The premise of the game is simple and not new, even if it is extremely unorthodox for a D&D campaign. The first and most important thing to remember is, the Player Characters (PCs) are not adventurers! That's right, they're not. Does that mean the story won't have adventure? Well, that really depends on what you consider to be adventure. The PCs will certainly face danger, exotic locales and their even more exotic denizens, and much more, but the most important thing to remember is the paradigm shift from "standard, traditional D&D" to a game in which the PCs have jobs and are out to do them. This game is not about treasure hunting. This game is not about dungeon-crawling. This game is not about a lot of other things, either, but I'll get to that in a moment.

So what is the game about? That's a harder question to answer, and one that I won't do on this page (although check out the SETTING link on the navigation bar to the left.) For now, suffice it to say that it will be somewhat like the X-Files in a fantasy world. Arch-Judicar Maebrylla du Aethaeran is charged by King Taeran with insuring the security of the kingdom of Gilraevan. The PCs will work for her, as king's reeves, internal security professionals that serve the kingdom as a whole rather than any individual locale like the shire-reeves (note: the old expression shire reeve has survived in modern English as the condensed word sherrif.) As such, their bread and butter consists of finding, identifying and eliminating internal threats to the kingdom.

Anyway, that's it in a nutshell. Many of the details will be rolled out (and, for that matter, invented!) as the campaigns moves along. The game will be played over a message board as indicated in THE GAME link to the left, or over a table-top in face-to-face mode, or I may run simultaneous games of each. The "party" will consist of four player characters. The four player characters will be chosen from submissions I recieve depending on the level of interest in the game. I anticipate that more than four interested folks will drop me a line, at least in the online game. The tabletop game will be run based on however many people I have in my group, but since I recently moved and don't really know D&D players in my new area, that may take longer to develop. In order to ensure fairness to the players and myself both (as well as fairness between players) each online character will "audition" to be part of the game. I will run one-on-one sessions with every potential character, and those who seem to fit well into the setting (tied also with those players who's playing style compliments both me as a Dungeon Master (DM) and the setting as a whole) will move into the game proper. With any luck, I'll have similar luck in identifying players that match my interests and expectations of a campaign for the face-to-face game, if it ever materializes.

However, I've prepared a small list of guidelines to give some highlights of my DMing style as well as let potential players know what to expect. Even players who think the setting itself sounds interesting may find my style to be contrary to what they enjoy in the game. This list is to avoid having me (and you) waste time in preparing for a game that isn't going to be optimal for either of us. Check out the list below and see if it sounds like the kind of game you like playing. If so, drop me a line by going to the CONTACT page linked at left.

• Character Generation: There will be a couple of interesting things you need to do during character generation. I want the characters to be fairly mid-level in terms of power. We will use the point buy method detailed in the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) with a base of 28 points. E-mail the character file with an attached text file detailing detailing character's background and social situation (look to the list below for guidelines and suggestions.) Use any standard Word of PDF character record sheet -- there's dozens of them online. Look to the setting information for more details on character background, or e-mail me with any questions. Obviously some of the questions will be game-world related, so you can't just completely make them up. I'll help you to get them together if that is the case.
  
  
  1. How old is your character?
  2. Where was your character born?
  3. What did your character's parents do for a living?
  4. What religion did your character's parents practice?
  5. What was the relationship between your character and his parents like?
  6. Where did your character live as a child?
  7. Was anything happening historically during his childhood?
  8. How did your character spend his time as a child?
  9. Was your character happy as a child?
  10. How did your character decide what to be as an adult?
  11. Are there any adjectives which embody your character's personality?
  12. What are your character's goals and motivations?
  13. How far will your character go to reach those goals?
  14. What does your character fear most?
  15. What does your character love most?
  16. How competitive is your character?
  17. What are your character's best and worst qualities?
  18. What does your character look like? (fairly detailed physical description, including eyes, build, height, hair, skin tone, notable facial features, voice, posture, clothing styles, etc.)
  19. Who are the people in your character's life: family, childhood friends, current friends, etc.
  20. Detail a secret of some sort about your character.
  
