This is the Noedia campaign setting for 5e D&D. For those of you who have played in this setting before, some things from the 3.5e setting have changed. Here’s a quick rundown:
Feldaz, God of Plains has died. Most plains folk worship The Mother Spirit now instead.
The totemic aspects of Gurmong have been retconned and now belong to Rolann.
Morlug have been replaced with Goliaths.
The influence of Gurmong’s demonic curses have been studied and documented a bit more.
The people of Kharad have discovered and started breeding dinosaurs.
Sylvia is less xenophobic.
The Druidic Order has opened up membership to races of all realms.
A sect of the Druidic Order has split off, calling themselves the Sylvan Sisterhood and clinging to the old ways.
The distinction between paladin-the-class and Paladin-the-holy-knight-of-Palad has been clarified.
Assuming the party isn’t interested in doing a level zero funnel, we’ll be starting at level 1. Don’t roll your abilities; use the standard array (15 14 13 12 10 8) or point buy (as described in the Player’s Handbook, page 13, under "Variant: Customizing Ability Scores") instead.
We’ll be using a blend of the inspiration rules described in Chapter 4 of the Player’s Handbook, and the hero point rules described in Chapter 9 of the Dungon Master’s Guide. The party has a shared pool of hero points (or inspiration points, if you prefer). The party can have a maximum of one point per party member in the pool. As a group, you can decide to spend a hero point on a party member’s attack roll, saving throw, or ability check to give the roll advantage. If the roll already has advantage, that party member rolls a d6 and adds the result to the roll instead. The group can spend multiple points on a single roll if they choose.
I’ll go over how to acquire hero points in the first session.
So, crazy idea, let me know if you don’t like it. We can do a more traditional first-level start instead if you prefer.
In lieu of creating backgrounds normally, how would you like to start the campaign as ordinary villagers who find themselves thrown into extraordinary circumstances? Some might perish but those who live will be destined for greatness.
The idea is to run a funnel: a somewhat-difficult adventure with a bunch of level 0 characters (four per player). Once complete, you choose one of the survivors to play for the rest of the campaign, and advance it to level 1. This should result in characters that have a bit of history and relationships with each other.
The characters would be generated like so. For each of your characters, you are assigned a randomly generated race, occupation, and starting gear. You get a +1 proficiency bonus and proficiency in your starting weapon. You choose your name, age, gender, subrace (if any), abilities (point buy or standard array), and background. You don’t get the equipment granted by your background. You don’t need to choose your personality traits, ideal, flaw, and bonds right away — they can be chosen any time before you advance to level 1. If you don’t like the characters you generated, players are free to trade characters with each other.
Below is a sample four randomly generated level 0 characters. You can refresh the page to generate new ones.
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