The Eberron Adventure Preparations..

So, for those reading that weren’t there, some nerds decided to play D&D. The twist? We’re grown-ass men (late twenties), and none of us had really played D&D before.  Fifth Edition and the Player Handbook had just been released, so we decided it was a great time to hop on.

I ended up DMing, and decided to launch right into a campaign, rather than a simple one-session introductory adventure. I chose Eberron as the setting, and built a loose story arc to follow.* It was a bit daunting building an original campaign for the first attempts at D&D, but knowing myself, it seemed like the best way for me to really learn how to DM. Other players picked up personal copies of the Handbook, and I think we put aside an entire session at the beginning dedicated to just character creation and learning the character sheet; the second session was gameplay I believe. We ended up with the following as the starting cast of player characters:

·         Turnin, who is a human monk. He’s earnest, socially inquisitive, and friendly but pretty naïve in the ways of the world.

·         A human conjuration wizard named Kyllar. Raised on the streets, so he’s got a slight case of sticky fingers. With a prodigious memory for everything but names, he’s generally been Mr. Utility and Mr. Encyclopedia for the group.

·         A dour Halfling rogue known only as Shadowale. He is impatient and prone to violence and drinking.

·         A hill dwarf druid named Bearchief. Well-traveled, and ever helpful to the group, though he has a penchant for having things blow up in his face.

·         A ruthless, mysterious and very competent Drow ranger named Zyn, whose “survival of the fittest” and “might makes right” ideologies tend to unnerve the rest of the party a bit.

So, a bit of an odd party composition, in that we don’t have a dedicated healer like a cleric (the Druid was doubling as a bearform tank), but it was important to me that everyone roll with a character they wanted to play. It was on me as DM to craft the sessions to work with how they wanted to play.

Since we were jumping right into a campaign, I sent the players each a set of tailored questions to consider after reading their backgrounds. It seemed like a good way for me to learn about the various classes (not to mention the actual characters), and to get the players thinking more in character. I think it was a good exercise. By making them nail down a few opinions/backstory things ahead of time, I was given a lot of potential hooks for future sessions.

So, with character sheets written up, a loose campaign arc in mind and a session sketch in hand, it was time to play. Next post… the Eberron Adventure begins!

*I could have used the Mines of Phandelver material, but I wanted to leave that low-hanging fruit on the tree in case someone else wanted to step up and try DMing at some point. As it turned out, someone did, they ran it, I got to play instead of DM for a bit, and it was good. So yay for foresight!