Image by DMFaenor
Sundered Realms: The Dome and the Delvers
Delve mega-dungeons and survive faction plotting in an advanced, high-magic megacity full of lost places and hidden plots. For Beginners and Vets!
$30.00
/ Session
Details
Weekly / Thursday - 11:00 PM UTC
Dec 18 / Session 158
Session Duration / 2–2.5 hours
Campaign Length / 200–500 Sessions
5 / 6 Seats Filled
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Schedule
Meet your party members
5/6
About the adventure
Your home is the Endless city, a sprawl of ancient and new architecture teeming with humanoids of all shapes and sizes. The cities swell with folks, overcrowded, streets cut through buildings that crowd over each other. Walkways crisscross the air between buildings.Resources are scarce, contested, and the landscape is pocked with ruins of stone and glass. Beneath all of this is where you make your name and fortune, delving down beneath the crypts and ruins, through hazards both natural and otherworldly, opening lost vaults, raiding tombs, and piercing the secrets of the Under. You are a Delver, a professional treasure-seeker, trained by the best colleges of the Delver's Guild. You are employed, sponsored, by one of the great factions that rule Nangolath...and the politics can be as deadly as the dangers of the Under. The City glows during night and day, flying ships dot the sky, guidelights lead the way both up and down through the tangled maze of streets. Shop signs glow with faerie fire and animated illusions, beckoning the passerby in to pick over gleaming novelties from some other *where*, or to try the newest of some arcane confection. Machinery gurgles beneath the streets, steam and ether conduits snake their way up buildings, and mega-structures squat over whole neighborhoods on stilts of stone and magic. Enter a world of exploration, dungeon-crawling, intrigue, and high magic, where a great city stretches over the trapped land, and beneath it the measureless paths of the Under. Research and explore ruins, caverns, and lost lands beneath the earth. Develop resources, contacts, and put together the secrets of a vast complex of dungeons beneath the crumbling, magic-drenched city streets. Engage in tactical combat with the strange denizens of the Under, and even other city-dwellers who try to rob your or stand in your way. Bring riches back to the surface to help build your fortune, name, and your next delving! Gameplay You are trained by the best, equipped with the same, and await with excitement your first delving into the endless, shifting Under. Explore lost places, navigate newly-discovered or time lost societies, piece together history...and the future. Crawl through dungeons of stone, steam, and shadow. Survive deadly traps, predators, and enemies. Discover lost treasure and items of power. Manage resources and contacts, research myths and legends then go seek them out. Build a life for your character between delves, and develop a working relationship with your crew. Elements of old-school play are used, and the challenge level is moderate to high when it comes to deadly dangers...there will rarely be an easy or trivial fight. Traps can be mean and sneaky. Characters to take apart and remake things, create or commission items. Players are invited to describe killing actions, spell descriptions, appearance/mannerisms, RP as much as is fun, and pull shenanigans to succeed! Glory awaits you, Delver, if you can cheat death!