  Character names are best selected using this Name Generator and using the "Deverry" names. These names will then feel like they fit into the culture of the country where this campaign will be set. They are great names, with a kind of mixed Welsh/Gaelic feel to them, and they sound completely authentic. If your character is to be some kind of outsider to this country (a difficult proposition, but not impossible) then you can work with me to develop your name.

  Don't worry about things like equipment; we'll work on that together. To a certain extent the equipment you use will be based on what the king's reeves are given in order to carry out their job. Obviously from the list of questions given above, I expect the game to be very narrative in content rather than mechanical. I want the characters in this game to really come alive and be as believable as the real-life players are.

  Also on that note, character advancement will be driven by narrative needs, not by strict experience points rules. I kinda like lower-mid level characters best, so expect characters to advance quickly up to about fourth level, then taper off until eleventh or so level. I don't know that I even want the characters to advance into the higher teens levels at all, as it will be the kind of game that is contrary to what I want (i.e.; I don't want superheroes running around the place slaying powerful levelled up pit fiends or dragons and the like.) Similarly, the concepts of treasure associated with monster will be completely abandoned, as that isn't even part of the game that I want to focus on. If you enjoy D&D games because of the stories instead of because of the advancement and accomplishment of mechanical goals, then maybe this game would be one you would enjoy.

• Story Denoument: A traditional game of D&D consists of a couple of characters, who have a very tenous relationship between them, going into some "dungeon" and hacking everything in it to death in order to run off with the "treasure." Problems are typically solved by characters pulling out swords and dicing them away. There is no doubt that combat is an important and exciting part of the game, and I fully intend to run combats. However, the focus in my games will be on intrigue, conspiracies, and the like. If you're the kind of player who only enjoys games that consist of one combat strung after another, this game is not for you. While there certainly will be combat, and probably plenty of it, it won't be the focus of the game at all.

  For that matter, I expect the story to be the most important part of the game. Characters should always be in character. Meta-game speech (talking as players to each other about stuff that your characters couldn't possibly know) is to be avoided at all costs (although I will allow some met-game detail to come through in the case of parenthetical italic text in the online game, and I'll make up a suitable alternative for the face-to-face game.) Description and dialogue should be not only be in character but also as realistic and detailed as possible. While I won't actually cut combat rules out, combat will be described through narrative -- I'm not making any kinds of combat graphs to post. Combat will not be tactically deep nor complex in most situations, because the lack of detailed combat maps makes such combat very difficult to run. If these kinds of details aren't to your liking, then the game isn't most likely one that you should play.

• DM/Player Roles: As the DM, it may fall to me to make seemingly arbitrary decisions about the way things are going. If you're the kind of player who brings the rules to bear to argue with the DM about a decision you didn't like; please don't bother coming aboard. The DM represents everything about the campaign world, including the capricious nature of the gods. If the rules don't seem to quite add up every once in a while, it most likely is by design on my part, not a mistake. I'm not trying to do this to fuel my own ego as DM, but to maintain consistency and keep the story moving along. In fact, more likely than not, I'm going to have to make most rolls for you in the Internet game since passing requests for rolls back and forth on the Internet is really kind of a pain.

• So, are you ready? Well, that's the lowdown. Information will keep coming up on the rest of these pages to keep you abreast of what's going on with the game. Both important (and maybe not-so-important) Non-player characters (NPCs) and the PCs that make it into the game will show up on the DRAMATIS PERSONAE section of the page. More detail on the changes (mostly subtractions rather than additions or outright changes) to the rules as indicated above will be found in the RULES CHANGES section. Background information and historical information on the setting itself will show up in the SETTING page (with the exception of maps, which will show up in the MAPS section), while information on what happens in the game will be summarized in the ARCHIVES section. Finally, there is the CONTACT page to get in touch with me, and the GAME section itself will lead you to the message boards where the game resides.