System: Dungeons and Dragons 5e
Slots: 5 (3 players minimum)
VTT: Foundry VTT on Forge, communication via Discord. Mic required, video optional
Schedule: Negotiable; My timezone is UTC+9, and I’d be aiming for sometime around noon
Duration: My sessions typically run 3 to 3.5 hours, with a 10-minute break roughly at the halfway point
Payment: $15 per player per session via startplaying.games.
About The Game
Odyssey of the Dragonlords is an adventure for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition set in a setting inspired by ancient Greek legends, where you will form a group of mythic heroes, whose great deeds are foretold by a powerful oracle. You will undertake great labors to prove your worth as heroes, rub shoulders with gods who walk the land, and perhaps—if you’re lucky and skilled enough—you’ll become legendary figures in your own right.
This will be a long-running game, by the end of which you’ll be facing terrible, monstrous challenges, but with the power you gather from the unique Epic Paths you follow and the allies both divine and mortal that you make along the way, you’ll be more than capable of overcoming anything in your path, if you play your cards right.
About Me
I’m a longtime tabletop RPG player who always bounced off of running games, until I finally decided to try running pre-written adventures. Going from needing to make everything up myself to having a playground and toolbox to fiddle with and tweak made all the difference, and now I’ve gone from a GM who reluctantly ran 1-4 session adventures to an enthusiastic GM who’s been running games that last multiple years.
As I do run pre-written adventures, and a large part of the appeal is that I don’t have to do immense amounts of work to prepare, you can expect me to more-or-less run specific scenarios, rather than wide-open sandboxes. That said, a big part of the appeal to me is having a bunch of pieces set up and seeing how things shake as the players interact with them.
I’m a strong believer that the unique strength of TTRPGs lies in how the mechanics we all agree to play by interact with and, ultimately, create the narrative we experience. As such, I tend to stick as closely to the rules as I can in the moment, and will hold my players to the rules as well, all in service of creating a story that can only be told in a medium that’s equal parts a creative endeavor and a guided, rule-bound experience.
I expect a reasonable amount of game knowledge—for my 1st level adventures, I don’t expect much more than for you to know fairly well how your own character operates on the understanding that you’ll try to learn more as we go, while for adventures starting at higher levels I’ll expect at least a basic understanding of what all of your teammates can do.
I also don’t enforce arbitrary limits on what “your character can know.” If I’m using pre-existing monster statblocks, I operate on the assumption that at least one player probably knows something about them, and so I design encounters that don’t hinge entirely on some piece of the creature’s statblock that’s meant to be hidden. Instead, I try to design interesting encounters with alternate victory/defeat conditions, hazards that the monsters use to shore up their weaknesses, or—when the occasion calls for it—a simple encounter where the players are expected to steamroll the enemies, for a nice change of pace.
That isn’t to say I play against the players, though the enemies you face do want to win and survive and I’ll generally play them as such. It just means that I try to create obstacles that are interesting and unique, even if I am just using building blocks that everyone’s already familiar with.
Contact
If you’re interested in playing, or have any questions before expressing interest, feel free to ask me here or message me on StartPlaying.