Colony Chronicles (Homebrew setting D&D 5e, newbie friendly!)

[Sain]

Welcome, to Pioneer's Pier. Take a deep breath of freedom. Ahhh, the fresh smell of fish, dwarf sweat, and whatever the heck that purple-green blob in the alley is supposed to be. This is the furthest you can get from civilization while still being able to buy food and drink at tavern and, if need be, a return ticket to where you can have real hobbies, a garden, and a nice comfy job at the Kingdom's administration or some shit. About 40-50 years ago some random adventurer decided that, yeah, this is where I wanna live. He was a popular bard so a bunch of others followed, and now there's town! This little experiment of mortal ingenuity and insanity was built here where the aptly named New King's river widens to a lull just before opening into lakes and swamps.

There in the west and beyond stretches the untamed wilderness of the New World - the lost continent that was abandoned when current deities ascended from their mortal bonds and took on their divine mantles. Once a very very long time ago this was the home of their ancient civilization, a magocracy without equal. Ancient ruins litter the landscape with beasts and beings - former pets and experiments of the mages - stalk the lands, guarding its ancient secrets. It's basically the wet dream of every adventurer with more suicide than sanity in their veins. Grab the fate by the balls, carve themselves a little hut or maybe at least gather some treasure and return to the actually established colonies for a sweet retirement, or gather power and wealth to overthrow your evil twin sister - whatever.

This is where your adventure begins, in a teensy town at the very edge of the frontier colony. But, fear not, it's probably not where it's gonna end.


What are the Colony Chronicles?

The Game
This game is a homebrew campaign setting for D&D 5e, but previous experience with the system is not required and I'm happy to teach newbies with this. OOC bits of the combat will be done on the game's OOC discord server (so having discord is mandatory), and IC resolution will be written out after. I'll hope for 1-2 posts per week pace for this.

The Application Process
All character sheets must be PMed directly to me. I'll be looking for 1st level characters. Any gender will be permitted. Please see the Character Creation section below for further details. If you don't know how the D&D system works, that's ok, just toss some ideas of a fantasy character down there and we'll see how to make it work in the system. Applications will be open for a week or two. I will message here when it closes and PM those who make it and who did not.

Smut
I'm aiming for a more realistic tone in terms of smut for this game. There will be some adult situation with friendly NPCes and I 100% encourage organic relationships with other PCs, but focus of the game will be adventure itself rather than sex. The game will be set in bondage-exotic section. Smutty bits of the game will be kept in a separate thread in order to keep the progress of the main story as a priority.

Adventure Background
60 years ago the Kingdom of Old World funded a massive expansion fleet to a newly found land. Colonists and adventurers flocked with them and established various ports and towns across the shattered coastline of the New World. What was thought to be an easy expansion however soon halted when various forces of inland began fighting back, hunting stray pioneers, killing unwary adventurers as they explored ruins. It was soon discovered that some sort of empire of monsters is hiding beyond the mountain range. For last several years the navy has been at constant war with it, and only some of the most remote towns are saved from the brutal fighting. These are the hotspots where biggest bucks are made on black markets and adventure. These are the towns where the schemers come to make deals over who will be the next governor, and odd monstrous creatures come to shake hands with hooded figures, plotting their nefarious plans over the future of the New World's colonies.

Adventure Outline
Random shit for couple of first levels to do world building. Then plots related to character arcs and probably we'll have 2-4 larger plot-lines running in the background that I'll shoehorn to somehow relate to at least some of the character arcs. Idea is to play a good old honest and wacky D&D game from 1-20, and yes I know it's likely to not get there since they never do, but fuck that, I wanna try



Character Creation

Permitted Content:
Any class, sub-class or race from official published material is permitted (discuss Unearthed Arcana before you pick it).

Races:
Any official material is ok (discuss Unearthed Arcana before you pick it).

Alignment:
No Evil characters or edgelords.

Starting Equipment:
Normal starting equipment for your class and background. Roll twice on this random trinket table. First roll d12 to pick which tables you get, then the d100s.

Character Sheets
May be completed now or when the group forms. For now I'd like you to complete the following template to show us a little of your character's background and what you had in mind for their class and race. This is mostly to establish who might work well together and who may enjoy similar content;

Code Select Expand

[float=right][img height=200]CHARACTER IMAGE GOES HERE[/img][/float]
[b]Name: [/b] What shall we call this brave adventurer/mercenary/rat catcher/murder-hobo?
[b]Race/Class: [/b]Please ask before using Unearthed Arcana material
[b]Brief Description: [/b]Who are they and why are they interesting. Just a short couple paragraph pitch of the character. Weave in at least some physical, and some personality. This can change later when we get the party assembled.
[b]Familiarity With D&D: [/b]
[b]How Often Do You Elliquiy?: [/b]Daily? Weekly? Constantly but only on weekends? Just give me a little pattern.

If you wish to post a character sheet along with the above, please consider Mythweavers or D&D beyond or whatever. If you're a newbie, no worry, I can help you finish character stats when we get to that point.
Stats will be standard array (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8) to allocate as you like.



In-Game / House Rules
Just some stuff. Everything is up for debate as player enjoyment comes first. I tend to be a bit more "Oh, okay, that sounds cool, you can totally do that" type of GM than the one to check if a dust explosion is really enough to collapse a floor beneath the monster ball or not.

