Creating The Mythos Of The Demigods of Daelen

We finally did it. We had our first session of the something new game I started up to replace The Magical Millennium (which remains on hiatus for the time-being) and even though two of our players couldn’t make it, we had a successful first session. I designed the campaign to be playable with as few as two player characters, so having a few people out isn’t a huge bother for me or the game I’m running. It’s still Dungeons and Dragons 5e, of course (2014 version for everything except I’m including the Weapon Mastery feature for 2024 because that feels appropriate for this collection of powerful characters), since most of my players aren’t that interested in going far afield, but I’ve done an intense bit of hacking and homebrewing to alter the basic systems to work on a different scale than the game was originally intended to run at. Most of this is just massaging numbers a bit (a thing I can do because the “Bounded Accuracy” of 5e allows me to alter the numbers in ways that have predictable outcomes), but there’s a few changes to how the rules play out, how success and failure should be interpretted, and how the mechanics of the game are designed to interact. Most of which is not stuff my players need concern themselves with since I’m the one running the show and I know how to alter everything appropriately. What my players are supposed to be concerned with is building the myth of their semi-divine character!

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Setting The Table For Mythological Mayhem With The Demigods Of Daelen

We’ve officially had session 0 for my new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Demigods and Dragons? Dungeons and Demigods? Anachronistic Mythology? I don’t know what I’m going to call it yet [I figured it out by the time of publication and it’s in the title of this post now], but it’ll have the word “Demigods” in the title because that’s an integral part of the concept. Probably, anyway. The longer I think about it, the more ideas I come up that don’t use the word, but I’ll definitely keeping tagging the posts I write about this campaign with the word, so at least I’ll be organized still. I thought for a while about doing something with “Scattered Divinity” or “Inherited Divinity” to emphasive how everyone was playing children of gods, but then one of my players wanted to play a mortal raised to demigodhood, so I had to toss out most of those titles since that character doesn’t really fit with that theme and it is important not to misrepresent something as important as the source of everyone’s powers. That’s kind of a big deal, you know? All of the campaign ideas I’ve got for this general concept involve that in the later stages at the very least. For some, it’s an important part of every major arc of the campaign. I still need to solidify what direction I want to go in, though, so that clarity will come in the future. For now, it is enough that everyone has a divine parent or patron, character concepts and connections, and a rough draft of their character sheet. That’s what I needed most of all during our session 0 and I managed to get through it all by the two-hour mark when one of the players had to leave.

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