Divine Family Matters | Roleplay as Children of the Gods!

Creating your character

Divine Family Matters is a D&D 5e (2024) campaign. We'll be creating our characters in the first session (Session Zero). You should be able to roll your characters as you would normally, with a little twist: Most godly powers and effects the characters have as a result of their divine lineage will map to class powers. For instance, a child of Hephaestus, god of the forge, artisans, and fire (and other things), might have the class of Sorcerer and would choose appropriate spells. A few statistics tweaked and some cosmetic effects added, a little imagination added, and you have a playable demigod. We're defaulting to Greek mythology, but if a player has an idea from some other mythos (Norse, Egyptian, etc.), those ideas are welcome and will be considered. We'll find a way to make your idea work, or close to it. Don't worry, all these details will be worked out with each player in our first session, or separately over Discord.

Preparing for the session

You will need accounts at the following places (all free for the purposes of playing in this campaign). startplaying.games roll20.net dndbeyond.com discord.com (you can use either the web interface or the desktop client, whatever works best) You will also need a copy of the D&D 5e 2024 Players Handbook. (If you're in one of my campaigns, you will be granted access to a copy of this book free of charge!) When you get your discord account, please send me your username so that I can invite you to the discord server.

What Matt brings to the table

I provide a safe space to have fun and let your hair down for awhile. We'll have safety rules that we'll go over in Session Zero and that everyone will agree upon, and I'm not shy about giving warnings or removing players who don't respect those boundaries. My games are roleplay-heavy and (mostly) light on combat. This isn't to say you'll never fight or it won't be exciting, but I'd rather utilize the Rule of Cool and let somebody do something super awesome than spend half a session arguing over the Rules as Written. My games are mostly theatre of the mind, meaning there's not typically a battlemap. I try to use lots of character voices, and I use openly-available music and sound effects in game. Creating a memorable and enjoyable story with my players is one of my favorite things in the universe.

Homebrew rules

Since this campaign is about gods and demigods and not (usually) about standard D&D archetypes, there will be some minor changes Most godly powers and effects the characters have as a result of their divine lineage will map to class powers. For instance, a child of Hephaestus, god of the forge, artisans, and fire (and other things), might have the class of Sorcerer and would choose appropriate spells. A few statistics tweaked and some cosmetic effects added, a little imagination added, and you have a playable demigod. Don't worry, all these details will be worked out with each player in our first session, or separately over Discord between sessions. You will also see some reskinned, redesigned, or original content in the game (I'll never say which!) that you won't find in any rulebook. Other homebrew rules may pop up along the way, and we'll probably integrate those into our Social Contract (discussed in Session Zero).

How Matt creates a safe table

This is extremely important to me as a DM. We'll start Session Zero by creating a Social Contract. You can read a lot more about that here, although it will vary somewhat from what we do since this is a paid game: https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Social_contract . Basically, it's an agreement between us as players about things like: * safety rules, including safety tools (discussed below) * sensitive content the dm should avoid at all costs (due to past player trauma, etc.) * genre and tone of the adventure Everything will be covered in Session Zero, and we'll revisit the contract if it needs changing. For safety tools, I primarily rely on two: X, N, and O cards --------------------- * X Card If we're playing, and somebody is uncomfortable with something happening in game, they can throw an X card (usually by typing it in the chat). This can be done publicly or privately, and then I'll bring it up with the group that someone is uncomfortable and we can rewind and do something else or we can fade to black until that part's over. * N Card Much like an X card, but thrown when somebody feels like we're headed toward a probable X card in the future. Handled the same way as the X. * O Card Used primarily to check to see if the group is OK by continuing with potentially problematic content. Somebody types or says "O?", and the group either agrees or disagrees. If they disagree, it's like the X or N card. Lines and Veils ------------------- These are used to set boundaries in advance on content in a game. * Lines are hard limits. Setting up a line means the content described won't ever appear in the game. * Veils are soft limits for things that are OK "behind closed doors" or in a "fade to black" scenario. A DM might set these up if they don't want to enact explicit sex scenes (HINT: THERE IS A LINE HERE). There are other tools that can be used, and if you'd like to explore their use, please check this document and we can discuss it before Session Zero: https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1583202183294.pdf