Snakebite

Night is a setting for my heavily-customized 5e game. I was a coward when I first started running it and allowed all the base classes, though I did require players to read the following text boxes for their class.  I actually think this worked really well, to be honest. I didn't need to spring too much lore on them in game but it was enough they understood that this was a different type of game with a different feel--a different vibe--and it let them get into character quickly. As they grew more comfortable with the story, it stopped really even feeling like 5e, though we used the same base ruleset. This is actually where I began formalizing my Game Vibes theory. Build the vibes to build a fun game, beyond the rules themselves.  Anyhow, if you're at all interested what this looked like in practice, I copied my class primers below:  Classes : Classes suggest social roles, and NPCs need not use these specific rules Barbarian : There is no urban, cosmopolitan impulse, nor di...

 It's too late. This kingdom is crumbling. We should take what few treasures we can carry and flee. The enemy isn't just at the gates--they're already inside. Our soldiers are abandoning their posts; many have disappeared; many have succumbed to the sickness that is eating this land from the inside out. We don't have long before this place is a wasteland and we have to be ready or we will lose everything. I hear the internet used to be good. There were websites. People talked to one another and made friends. People shared recipes. I'm not sure what else they did, to be honest. I wasn't there. It's a hazy, mythic era full of vaguely-defined heroes; heroes which, as is usually the case with classic literature, don't always stand up to moral scrutiny. "Anonymous." Hackers. Dissidents in repressive states. Dissidents in free states. Perverts. All nebulously united in a grand experiment in personal freedom, the free exchange of information, and the ...

Sword-Coast D&D is so dominant that it's not only the assumed setting for all D&D campaigns, it has become the default setting for essentially all western fantasy. When someone wants to break out of the mold they need to open their story with a rape or a brutal beheading; get that Game of Thrones energy on display, otherwise everyone is going to start looking around for kobolds.  This isn't a bad thing; I like the Forgotten Realms, I think. It's a fun place full of adventure and bright colors and wizards and curses. I like fantasy. I love it, in fact.  But I do sometimes want a different kind of story. One that doesn't slot into the same grooves as thousands of other games. We live in a world of imagination and I want to use it. So every now and then I'll bang together a new world, one utterly distinct from the Sword Coast, with a history and culture and its own monsters and cities and cosmology. And I'll drop my players into it, and-- Look, you know wha...