I am looking for one or two players to join three others for a long-term D&D 5e (2014) campaign set in the Forgotten Realms.
The game takes place on Cromwyn, an island that once lay among the Moonshaes.
During the Spellplague, Cromwyn disappeared completely.
Recently, it has returned.
However, it did not return to the Moonshaes.
Rather, the island reappeared far to the south, isolated off the Sword Coast and radically altered. Its geography had changed, native ecosystems had been warped, and the barriers between the Material Plane and other Planes had become dangerously unstable.
Cromwyn is now colliqually divided into two parts.
The Shatter is the much larger main island. It is poorly mapped, extremely dangerous and heavily affected by planar instability.
The Lords’ Alliance controls the colonial project and operates Cromwyn as an effectively permanent penal colony.
Prisoners are transported there from across Alliance territories. Some are violent criminals. Some are thieves, smugglers, deserters or political prisoners. Some were convicted fairly. Others were not.
Once someone has been transported to Cromwyn, leaving is effectively impossible.
A prisoner can earn money, property, influence, privileges and a considerable degree of freedom within the colony, but Cromwyn itself remains their prison.
The death rate is enormous.
Expeditions, monsters, accidents, violence, disease and planar exposure kill people constantly, and new prisoner transports continually replace them.
The Shatter
The Shatter is both the reason Cromwyn is so dangerous and the reason anybody cares about it.
Planar interference has altered its flora, fauna, geography and people.
Strange minerals and magical substances have appeared throughout the island. Creatures from other planes sometimes become stranded there. Native communities that survived Cromwyn’s disappearance have themselves been changed by generations of exposure.
The Shatter is not empty wilderness.
It contains settlements, ruins, altered cultures, dangerous ecosystems, monsters and environments the colony only partially understands.
It also suffers from planar storms, which can temporarily change terrain, weather, magic and living things.
More valuable are planar breaches.
These are temporary openings or overlaps between Cromwyn and another plane.
A breach may last for hours or days before collapsing.
Expeditions enter them to recover rare minerals, plants, magical resources, monster components, artefacts and other materials that cannot normally be found on the Material Plane.
The rewards can be enormous.
So can the body count.
Planar Load
Extended exposure to unstable parts of the Shatter causes Planar Load.
Load represents accumulated magical and environmental contamination.
The longer an expedition remains exposed, particularly during storms or inside breaches, the greater the risk of exhaustion, magical effects, corruption, mutation and other consequences.
This means expeditions have a practical limit.
Sometimes the question is not whether the party can reach something.
It is whether they can reach it, get what they came for and still make it home in recognisable condition.
The Campaign Hook
Your character has been convicted of a crime and transported to Cromwyn.
Whether they actually deserved it is entirely up to you.
You could be a murderer, thief, smuggler, revolutionary, deserter, political prisoner, someone convicted of a morally defensible crime, somebody framed, or anything else that reasonably fits the premise.
On arrival in Headisport, your penal contract is purchased by a private expedition outfit called the Black Pig Company.
That is where the campaign begins.
What the Game Will Be Like
This is intended to be a sandbox campaign, not a linear adventure path.
There will be contracts, rumours, expeditions, factions and opportunities, but the players will decide what interests them and what direction the group takes.
Typical work might include:
recovering lost expeditions or prisoners;
monster hunts and bounties;
rare-resource extraction;
planar-breach expeditions;
escorting researchers or prospectors;
diplomatic missions with Shatter communities;
investigating anomalies;
establishing or repairing magical wards;
exploring altered regions;
recovering lost cargo, equipment or settlements.
The campaign uses a hex-based regional map, but ordinary travel will generally be handled point-to-point rather than crawling exhaustively through every individual hex.
Travel will still matter. The Shatter is unstable, and routes, weather, monsters and planar events can change.
Planar breaches will work differently. These will often become tighter, dangerous, time-sensitive hexcrawls where navigation, exploration, exposure and deciding when to leave are much more important.
The game will include a mixture of:
roleplay, exploration, combat, investigation, faction interaction, survival elements and character development.
The setting is dark fantasy and can deal with grim material, but I am not interested in running relentless misery.
There will also be black comedy, absurdity and the usual strange situations that emerge when several adults spend an evening pretending to be fantasy criminals.
Player agency is important to me.
I run the world, NPCs, enemies and consequences.
You decide what your character actually does.
There will not normally be one hidden “correct” solution that I expect you to discover.
Rules and Technology
System: D&D 5e, using the 2014 rules
Character Sheets: D&D Beyond
Virtual Tabletop: Foundry VTT
Voice and campaign communication: Discord
Webcams: Not required
Characters will be created and maintained through D&D Beyond.
I own a fair amount of 2014 material already. If you own an official 5e source that I do not have, I am happy for material from it to be used as long as it is official material and works cleanly through D&D Beyond.
I am not currently looking to use unofficial/homebrew classes or character options.
About Me
I’m 39, based in Ireland, and have been playing and running tabletop RPGs for a long time.
I’m primarily looking for players in their late 20s or older.
You do not need to be an experienced D&D player.
Beginners are completely welcome.
Knowing every rule is much less important to me than being reliable, reasonably communicative, able to work with the rest of the group and actually interested in what the other players are doing.