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Bonds:
Basically I'm stealing this from Dungeon World and similar systems with the caveat that rather than awarding XP for fulfilling your bonds you may gain Inspiration (ie Advantage that you can bank, then use yourself at any time on any one roll or grant to another player on any one roll). This should help guide you guys to have reasons to knit the party together despite the horrible adversaries they face. More on Bonds will be discussed when players are chosen.
In the meantime you can look up examples of class-based bonds over at the Dungeon World Play Kit (as Dungeon World uses more or less the same classes as D&D

Leveling:
For this adventure we will be using the Story-Based rules for leveling rather than XP, so after certain pivotal moments in the plot. The adventure is expected to run from level 1 to level 20.

Combat:
You can do surprise attacks and stuff in IC forum posts, but when initiatives start to get rolled the IC is paused and combat handled OOC:ly (with possible IC comments that you can decide in between) on discord. Once the mechanics are sorted out and victors solved I will make a GM post describing the broad lines of how things happened and how it ended. Then you post what your character did, and pick up from there.

Character Death / Bad Ends:
Is a possibility, this shouldn't be sugar coated as sometimes a character may be overcome by their foes. However if this occurs a player may make a choice, either create a new character who will be introduced to the group at the next convenient story location or (if narration permits capture) you may instead choose to keep this character alive to be kidnapped by the enemy and rescued by your companions in the next convenient location. If this second option is chosen you will permanently receive -1 death saving throw (minimum 2) representing the character's quite possibly possibly shaken nerve from the experience.
Again this is open for discussion based on player preference.

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Ershin for letting me use her game pitch template.

NOTE

I'm looking to branch out beyond my usual scope of players, so if a choice must be made I will likely choose people I haven't written with before who I feel will be a good fit for the group. Please don't be offended, this doesn't make me like our current games any less <3

[Silk]

I'd like t give this a try. :) still somewhat new to 5e but i think i can get a sheet done :)

[Sain]

I'd like t give this a try. :) still somewhat new to 5e but i think i can get a sheet done :)

Looking forward to it The sheet does not have to be very big. Just couple paragraphs of the character concept and idea is enough.

[Doomglazer]

Also intrested never done 5e or d&d for that mather so its all new for me

[Sain]

Also intrested never done 5e or d&d for that mather so its all new for me

No need to worry about the mechanics yet. You can just fill the sheet above and PM it to me

[Vonandi]

What would you consider edgy? I feel like the definition differs from person to person.

[Sain]

What would you consider edgy? I feel like the definition differs from person to person.

I'll be answering in the context of this game since my wants do shift from story to story. In Colony Chronicles, though I do wanna keep some of the happy parts light and sometimes a bit silly, I'd still like the conflict and suffering to be portrayed with a realistic lens. By "no edgelords" I mean that darker themes of the character should not be used mainly with motivation to make the character appear cool and dark, rather than exploring what those underlying trauma, loss, betrayal, or tragedy would truly mean for the character. I'm not big fan of the "I lost my mother so now I'm a vengeful lone wolf assassin with a black hood and twice as black heart" character arc Not for this game.

[HalfTime]

This looks neat, I'm interested.

[Ziether]

Obligatory "I'm throwing my hat in" post.

Good luck, folks. I'll be interested to see what comes of this.

[selfexiled]

Interested. Gotta figure out this discord thing first and also figure out 5e. I’m a 3.5e lover...

[Sain]

This looks neat, I'm interested.

Obligatory "I'm throwing my hat in" post.

Good luck, folks. I'll be interested to see what comes of this.

Interested. Gotta figure out this discord thing first and also figure out 5e. I’m a 3.5e lover...

Thank you all for interest I've got some sheets already, but I'll give those that have expressed interest time to turn theirs in still. Think I'll pick them sometime next week so there's still plenty of time to toss a sheet at me.

[Kit]

Hello again Sain ! It may suprise given that I said liking paper rpg's but I never did any version of D&D. To classic for me back then, preferred the more exotic ones, but now I am willing to go back to my roots (Not an Imagine Dragon reference).
I have discord and if you accept me to participate in this epic adventure I'll look intensly into it !

[Sain]

Hello again Sain ! It may suprise given that I said liking paper rpg's but I never did any version of D&D. To classic for me back then, preferred the more exotic ones, but now I am willing to go back to my roots (Not an Imagine Dragon reference).
I have discord and if you accept me to participate in this epic adventure I'll look intensly into it !

Hello Kit! I still have recruitment open. I think I'll keep it up till Friday barring any sudden happenings on my end. If you wanna join you can fill out the small sheet that I have in the original post and PM it to me on the forums. I won't be promising anyone that they'll get in 100%, but it's a rather small and quick to fill out sheet so hopefully much time was not lost in the worst case

[Sain]

I suppose it's till Friday on some timeline so I'm not too late.

Recruitment closing. Unfortunately I could not accept every sheet as there was quite a number of them. Players were picked on perceived matching of writing styles, activity, and how much the character ideas grabbed me.

Everyone who applied should have been PMed with yay or nay. Thank you all for interest and see you around in other games