The Fated Few | A Mythic Fantasy Sandbox Adventure - 2024 Rules
A frontier realm, beset by disaster and mythic beasts, looks to strange oracles for answers. Without explanation, they name you Defender of The Realm.
$15.00
/ Session
Details
Bi-weekly / Monday - 11:30 PM UTC
Mar 9 / Session 3
Session Duration / 3–4 hours
4 / 6 Seats Filled
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Schedule
Meet your party members
4/6
About the adventure
Before you is a large, freestanding archway of worn, ancient stone, perhaps twelve feet high and ten feet wide. Whatever doors or gates once blocked the arch have long since disintegrated. Scattered beyond it amongst the weeds are the faintest hints and outlines of whatever structure the arch used to open into. How has this doorway remained standing all this time as the rest of the building was reclaimed by the land? As you look through it, the air within it seems to darken until you’re staring into the blackness of a moonless sky, complete with faint stars. Are those tiny points of light moving? Then, as quickly as it appeared, the darkness fades, leaving only you and the empty arch and the weeds and the ruins. Was this foretold by the oracle? Write your own legend in a realm we've built together! In our Session 0, we will collectively construct the local area and populate it with myths and portents - the seeds of our adventures! Then we will let our story of prophecy and fate unfold organically as the characters explore their frontier realm. The oracles are otherworldly beings, each gifted and cursed with their own specific kind of foresight. They appear from the wilds to deliver divine prophecies to the people. One such oracle visited you - be it recently or in your childhood - to ordain you a Defender of The Realm. The honor is yours whether you want it or not, and now the people look to you for protection. Will you rise to claim your destiny, or succumb to the cruelties of fate?
Game style
Hexcrawl / Exploration
Dungeon Crawl
Realm Building
Tactical / Crunchy
Rules as Written (RaW)
Game themes
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(7)
Less than a year on StartPlaying
3 games hosted
Highly rated for: Knows the Rules, Creativity, Inclusive
About me
It’s 1994, and I’m sitting with a gang of my older brother’s friends in my parents’ garage around a ping pong table with the net taken down and a seemingly massive grid map laid over it. It’s cold and we have to wear coats. A fluorescent bulb flickers slightly a couple of feet above our heads and casts a harsh light on everything. In hindsight, I know that we didn’t have a ton of miniatures or scenery and it was all just crudely rendered wet-erase marker - but when I remember it, there are pine trees and grassy hills and jagged outcroppings of grey stone. My friends and I are fighting a coven of hags and their ogre minions. I don’t remember how the battle ended. I don’t even remember my character’s name or anything about them. But I remember those people in that room and that feeling of being together with them. I was hooked and I remain hooked on this hobby to this day.
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
📖 2024 rules. Starting at level 1. 🎲🎲🎲🎲 We will roll ability scores together over Discord in Session 0 (or possibly before). OPTIONAL: If you're brave enough - keep your rolled stats in order with the first roll being your Strength, the second your Dexterity, on so on down the line so that you're more discovering your character than building them. Let me stress that you don't HAVE to do this, but it's a fun challenge. 🧝🏼♀️ Base classes can be taken from The Player's Handbook. 🧌 Species can be used from The Player's Handbook and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. 💫 Subclasses and spells are available from The Player's Handbook, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. I'm not a fan of Hexblade Warlock and Twilight Cleric for reasons I'm happy to explain if you want to ask. Those two are disallowed at my table. 🗺️ Because we will be creating our adventuring realm together, we'll be able to place items from your backstory on the map in Session 0. Remember that your first level characters don't need a super involved backstory - the most interesting parts of their lives are ahead of them rather than behind. 🧙🏼♂️ Each character will be visited in Session 0 by a mysterious Oracle at some point in their history. This Oracle will ordain them as a Defender of The Realm and provide a cryptic portent that links that character's fate to that of The Realm. 🥷🏽 NOTE: I'm sure character builds from Reddit have their place in the hobby, but this campaign doesn't require some meta uberbuild to be fun.
What to expect
Preparing for the session
You will need: A free account on Discord to join the campaign server for text and voice chats. A free account on DNDBeyond for your character sheet. A free account on Roll20 to access the Virtual Table Top (VTT) Download the free browser extension Beyond20 to better integrate DNDBeyond with Roll20. I ask that you have a decent microphone and join our games from a quiet place with minimal background noise and distractions. Please configure your audio such that the signal has some fidelity to it and does not crackle, echo, or break up excessively.
What GM Delaney brings to the table
I come from 30 years of DMing experience and am a professional entertainer and storyteller by trade. I have no fear of embarrassment when it comes to embodying ridiculous or over-the-top NPCs. I pride myself on my tactics, and if it makes sense for the enemy to be ruthless and cunning, they absolutely will be. I want, above all, for you to have fun and feel welcome at my table. For this specific campaign, I have a deep collection of dungeon maps and an expansive list of Portents, each leading to its own set of story beats, complications, and monsters. There is an equally wide set of individual Oracles - each weirder than the last - to deliver those Portents. The overall effect is that of each character's prophesized fate weaving together naturally with the others as they explore The Realm together as its Defenders. If I ran this game 1,000 times, none of them would turn out like the others. This campaign has a special Session 0, wherein we build The Realm together, name it and its major landmarks, and further populate it with items from your characters' backstories. I want you to feel as much ownership of this campaign as I do. This is a more Old School D&D experience. I'm not saying it will be loaded with "gotcha!" traps and instant death monsters, but we will be utilizing a hexcrawl exploration style complete with dungeon delves and potentially lethal combat. There will still be plenty of roleplaying to be had alongside all of this.
Homebrew rules
Expect Long Rests in dangerous or wild places to be truly dangerous. Conversely, as Defenders of The Realm, you will be offered hospitality - within reason - free of charge in almost any settled area. If there are homebrew rules that you enjoy, please let me know as I am always open to hearing about them. But mostly expect me to run things Rules as Written (RaW) unless a rule becomes tedious, unfun, or cumbersome.
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Platforms used
Safety
How GM Delaney creates a safe table
We will set out safety guidelines in Session 0. Please check the content warnings with both the understanding that I have tried to be pretty exhaustive with what may occur in an improvisational game and that the game experience may change during play and content / trigger / safety issues can be handled during play with verbal or text communications in public or private. We will have some debrief time after each session in chat or live voice in case anyone has concerns to bring up. My door is open to messages on Discord at all times (that I am awake). Misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia and other bigotry (fantasy or otherwise) will not be tolerated at my table. Please address players and characters by their expressed names and pronouns and behave in a respectful manner towards everyone at the table at all times. Romance beyond light flirting will fade to black. Sex and sexual violence will not be depicted in my game. Violence towards / harm to children will not be discussed in-game.
Content warnings
Safety tools used