been there in previous campaigns, and while the players always had had fun, there’s more of a sense of ownership now.
Over the next six months, I’ll be releasing several PDFs of little bits of the setting and eventually the full campaign setting. Everything I write is designed to be either played in the Valley of Aesri setting as a local campaign or dropped into an existing campaign. Even the Valley of Aesri campaign area can be placed in an existing world.
In this blog, I’ll be offering some tidbits about my experiences in working in small scale/local campaigns as well as some freebies. These may be an NPC, a place, or something else that you might use in your campaign.
Happy gaming