Forest of Fables | A Fairytale D&D Adventure | Play-by-Post

Creating your character

Character creation is meant to be pretty flexible here. My biggest priority is that you make someone you're excited to write, roleplay, and throw headfirst into some deeply questionable fairy tales. Starting Level: Level 3 Ruleset: D&D 5e 2014 Rules Starting Equipment: Use the standard starting equipment provided by your class/background. Hit Points: Take the average HP for each level after 1st. Alignment: Any non-evil alignment is welcome. Your character should ultimately be someone willing to work with the rest of the party. Advancement: Milestone leveling. Rolling Your Stats For each ability score: Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die. Do this six times, then assign those six numbers to whichever ability scores you'd like. Once you've rolled your complete set, you may reroll ONE of the six stats if you'd like. Species, Classes & Subclasses You can use character options from the 2014-era D&D 5e books. Most official species, classes, subclasses, backgrounds, spells, and feats are completely fine. Homebrew Homebrew is allowed - just run it by me first. If you've found a homebrew species, subclass, background, spell, feat, or other character option that you're excited about, send it to me before building around it. I'm generally pretty open to homebrew! I just want to look it over first to make sure it'll play nicely with the rest of the party. Backstories You don't need to write me a novel. You absolutely can, because I will happily read it, but you don't have to. Give me enough to understand: Who is your character? Where did they come from? What do they want? Why are they willing to work with a party? Is there anything from their past you'd be excited to see come back into the story? Your character should be based on an existing fairy tale, they can be completely original, loosely inspired by folklore, connected to a particular story. You just won’t want to play the main character of an existing story. Build Someone You Want to Roleplay Because this is Play-by-Post, we'll have a lot more room for character interaction than we might in a traditional weekly session. Characters with opinions, goals, flaws, relationships, curiosities, fears, secrets, and things they actually want tend to thrive here. Don't worry about creating the most optimized character possible. Create someone you'll be excited to write. Ask for Help! You absolutely do not need to build your character alone. I'm happy to help with the process—whether that's choosing a class, figuring out your ability scores, picking spells, brainstorming a backstory, working out how your character fits into the setting, or literally walking through the character sheet together. New players are very welcome, and there are no silly questions. If you have an idea that's basically "I want to play someone who does THIS, but I have no idea what class that would be," send it to me.

Preparing for the session

You should have a DnDBeyond account (free is fine) and a Discord account.

What Nikki brings to the table

My games are about collaborative storytelling, character development, and creating memorable moments together. While combat has a place in the story, it isn't usually the centerpiece. Expect encounters with meaningful stakes, opportunities for creative problem-solving, and conflicts that grow from the narrative rather than existing simply because it's time to roll initiative. Because Forest of Fables is built around an enchanted world of fairy tales, folklore, and stories that aren't behaving quite the way they're supposed to, there's room for a huge variety of adventures. The Thimble & Thread Inn serves as our home between these adventures—a place to recover, investigate the mysteries of the forest, spend time with other characters, and watch the larger story slowly unfold. This structure lets us explore different fairy tales, folklore, tones, and themes while still maintaining the same characters, relationships, and overarching campaign. You can expect a world filled with recurring NPCs, strange travelers, witches, royals, talking animals, heroes, villains, and plenty of people who don't fit neatly into either category. I love building relationships between player characters and NPCs, and I especially enjoy weaving character backstories, personal goals, and choices into the larger campaign. The people you help—or don't help—will remember you, and the decisions you make can change how their stories end. As a GM, I favor character-driven storytelling over strictly sticking to the rules as written. I love rewarding creativity, clever ideas, and dramatic choices. I generally lean toward Rule of Cool when it makes the story more exciting, while still keeping enough structure and consistency for your abilities, rolls, and decisions to matter. Rules are important, but they exist to help us tell the story—not get in its way. Roleplay is heavily encouraged, especially because the Play-by-Post format gives us plenty of room for character conversations, relationships, downtime, introspection, and smaller moments that sometimes get skipped during live sessions. Players who enjoy pursuing personal goals, interacting with other characters, investigating the world, and actively helping shape the narrative will get the most out of this campaign. Whether we're breaking curses, solving mysteries, wandering into forbidden parts of the forest, arguing with questionable fairy-tale royalty, trying to determine whether the supposed villain actually deserves to be defeated, or discovering that a familiar story isn't quite as familiar as we thought, my goal is to create a story that could only have happened because of the characters you brought into the forest.

Homebrew rules

- Crunchy Crits - a Nat 20 will do max damage + rolled damage - Drinking Potions: Action = full potion, no roll. Bonus Action = roll. - Nat 1 Attacks - will hit an ally in the range of the attack.

How Nikki creates a safe table

Each player will be given a consent sheet full of different possible triggers to mark as green, yellow or red that I will keep on hand - to be completed before we start the campaign. Since we are playing asynchronously, any time a player needs to stop a scene or moment, I ask that they please DM me as soon as they can and I will step in and pivot the convo as necessary. I don't anticipate anything that would fall into a traditional content warning to happen, so I haven't selected any for this game, but we will always have open conversation and check ins if anythign arises.