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(55)
4 years on StartPlaying
1032 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Storytelling, Teacher
Average response time: 19 hours
Response rate: 100%
About me
Imagine The air is cold, stale, and dry. You entered to half-buried hill of old stones following clues scrounged from the lair of cultists, paired with research the wizard spent weeks on...weeks of boredom in the sleepy town. Now, you finally get to stretch your limbs and do what you do best! Ahead of your group the darkness billows like a gauzy curtain. Rock dust grits beneath your boots as the party creeps into a broken chamber. The small sounds you make echo back to you seconds later, distorted, and the ceiling is lost above you in shadow. You can feel the crushing weight of stone above. The fighter carries a torch which gutters in a sudden wind. Sounds creep from the surrounding dark; the dry rasp of scales on stone. The sorcerer's eyes go white as it watches from above through the eyes if it's familiar. The sound of the rogue's footsteps fade as they slip away from the torch's light, knowing that an attack is imminent. Inhuman throats hiss all around the party, whispering coughs punctuating the roiling darkness. At the edges of the torch light the gloom takes shape. Scaled creatures in filthy robes hiss as they charge into the circle of the party's light...What do *you* do?! Decades of Passion and Experience are your Game Engine Play campaigns that are a combination of player-generated and GM-inspired. Be immersed in rich description, action, problem-solving, and meaningful choice! Enjoy tense combat in a combination of grid tactics and narrative description. Dive into sandbox-style play, build your character’s name, resources, and power while unraveling mysteries and secrets. Then use those secrets to alter the direction of the world story, impacting hundreds or thousands with your decisions. Interact with new game mechanics, magic items, and creatures. Personalize your character and tie their abilities to the history of the world. Enjoy tailored gameplay based on character background, abilities, and player playstyle. Delve into grounded and human settings, with events happening beyond your character's actions, and NPCs who have agendas of their own. Experience detailed, evocative worlds, and explore them with a fun table of players and flexible GM who has something to offer every playstyle! Different Playstyles I run several tables and each table has a different game style. New players are absolutely welcome! I enjoy bringing new players in. It may actually be one of my favorite things. New players always bring a fresh perspective, a curiosity about the game, a willingness to flow with others, fresh creativity, and bravery when it comes to trying new things. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are my best tables for new players. Some of my tables are more challenging than others, some campaigns or groups leaning more toward grittyness, hardcore gameplay, and deep detail. Regardless, the groups that form around my game tables are all gracious and patient...because this is what we feel it takes to make a great game! Old-School, Narrative, and Homebrew I combine elements from many editions of the game, alter rules for each table and world to match the theme, and in many ways tailor the game to my table. If you are looking for a strict interpretation of 5e rules, looking to play the mechanics, min/max, run game-breaking builds, etc, and are put off by homebrew and rule changes I may not be the DM for you. However, if you are into the spirit of co-creation, like characters that are unique to the table, and want both narrative and granular play then feel free to join us and observe a session!
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
Campaign is underway, but please feel invited to join us! I excel at getting players oriented :) CHARACTER CREATION ABILITY SCORES: Standard Array RACES ALLOWED: All Starting Level: 10 One Additional Feat EQUIPMENT Full compliment of standard equipment, including all kits, tools, weapons, and armor you are proficient with. 2 Uncommon Magical Item Three Common Magical item 1 Rare Magical item Think over one trick, bit of knowledge, tactic, or angle that gives your character an edge. Think about the situation that this edge works in. This will be an additional bonus or ability to start with. In terms of the world your character will inhabit think of a combination of Ravnica, Eberron, Arcane, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun!
An endless, arcane-powered cityscape above and a sprawling megadungeon of subrealms beneath! Fans of Eberron, Ravnica, Shadowrun, and old-school dungeon-crawls will love this original setting! CHARACTER CREATION ABILITY SCORES: Standard Array RACES ALLOWED: All Level: 11 1 Additional Feat 4 Common Magical Item 2 Uncommon (run each by DM) Game is set to reach at least 16th level. Message me on discord, and feel free to come sit in and check the game out. New players will have a private session to make their character, set expectations, and get caught up with the world story, and the fee for the private session will be refunded after the players has played for a few sessions. *Story so far...