Remembering My One Good 5e Campaign

20 Dec, 2024

D&D Fifth Edition turned 10 this year, and reading Knight at the Opera's excellent breakdown of 5e's good/bad/ugly bits got me reflecting on my own experiences with the game.

I've been in three 5e campaigns that were genuinely good. Two were run by a college friend with a true genius for theater.¹ His approach to running 5th edition was to go all in. Roleplay everything in character, write villains with intense, detailed backstories and motivations, stage epic fights. I think his plotlines were mostly scripted, but they were good so I never cared about railroading. AFAIK he wasn't involved in the OSR but he did incorporate some adjacent tenets. Death was always on the table and we experienced multiple TPKs. Social skill rolls were ignored and I genuinely believe I experienced some kind of personal growth after holding my own in heated negotiations with his NPCs.

I ran the third good 5e campaign (titled The Forsaken Empire). It was good not because of my talents as a DM or any inherent virtues of 5e, but because an unusual situation brought out 5e's best qualities.

I spent summer 2015 volunteering on a tiny permaculture farm in Iowa. No internet, no data, no tv, composting toilets, etc. There were three other interns, all classmates at my college, and we got tired of card games after week three so we checked out the 5th edition rulebooks from the Ames public library. As the only one with prior D&D experience, I was DM.

The campaign ended up lasting around 25 sessions, occurring 2-3 times/week (there was nothing to do after dinner except hang out). I usually planned sessions on the off nights and/or dreamed up lore & plot twists while feeding chickens, picking peas, weeding, etc. The party consisted of a dwarf rogue (exiled from her clan), a human ranger (bandit turned revolutionary), and an elf druid who would die almost immediately and be replaced by a human paladin (shipwrecked).

Loosely inspired by the structure of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, I scattered a McGuffin (shards of a magic mirror allowing one to contact outer planes) around a few discrete adventure sites & allowed the players to hunt them down in any order, with the caveat that a villain was also seeking them in the hopes of summoning a Cthulhu-like elder god.

I used this dreadful rhyme to introduce the quest:

One in the tower of the warlock dread
One in the house of the dragon red
One in the tent of the halfling khan
One in the heights of old Marghan
The last in Dorian's highest house
Find these and you'll be northward bound

Most of those adventures involved site-based exploration and/or set-piece battles, though rarely in an actual dungeon.

It's all a bit hazy now, but alongside this there was a rebellion against the collapsing elf-led empire, a conspiracy involving Moon-circle druids, and subplots for each character's background. The dwarf found a new family in the party, the ranger reconciled with his long-lost mother, and the paladin died defending his family. At the end, they defeated the villain in a boss battle and then went off to assassinate the empress for good measure.

Some headings from my notes:

1. The Bandit King of Herol Wood
2. Attack on the Green Knight's Grotto
3. To The Khan
4. Marghan
5. Helsingor Prison
6. Helsingor Prison Redux
7. The Siege of Giant's Crossing
8. The Eagle Rock Sewers
9. To Dawngate
10. Notes from a Hyperborean Expedition
11. The Feast at Celendro Manor
12. Celendro Manor Aftermath
13. Back to Dawngate
14. Mezzenbone's Lair
15. FINAL BOSS FIGHT
16. Aftermath
17. Epilogue: Kill the Empress

None of this is that interesting on its own. What stands out to me is the fact that every campaign I was part of afterwards (with one or two exceptions) ranged from slightly to very disappointing. There's a palpable "you had to be there" quality that I lack the skill to convey in writing. (Like recounting a vivid dream).

The trad/neotrad playstyle benefits from time, trust, and intimacy.² The heart of the campaign wasn't the lore, characters, plot twists or epic battles, but the way our shared, strange, stressful experience (and ample free time) imbued these elements with an intensity they would not otherwise have had. I'm not a gifted dramaturge like the friend I described above, but when afforded time trust, and intimacy, I was able to lead an immersive campaign. I focus on old-school games nowadays, not because I hate the trad playstyle but because OSR/NSR culture offers structures & support for running satisfying games within my busy, scattered, non-farm life.

Is there a point to all this? I don't really know. I mostly wanted to memorialize this campaign in some way, to honor a very vivid paracosm and the friends I shared it with. I also think it's good for bloggers to share their campaign notes & help shake the hobby's fixation on paid products. (Not that there's much useful here).

On 5e as a system, it's funny to see ways I was inadvertently reaching for what I'd now call OSR/NSR elements:

• I was big on the 'just use bears' philosophy, and would often just scrawl down HP, AC, Attack, & Damage for miscellaneous foes instead of looking up stats. Since all my players were new to 5e, I didn't have to deal with much rules-lawyering or power-gaming so this loose approach was a non-issue. I also ran the first few adventures without a Monster Manual, just using the animal companions in the PHB.
• I really, really wanted 5e to be a science-fantasy game, so I mostly used 'aberration'-type monsters and made up a post-apocalyptic backstory for the world. If I had had a copy of Vaults of Vaarn or Electrum Archive or Ultraviolet Grasslands back then I'd have been all over it. However, I think having to work within the limited palette offered by the 5e core rulebooks took me in some interesting directions.
• As the campaign went on, I wrote more & more dungeon-like site exploration challenges.

Does this mean I think 5e can be played in an OSR style? Nah. But it perplexes & saddens me to see how ossified 5e play culture has become, how many people fixate on optimal builds & whether you can 'trip' a slime or whatever. You can play 5e in a flexible, rulings-not-rules way even if the game occasionally works against you; I know because I've done it.

However, I don't think that it would have been much better or worse if I had introduced us to B/X or Worlds Without Number or something; system matters, but it was the players & our shared circumstances that gave the campaign life.

Notebook snippets

Just some stuff I dug up in my notes that I found either cool or funny. (Apologies for the shitty scans).

• The setting was a continent with an inland sea. Each fantasy race had a homeland somewhere on its shores, all under the hegemony of an Elf empire. The Elves once ruled from a flying city, but it crashed mysteriously into the sea several decades ago -- only the Empress was saved, brought to safety by the Solar Angels in her 'Celestial Guard'. I originally threw together a hand-drawn map after session 2 but lost it somewhere, so all I have is this shitty Inkarnate map I made later.

• I've always disliked the standard D&D cosmology, so I reworked it into something I liked better, with six liminal realms overlapping the material plane, oriented around order vs. chaos and life vs. death. Angels & Demons/devils were aligned along the order-chaos axis, eliminating good vs. evil. (Here, I was definitely thinking of the Vorlons & Shadows from Babylon 5).

• I turned halflings into a wolf-riding steppe people. Very silly but I still like it better than generic hobbits. Their legendary leader is named 'Kudym-Osh', which I discovered while randomly generating names for an attempted Siberian playthrough of Crusader Kings II. I think it's an amazing name & still try to find places to use it.
• STRICT TIME RECORDS MUST BE KEPT:

• I wrote a fun adventure where they got invited to a party at someone's mansion, but overnight the hosts locked the doors and turned into werewolves. Maps of 'Celendro Manor':

• End of game flowchart & final boss. I don't necessarily endorse this as a way to plan adventures. Also, making a 20th level villain in 5e is a pain in the ass lol. I chose warlock just because it was simpler than sorcerer or wizard.

#musings #session-report