Planning a D&D campaign, inquire within!

Hello friends!

My name is Xander. I've been a member here for nearly a decade and I've been lucky enough to have met many friends both here on the forum and in person at gatherings. I'm also a huge nerd who, for the last year, has been enamored with the great game/pastime/hobby that is Dungeons and Dragons. I played quite a bit in high school some time ago, but fell away from it for a long time. Now that I'm back into it I've been building a world for my home group to play in. Once completed, I learned about a particular style of play that works very well for large groups. I immediately thought of this wonderful group of people and thought about possibly running this kind of game style for some members here.

For those of you who have never heard of a "Westmarches" campaign, I recommend this video by writer and long-time DM Matt Colville. There is also a document written by the man who invented this style of play.

I'll also link my campaign design document.

One of the benefits of this kind of campaign is that it's open to many more people than a normal game of D&D and is possibly even open to multiple DM's. I'm excited to hear what people think after reading. I'd be accepting people with all levels of experience in D&D and roleplaying games in general, and I love to teach the games I play!

By sheer coincidence, there are a couple of us in the community who have been talking about wanting to try this. Tropic Thunder and I have been playing LOTRO over Skype for years now. We've wanted to try tabletop RPGing forever. We're a little more interested in Adventures in Middle Earth, which uses the 5th Edition D&D rules, but we're both complete newbies at this. I also very close with a vanilla lady who wants in on this. Thing is, I'm in PA, Tropic is in Canada, and my lady friend is in Florida. So distance could be a problem, but I've heard of 'virtual tabletops' on Steam, and there's always rigging something through Skype. Our other biggest hurdle is at least both Tropic and I want to be characters having the adventure, so we would love to learn and have a DM. Tropic said you were inquiring over Fet too. Her name is the same on there and mine is Scottish Kevin, which is what people call me at gatherings. The two of us have been going to gatherings for almost 10 years. Your name is unfamiliar to me because my memory sucks, but perhaps we've met. I haven't watched those videos yet or followed your links. This is just a quick message before I have a Skype Westworld watching date with that the other lady I mentioned. Maybe we can all get something going.

Ahhh Tropic Thunder is a dear friend of mine as well! I know her and her husband used to run a game night up in Toronto. I don't know if we've met, you and I, but I'm always happy to meet new friends. That's one of the goals of this endeavor.

As for the game system used, I already have a setting that I've been building for some time, so we would most likely use that setting with the 5e ruleset which is what I'm most familiar with and personally like most. I assumed we'd have lots of people from lots of physical places wanting to play, and I already have a bi-weekly group that plays on roll20, which is a utility I enjoy quite a bit.

Um, what edition would this be? 5th edition?

Yes, it would be 5e.

Is there a guide line for starting PC's for this campaign (aka what races/classes are allowed, what level do we start at, etc etc)?

Good question, something I forgot to include in my write-up.

As per the design document, those with Elven blood are rare, but those that exist are probably almost exclusively adventurers due to the nomadic nature of their existence. Other than that all of the races featured in official materials for 5e would be free for play, though if you want to use some of the monster races (from Volo's Guide to Monsters) it may take some creative writing!

Classes released officially are all available, however UA options from before Xanathar's Guide that didn't make it into that book are, generally, not.

PC's would start at 1st level, we would use XP for leveling, and stats will come from the standard array or point-buy system.

As a huge pen-and-paper RPG fan, I can only salute this great initiative and wish you the best of success

This sounds amazing and I’d love to see what we could do with it. I’ve been playing in adventurer’s league for a while now which is, to a lesser extent, a sort of community based style of d&d also, but still based around multiple groups and dms which don’t necessarily interact. I’d be happy to try out this style of gaming if we could gather enough people for it.

I play Adventurer's League as well, been DM'ing a game over there for like a month and a half. I've been getting a little bit of traction with the idea, so maybe one day it can work out!

Zomg! Just came to this thread looking to see if any other DnD nerds were here! On my phone ATM so will need to look over the campaign stuff later, but color me interested!