Taemmaril Calendar

I'm hard at work preparing for our group's first adventure on Wednesday, but as most of the stuff I'm doing isn't really for players' eyes, I can't share it here yet. what I can share is my work on a calendar for my campaign.

It is still quite basic, but I have decided on how many days there are in a year and four special days, celebrated (or at least recognized) by most civilized people in the area around the Great Bay. As I move along I will probably detail other holy days, specific for certain deities and places, but for now this is fine.

50 Inn and Tavern Names

When I make cities and towns I usually detail one inn and one tavern, but for the rest, I just make up names and leave it at that, until the PCs show any interest in one of them. For that purpose, I have thrown together a list of appropriate names, that I can pick from quickly as needed. As you can never have too many of these, I thought I would share them with you as well.

Maps

One of the things I enjoy most about creating a campaign is drawing maps. Back in the day it was of course done with pen and paper, but lately I've been experimenting with doing it digitally, which has a lot of advantages and very few draw-backs. It is a lot easier to edit digital maps and with the use of layers, you can very easily use the same map file for both DMs and players. Just make sure to have all the DM information in layers that can be turned off and on as needed. The only draw-back I can think of, is that sketching comes more natural with pen and paper (at least to me). I have borrowed a Wacom pen and tablet from a friend (I really need one of those for myself), which makes a lot of difference, but I am still not quite used to using it yet.

DM Resources: Campaign Mastery

One of the things that take a lot of my time these days, besides preparing my campaign world and stuff for the PCs to do, is roaming the internet for good source material and advice on the various aspects of being a DM. Back in the eighties and nineties, before the internet, my main source for inspiration and knowledge were the few books on the subject I came across and bought (such as the excellent AD&D 2e supplements The Castle Guide, Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, and Creative Campaigning). These days there are countless websites and blogs with advice and background material of all kinds, from new monsters to how to populate your city, but not all of them are equally useful or well written (which was the case for many official supplements as well).

I thought it would be a good idea to write a bit about some of the best of them in a small series of articles, to pass on my findings. While new discoveries to me, many of the sites I write about might be well known to many of you. For that reason I would be happy to receive suggestions on your favorites in the comments, so I can expand my own list of useful resources.

My Roleplaying History

I had my first experience with roleplaying games back in the winter of '85 (I was 13 at the time). One of my friends got the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (Red Box) for Christmas and we were pretty hooked at once. I had only started learning English in school 1½ year before and weren't really good at it, but my friend (who was a year older) had flair for it and could do most of the reading. Naturally he took on the job of dungeon master, while I and a couple of his friends created some characters. I must admit, that I can't remember what my first character was or what he was called, but it was most likely a fighter.

The World of Taemmaril

I have only just begun creating my campaign, but here are some of the details I have worked out so far (some of them might of course change, as I get new ideas).

The campaign world is called Taemmaril and is a fairly standard Earth-sized planet, with three known moons, one of which is too small to be visible with the naked eye. The players' starting point is a small town called Silvershore, which is situated on the northern coast of the Great Bay (see the attached map above).

Character Creation

As mentioned in my first post, our gaming group got together yesterday to create some characters for my campaign. I had set up some guidelines for what races and classes I allow in my campaign, which are most of those included in the Player's Handbook.

The races excluded were dragonborn, gnomes, half-orcs and tieflings. Dragonborn and tieflings are a bit too out there for my taste as PC races (I might let players use them at a later point though), half-orcs are hated as much as orcs in my campaign, because of a plague a hundred years ago, that they were blamed for and therefore aren't welcome in most civilized areas of my campaign world (which makes them too problematic as a PC race), and gnomes never have and never will exist in my world.