Introduction

I've been running tabletop games for about a decade now, and I've run into a situation which I'm sure many players out there are familiar with: I no longer get to play with the people I started with. My high school D&D pals are long gone. My college groups for D&D, Don't Rest Your Head, Exalted, and some games we developed from scratch are now scattered across the country. And while I couldn't be more excited to game with my new group, I miss being able to talk at length with my old players and game masters about our games. With this project—the one you're reading now—I want to open up my newest campaign to my old gaming buddies, and I suppose also the public. 

So what can you expect from reading this? 

1. You'll be seeing some of my creative process. I'm not great at tooting my own horn, but I can say this with confidence: I work differently than most game masters. The people who have played my campaigns can attest that I put a tremendous amount of effort into building a detailed game world, and I'm proud of the unorthodox ways I go about that. You'll be able to see this from reading onward, but here are some brief examples from my history as a game master:

• I ran a radio show for three years in which I DMed a D&D campaign over the airwaves. There are some unique challenges in running a game which relies entirely on audio and involves no visual components, but our show maintained a high number of listeners throughout its run.
• I've written hundreds of pages of documents to exist in my game worlds, including personal diaries, court transcripts, entire books, articles on a handful of topics, and even a children's book which I also illustrated. 
• I developed a unique system of casting magic spells for D&D which relied on the use of about 175 glyphs, allowing the wizard using them to create infinitely complex and customizable spell effects. The ingenious player who used these managed spells ranging from causing an NPC to spit out a different flower depending on which word he spoke to creating a mermaid-duplicate of himself to stripping the immortality from a demigod. 

2. I'll explain the methods I use to develop some of my game world and why I use those methods. You'll learn pretty quickly that I'm a game master who favors storyline and immersion over combat and rules. I generally believe in allowing the players to completely decide the direction of the story; I offer only the interference that a real world situation might. I think that this gives the players a far better experience than being guided along a story I've already determined the ending of. Part of why I'm inclined to document the development of this campaign is that this time, I'm taking my hand completely off the reins of the story. The direction the players march in will be the direction I focus my attention on, adding details and depth as I sense where they want to go. This will be an experiment for me, and I'm interested in documenting how this goes.

3. Finally, I'll be sharing the stories that my players and I create together here. For this particular campaign, I've developed a custom class for each of my three players (more on this in my first few updates). I've also decided to create a large expanse of territory for the players to cover, consisting of 17 distinct towns and cities, from the metropolis of Woodhearth to the hamlet of Cloud's Landing. My players are each interested in forging stories across the territory, and I hope that the diversity of the region and the many options available to them will allow for a sprawling campaign with plenty of interesting notes to share here. 

So that's the gist of what will be going on here. I hope that what I share here will offer something valuable to you gamers and game masters who prefer story and detail over min-maxing characters. (No offense to those folks, of course—different strokes and all that.) And thanks for reading!

Edit: I'm writing this almost six and a half years later. As of the writing of this edit, I've posted 12 unique one-shots (10 based on movies), dozens of articles, campaign notes, loads of resources, and an actual novel. It's grown to be much more than I imagined it would be. I add this edit only so that readers know that things have changed quite a lot since I first wrote this. Please look around, and as always, happy gaming!

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