I call myself Shadow Links and this is my blog where I plan on documenting my experiences attempting to DM D&D. For the most part this will be for myself and a record of the adventures, but hey, maybe someone would like to read it.
So just a little about myself, I had never played D&D until recently. It was kind of an odd think that one day one of my friends was like "Hey, I'd like to try it sometime, it should be fun!". Nothing happened of coarse for quite sometime. The topic was breached again when we found out that someone we knew (older than us) and one of my old coaches played and co-DM'd. This sparked a renewed interest and I started researching, learning about the different editions and the like. Hearing that 5e was really good for new players and the fact that it DIDN'T have a bazillion rulebooks like 3.5, nor did it have the bad stigma associated with 4e, help me settle on choosing 5e and working on convincing my friends of the same.
So I went and bought the starter set and the PHB. Let me tell you, I think the starter set was the best decision I could have made, but more on that later. With material in hand, we needed to decide who would DM. Being the one who bought it and I didn't mind, I was selected. So i started poring through the DM and Mine's of Phandelver guide that came with the starter set, while enjoying the feel of rolling the accompanying dice set. We began this game and only ended up doing 2 sessions. One done theater of the mind the other on a digitally masked map. Both went rather well but given the "gamer nature" of me and the players, combined with my lack of confidence in describing the area and keeping track of it, most of out later adventures were carried out digitally with the help of Fantasy Grounds.
Fortunately I had some friends in the group that also got interested in taking up the DM mantle, which I was more that happy have so I could be a player. The first one was someone we didn't particularly like, but we worked with him and had similar interests. The session was awful, part of it being the level 1 section of Princes of the Apocalypse being rather pointless combined with the DM's specific roleplaying choices which involve forcing characters to puke at a smell randomly, NPC's gagged when hearing that a PC spent a night with a apparently ugly female, selling us hard on a 1 room cavern that had nothing in it but monsters, and stubbornly keeping a deadlock with no options when a PC levitated a bear in the middle of a fight in a bandit camp. It was just unfun. 1 session and done.
Another friend learned from this experience and started the Curse of Strahd campaign. Unlike the previous games he allowed homebrew characters, a modified ranger class, and unique weapons, like a dragon jawbone greatsword that the party barbarian eventually started to attune to as he realized it had some dragon magic left in it and could release acid, as well as a warlock pact weapon scythe that had reach and 3d4 damage. He accelerated at describing fights and always had a unique effect on 1's and 20's. He later started doing voices for NPCs and it was a lot of fun. In fact we are still working through the campaign and are at level 4 and we try to meet about once a month.
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| And so it begins... |
Which brings me to the campaign I am currently working on putting together - Hoard of the Dragon Queen and later - The Rise of Tiamat.
Thanks for reading this first post!
-SL
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