Prior to my current campaign I was patting myself on the back for rekindling the love of Dungeons & Dragons back in January of 2020. I thought I’d put D&D down for good, but I’ve always been wrong whenever I think that. If this very blog goes quiet about D&D, I’m busy being wrong again by the way. Anyway 2020 brought the revival of the game world of Lepzard as a D&D game, for the first time ever as 5e, and after failing horribly at trying to play a starter set scenario (Phandelver), I launched everyone with brand new characters into the world of Lepzard. Since it had been awhile I set the players on an island that I could moderate as a simple sandbox, with a few NPCs and scenarios that would make them feel like they were interacting with a world and could manipulate it.
The island, which lacks a name to this day, is somewhere in a semi tropical part of the world of Lepzard. It is oblong stretching North/South and the south side of it has a tribe of orcs ruled over by a powerful orc chief simply known as “The Chosen One.” The eastern coast has “Intimidating Crabs” which are giant crabs with large knives that wander in and out of the surf. The western coast has “Immitation Crabs” which were an amusing almost Piers Anthony like attempt at humor, as they’d always be something wearing a crab suit but then upon combat reveal themselves to be something else disguised. The northern part of the island was no more than some mountains and a scattering of small settlements to create drama with via various NPCs. Here I introduced a couple of homebrew gods from my past games (Vwind – generic evil) and (Zentha – generic good). There’s no such thing as “Generic Good/Evil” you say? Screw you, the DM is always correct. As it happens if you have a purposely underdeveloped starter area, like this one, because the idea was that players would eventually sail for a mainland, then you don’t need a bunch of overhyped lore. To these two gods I added my long term favorite God from many years back, known as Sandra, Goddess of Time. That’s a thing in Lepzard (Sandra = Sandy = Sands Of Time). This lot is needed for some background plots that matter to myself alone as DM.
Long story short, everyone went fucking insane about the pandemic bullshit and this group fell apart as we all did the stupid lockdown for covid thing. I was so close to making this part of my life again regularly. I’d found nerds. We found our thing. But 2020… fuck 2020. Game sessions dissolved. As usual I thought I’d never play the great game again and why do I have so many dice? Right. This wasn’t the end luckily, I just had to wait until 2023 to relaunch.
IF I ever need a semi familiar but details discarded sort of island to drop some characters on, I guess I can pull this one back out of my ass. Most of DMing comes from pulling things out of your ass. The rest is dealing with rules that don’t quite work perfectly and players complaining about stuff with selfish motives for their complaining. That’s it. That’s the game. It’s worth it as a DM if you’re an instigator and want an excuse to hang out with people. Go figure.