* Succeeding the Commencement Competition and becoming official Delvers, the party has chosen the faction which will sponsor their delves, and has entered The Shimmering Dark, the upper edge of a greater complex of shadowy fey and dragon broods! Game is set to reach at least 16th level. After a terrifying meeting and negotiation with Lady Ossirith, a shadow hag who rules the Shimmering Dark, the party has returned to the surface, stepping right into a web of intrigue. Rivals from their training school pay a surprising visit to the party while they take a simple delve from the job board into the endless underground lake known as the Drink. They find a sealed chamber, and break into it, finding and activating a teleportation stone within. Now they are back in The Gash, home of the kobolds and the location of the Commencement Competition. Ascending back to the city the companions discover a hidden kobold trading post thriving just beneath the streets of Centra, generating questions about the true relationship between the Delving Guild and the kobolds so close beneath. The new stars of the delving world have started a small church, aligned themselves with the courtesans and entertainers of the Courts of the Fey, and have begun to delve more deeply into the mysteries of the Under; first into the lightless Whispering Deeps, then to the great underground Falls of Tel'Dorath, and now to the strangely mechanized Pillars of L'lath...where they face wasp-folk who seemed to be infected with a metallic virus. The crew returns to the mysterious, mechanized Pillars of L'lath. The area is an unimaginably vast cavern, its hidden ceiling propped up by pillars made of mixed stone and metal more than 5 miles high. There the party navigates a hereditary war between wasp-worshipping drow and refugee Svirfneblin. The electrified clockwork machinery that runs much of the pillars seems to have broken down. The air is full of rust which billows up from the deep on hidden air currents. The demands on the artificer loom large, as does the warnings of a goddess to mind carefully their alliances. Now we enter a labyrinth of glassy, corroded caverns, mutant dens, shanty-towns, and heaping ruins pocked with monstrosities, the region choked with lurid green Vapor. Baeltian scientists with their pulsing machines, Sundered City alchemists and the fel research they conduct, webs of deceit, assassination, and turf warfare between crumbling heaps of civilization, the Poisoned Cities offers many challenges. First, the party must find their friend, then decide if they will explore the region for the first time or return to Centra and begin plotting their attack on the Union Doctrinaire's assassin-zealots!
What to expect
Preparing for the session
The world is inspired by my love of gritty, fantasy, cyberpunk fiction, intrigue, conspiracy theories, and the concept of professional adventurers. Get the flavor watching Altered Carbon, The Witcher and/or watching Dresden Files. There are pro adventurers, spies and agents vying for the dominance of their guild, trade firm, or noble house, there are opportunists everywhere, and deals are made and broken quickly as the ever-shifting political tides of the world crash back and forth. The Characters work as delvers. Delvers are professional adventurers, and belong to a guild which gives them discounts on services and special knowledge about the under. They have to give the guild a percentage of their take from each trip into the Under, but will have free room and board. Make sure you have stuff ready before game: Notepad to keep game notes and questions Water Snacks Fidget toy Mic, headphones, discord setup Inspiration: miniatures, art, lighting, etc
What DMFaenor brings to the table
ROll20 will be used for evocative 2D maps, game notes, die rolling, character sheets (D&DBeyond is fine, too!) and tokens. Discord is used for voice, music, and sharing game art images.
Homebrew rules
Using mostly 2014 rules Healing potions are a bonus action Session Inspiration: players and DM get inspiration at the top of the session. Each time a players uses theirs the DM gets another, but can only have one from a player at a time. Can be used to reroll a d20, damage roll, or other check or save. Can be used before rolling to gain advantage on a d20 check
Equipment needed to play
Microphone
Headphones
Computer
Pen & Paper
Platforms used
Safety
How DMFaenor creates a safe table
-Content Warning: Violence, creation of suspense, descriptive combat, NPC and potential character death. -Hard NOs: Torture, sexual abuse. I do NOT include these in my games. If any players attempts to force this they will be kicked. -Romantic scenarios, as well as "bad stuff" may happen "off-screen", but may only be hinted at in the vaguest of terms (that way players are each free to use their imagination if they choose) -I am familiar with the safety toolkit, and make all of them available in-game. Please be respectful of these tools and do not abuse them for game advantage. They are here to help players, not characters. Tools available: X/N/O cards are available for players- O=player ok to continue, N=players is becoming uncomfortable with content/events, X=players needs to stop or withdraw for a moment and reassess their experience. Script change-players can request Stop, FF, RW events if they are becoming triggered or feeling unsafe. The group can take Breaks as needed Open Door- If a player has to leave the session or campaign for reasons of emotional or psychological safety that player will be allowed to return as they desire. -I am *very* open to aftercare, debriefing, session wrap with highlights and stars and wishes! -Character creation/session 0 will give players an opportunity to mention specific triggers and needed boundaries, and each player will be expected to respect the boundaries set. Violators will be kicked.
Content warnings
Safety tools used