The Valel campaign setting centers on Dragonwrath, a bustling city of thirty thousand. It takes its name from the Dragonwrath River which hurls its water spectacularly into a chasm on the western edge of the city. It is a land of great strife -- tensions are rising between Ballesor and Lygoria, on whose border the city sits,humanoids raid from the Badlands, Dervishes raid from the Wastes, and unspeakable horrors from the Under-Earth sometimes crawl from the chasm east of town.

SELF-CONTAINED GAMING SESSIONS

This campaign world is designed so that we can play full self-contained adventures inside a five-hour gaming session. Each session will begin and end at a "home base" – almost always Dragonwrath. This format allows us to shuffle characters in and out of the campaign based on which players are present each session. All of these things are necessary for this to work:

• Adventures must be designed for quick play; in other words, they must be short adventures.
• Players must be committed to cooperating with fellow players. A party leader should be chosen to make most minor decisions (e.g. choosing the left or right passage) and players should be committed to spending play time on group actions. In other words, the DM shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time handling split groups or handling individual situations.
• The DM must be committed to keeping the pace crisp.
• Travel time between locations must be accelerated to be as quick as possible.
• NPC interactions must be glazed over when possible; we will not be role-playing bar scenes unless it is relevant to the adventure.
• Players should be willing to "level" their characters during the periods between gaming sessions.
• The gaming group must be kept small. The ideal group is 3 or 4 people; I intend to invite 5 full-time players; a few others will be invited on occasion if room is available.
• The DM must be willing to change the adventure based on time remaining. If there are 45 minutes left in a gaming session and we have a full dungeon level remaining I will shorten it on the fly.
• The players must be willing to assist in wrap-up; in other words, omitting long-shot searches and wild goose chases near the end of the session to enable shutting things down.

GAMEPLAY OUTSIDE OF THE GAMING SESSION

I would like to handle as much of each player’s individual game needs outside the session as possible. This means sending emails back and forth from player to DM.

CAMPAIGN STYLE

This will be a fairly stingy campaign both in terms of leveling and in booty collection. Those who played the previous campaign, RUIN, know that one was very generous. If a 1 is a magic-starved world with few goodies to find and a 10 is a Monty Haul campaign, Ruin was a 9 and this one will be a 4. Leveling will be fairly slow out of necessity; if people are going to miss sessions a lot and everyone is leveling each session, characters will very quickly become unbalanced.

I’m basing experience points not on monsters killed. Rather, XP will be given out for characters completing goals and overcoming obstacles, and players helping create an enjoyable gaming session and role-playing their characters. If you (or your character) slow the game down too much or act like an asshole, you can expect a much smaller XP reward.

The campaign’s path will be entirely up to the players; you’ll be presented with options at the beginning of each session and the players can decide what to do. I will tailor each session toward the players who are present; you won’t find yourself helpless without a thief if the only player with a thief character is not present at that session.

A particular player can have more than one character available to him, but can only play one during a single session. In other words, you could play Bobo the thief one week and play Father Swein the cleric the next week, but you can’t play both in one night.

A week to a month of game time will pass in between each gaming session, during which characters can level up, take care of personal business, recuperate, add to memoirs, and spend the spoils from the last adventure

CHARACTER CREATION

There are enough differences between stock D&D characters and Dragonwrath characters that using the D&D character generation software is not possible. Go to the Character Creation Page to see how to roll up a Dragonwrath character.

THE IMPORTANCE OF RELIGION ON VALEL

This campaign features a creation story which is indisputably true, in that it can and will determine how things in the world behave. The gods are real and, conflicts with physics aside, the story of how the world came to be is true. As a consequence, all races share a set of gods and beliefs in their place in the universe. There are two tiers of gods; the greater ones, of which there are about thirty spelled out, and hundreds of lesser ones which the players can create at will. Every character should have a patron deity (although level of piety is variable) and a healthy respect for the powers of the gods. There are no competing religions; this pantheon of deities is universally accepted by all to exist. However, there are plenty of conflicts between followers of particular gods.