March 2024 Campaign update

First, the news: in March 2024 the Phoenix Tome family is welcoming baby #3, and the bi-weekly Novalia game is going on a temporary hiatus. It will return when I (the DM) and my wife (player of Swanhild/Arvellas/Fennick) have time for it again.

Since it’s taking a break, it seemed like a good time to have a quick look back on the campaign, and what’s going to happen on this blog.

Novalia timekeeping

It has been a slow-moving one with many breaks, disruptions and missed weeks. The campaign started on May 20, AD 2022 in the real world, and Miriam 20, 1181 EC. This means that in 21 months of real time, we had 28 sessions with the main group. Not quite bi-weekly, but this does include some time before the main group started. I’m not sure exactly how long that was.

In those 28 sessions, the in-game clock has advanced to Panem 29, 1181 EC. This means a little over 3 months have passed in-game, in 21 months of real-time. An average of 1 game-time day per real-time week. I can hear the 1:1 time crowd lecturing me already.

Obviously, this doesn’t match up well with my goal of a campaign that spans centuries of in-game time, which is one of my prime objections to 1:1 time. But I think it’s a temporary situation with a few causes that can be addressed.

Of course there are the aforementioned breaks - largely unavoidable in this season of life. God forbid that a game should ever come before God or family.

There are also some growing pains adjusting to open-world, long-term play. Players coming from 5e are often very hesitant to use downtime or do anything that takes a long time in-game, and I didn’t really know how to run these things as a DM either. D&D 5e campaigns are a breakneck sprint where you often go from nobody to superhero and save the world with only a few days or weeks going by. The idea of taking a month to travel to another city and find high-level spellcasters to heal your permanent injuries, or taking months to train a new skill, or taking weeks to hire henchmen or months to build buildings is something new to us 5e refugees - again, both players and DM. I expect we’ll get better at this in time.

There’s also the fact that things take longer as the scope of play expands at higher levels. With characters reaching levels 3-4, wilderness exploration and the conqueror tier of play get more viable, and gameplay on the scale of months at a time is normal at King tier.

Worldbuilding and ACKS II

This campaign was started in ACKS, and has slowly transitioned to ACKS II playtest rules as they’ve become available. The changes to core gameplay are very minor, but welcome refinements.

But the improvement in DM tools and procedures in ACKS II is off the charts game-changing. With these rules came many realizations about how I could improve the campaign. Luckily, the upcoming hiatus gives time to implement them. With a story-web and setting updated to these guidelines, the revived campaign should run a lot more smoothly, with more interesting content and less need for time-consuming prep between sessions.

New Campaign: Lumar

Wifey and I have played one-on-one D&D for a long time (one player, one DM), and during baby time it’s probably all we’ll have time for. I’m also in the process of switching an Eberron D&D 5e campaign over to ACKS II and a homebrew world, temporarily named Lumar. So I figure it’s also a good time to start covering this campaign on the blog.

Yes, the working name Lumar is borrowed from Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea. I also borrowed a couple of concepts from that book: liquidized particulate oceans, and giant sandfalls from the sky with magical properties.

The core concept of this world was to take Eberron and make it more gameable, and shift it to a darker tone. Using the ACKS II worldbuilding system, but adapting it to the crumbling ruins of a megacity.