New Year 2025

Reflections

Last year, my goal was to create a new campaign setting that had enough content that I could start a new campaign in it. I feel like I've accomplished that goal. Dawn of Others is a robust world with plenty built into it for great stories. There is much more that I have planned for this world, but there is enough here that we can easily play within this setting.

It feels really good to have reached this stage in the project.

This project move in an unexpected direction. While I am historically a world builder and rarely use a pre-established world to run games, I have never considered my self a home brew GM. This is because I am not inclined to delve into the mechanics of an RPG. I am much more likely to reskin something that already exists rather then completely build something new.

This world has become a home brew world. There are rules in this setting that I have modified from other systems and things that I have just had to make up. The entire faction renown system had to be built because it really isn't something that was fleshed out to any degree in 5e. This setting is really founded on the idea of factions and renown, so this had to be robust.

With all the home brewing, there have been unexpected challenges. But I feel that I have really grown as a world builder and a GM through this process. Good story telling is all about being willing to take risks and put your heart into something that no one else may ever love the way that you do. The process of building this setting has been a reward unto itself and I will be satisfied with creating it even if no one else ever joins me within this world.

Goals for 2025

Building the Settlements

I want to finish developing the settlements and get those locations established into the world. There are seven that I currently have planned and I would like to get all of them framed up. Not every detail, but enough that I could easily take a group of players into the settlement. I was able to get a settlement done during World Ember and that makes me feel that this is a reasonable goal for me to work towards.

This goal is layered. Building the framework for a settlement means building a lot of little things within the settlement to give it the sense of place that all settings need. Each one needs to have factions that the players can earn renown with and that means that I have to build those factions along with the renown system. One of the challenges in doing this is making sure that each faction offers something different and interesting to the world. Each faction needs to have a reason that the players would want to join it and reasons that they would be reluctant to. And the benefits of all the factions need to be balanced and fair so that each faction has game play value without over shadowing the others.

Plots

I spent a good deal of my reading time in the Plots section of this past World Ember. I am a panster by nature. Improvising a story on the spot is one of my greatest strengths. But I want to build on that foundation and increase my GM skill set. With that in mind, I want to work more on writing adventures that are set in this world. This will allow me to learn more about planning and building adventures as well as developing larger plot arcs that can span an entire campaign.

I have already written three adventures within Dawn of Others. I have been writing a one shot adventure for each camp. I plan on continuing with this as I build this setting. These small one shot adventures will give me the option of bringing my players into the world at each camp and allowing them to get to know the setting a little bit at a time. It will also let me play test the homebrew that I've been building in this world. Because while everything looks good on paper, there is always the possibility that it doesn't work as well at the table.

Looking at how other people set up adventures and plot lines has helped me think about how I would like to do this. It has also helped me think about what kinds of elements should be included in the adventure so that anyone could run it. A longer term goal for Dawn of Others is to bring other GMs into the setting. I really enjoy collaborative story telling and world building. Allowing my players to effect change in the world and having other GMs running adventures within the setting would be a ton of fun.

Lore

One thing that I have always enjoyed in any game is the world lore. My players are Lore Goblins. Given that, I have been thinking about ways that I can build lore into the adventures that I am writing. I want to give the players the lore of this world, but I don't want to do it with really long, boring primers that will result in information overload and boredom. Assuming that they read it to start with.

So, I'm exploring ways that lore can be woven into the action. I think that video games do this the best. Taking them as an example, I am going to try to use some of their methods. This is going to mean writing out scraps and bits that the player can find while they are exploring locations. This will include audio files to listen to and short videos they can watch.

This should create a setting where the lore is present for the players to investigate and engage with, if they want to. But nothing that they are required to spend their time on if they are interested. The other advantage of the lore being presented as fragments and files is that the players could create a library of the lore the at they have found. This would allow them to piece together the larger historical narrative if they want to do so.

I think that the optional nature of the lore is going to be essential for it to really work. There is nothing fun about forcing players to explore the lore of the world when they are not interested in doing so. Even if the players never engage with these lore fragments, it will help me as the world builder, gain a greater depth of understanding and thus allow me to better enrich the world. The more that I know about the world, the easier it is to build into it.

VTT

This goal isn't a World Anvil goal, but it is directly related to this project and I wanted to include it so that everything that I am working towards this year is laid out in one place.

I need to get into a VTT and set everything up so that I can easily run games within the setting. Because there is so much home brewing this means that the best game playing experience would mean creating a ton of custom assets within the VTT so that they players didn't need to do the heavy lifting while they were building their characters.

The benefit of setting everything up ahead is that it would be established and ready every time I wanted to play within the setting. The down side is that it is going to be a ton of working doing something that is completely new to me, The learning curve on this is going to be really intense.

Since I role play exclusively online, the VTT experience is really the corner stone of the player's experience while interfacing with my game. If the VTT is clunky and labor intensive, the players aren't going to have a good time playing. This is something that I will really need to spend a good amount of time in.