The Slaves' Revenge: A Calimshan Saga

About the adventure

I think this campaign will be really exciting and rewarding for a certain sort of player, but not everyone. Below I'll describe the style of this campaign so you can determine if you are that certain sort of player: Ø This is a zero to hero adventure. You will begin with no gear, no equipment, no weapons. ⚔️ This campaign will be combat heavy. Almost every session will have combat, often two and occasionally even three. 🎲 Rolling dice is fun, right? I try to make sure every skill, no matter how obscure, has a useful application in the game. Want to make use of that flute proficiency? We'll work something out. Want to craft some poisons? Let's design a system. Did you take expertise in Medicine? Yeah, there will be opportunities for medicine checks. The world will be deeply interactive. 🏰 Being a hero in an epic fantasy story should be exciting. Tracking arrows and counting rations is boring. I eschew simulationist mechanics. I can see how some people could be into that, but you won't find it here. 🏖️🚂 You always hear about "the sandbox" and "the railroad" in descriptions of campaigns. Well, this one isn't quite either. The design is influenced by the Node-Based design philosophy in The Alexandrian's TTRPG blog. This isn't a sandbox. If your characters decide they want to charter a pirate ship and take off for the Moonshae Isles, that sounds cool, but it's not part of this adventure. I have a set of places, people, groups, and encounters that are part of this campaign. You can interact with them in a variety of orders, styles, and approaches, but you need to commit to the quest this campaign offers: get revenge on your enslavers. How you do that is up to you. 🛣 This will be a road story. There won't be a hub town like in Lost Mine of Phandelver. There won't be persistent faction competition like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. There won't be any bastions or home bases. There's no political intrigue. This will be a picaresque journey, like the Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, Candide, Watership Down, or Lord of the Rings. 🎭 The tone of the story will be dramatic and serious. Obviously, a good session involves tossing around jokes and everyone cracking up now and then, but the characters and story itself are serious. If you want to make a vampire spawn version of Michael Jackson or have a blue halfling themed like a Smurf who throws cupcakes in combat, this is not the campaign for that. 💀 No PvP. The party members suffered together and bonded through that and are committed to helping each other achieve their goal: revenge. 📖 This campaign is ideal for intermediate players. I've run Learn to Play campaigns before, and that is fun, but this one is aimed at people who understand the basic rules and know their way around a character sheet. On the other hand, if you are a DnD expert who knows exactly what Jeremy Crawford said about the wording of every 4e power in a 2010 Reddit AMA, you may be frustrated that your knowledge exceeds that of the DM.