Veins of the Earth
You were an adventurer. Somehow you ended up underground. It happens as part of the job from time to time, but this is different. For some reason, somehow, you were trapped. Whatever escape plan you had (if you were smart enough to have one) failed or became impossible. Now you face the depths with whatever meager supplies you brought. You begin to realize all your previous underground experience barely scratched the surface. The caves you explored before were like pores in the skin of the earth. Now you walk the Veins.
Game System: Adjusted Dnd 5e
Game Setting: Veins of the Earth, a gritty surreal version of the Underdark, taking place on (or under) a magical historically-adjacent Earth.
Post Expectation: adaptable, but I'd like to see posts every other day or close to it.
Game length: A few months, hopefully reaching level 6 at least.
Number of players: 3-6
This is a short experimental sandbox campaign. It's a mega-dungeon crawl taking place in a gritty surreal version of the Underdark. This campaign will deal with psychosis, cannibalism, slavery, and many other unpleasant fictionalized versions of real human behavior. The focus is on survival and the sometimes desperate ways we accomplish it.
I’ve been GM for a handful of games, a couple of which were on this site. I'm fond of converting alternate settings to 5e DnD. I tried this setting previously on the old site, but life happened and things generally fizzled out quickly. This game is intended to be shorter and faster paced in the hopes that momentum can carry it through to the end. I’ll be taking rolling applications as my schedule allows. They’ll begin as 1 on 1 games for the first handful of posts to gauge pacing then I’ll merge them into bigger threads. I’d like to see frequent posting, but I definitely understand when life takes you away for a while. If you disappear for too long, your character might fade into the dark. They’ll return if you do.
Character generation instructions can be found in the application folder. Please skim the setting specifics, as there are some comprehensive changes to vanilla 5e.
A note on tone
This game takes place in a lightless, desolate, dangerous place where calories are scarce and you are closer to the bottom of the food chain than the top. This isn’t a game about your characters thriving and succeeding. This is a game about pushing them to their limits in interesting ways that force them to make hard decisions. Despite that, it’s not meant to be a horror game. This is a sandbox game and players will get to choose the direction/tone. There is no immediate goal, no main quest, and escape is only a fantasy at first. Shape the world or just make it to your next long rest. It’s up to you.
Combat is always an option, but it can be entirely avoided if that’s what the players decide. This game is about decisions: deciding what to carry, who to fight, where to go, what to eat, when to rest, how much time to spend doing a task, and whether or not to drink that potion you just found.
A note on gameplay
This game will be highly lethal. Your characters will go down, possibly a lot. They might go insane or lose a limb. Random encounters won’t be level adjusted, and successfully escaping provides as much experience as defeating your opponents. Progression is mainly through sheer survival: Eat. Sleep. Don’t let the darkness get you.
Also, being a PbP game, I expect the game to progress mostly through in-character posts. I’m completely okay with posts that do nothing to move the scene forward if they're concerned with character goals and motivations. Banter and discussion are welcome.
If you have goals as a player about what you’d like to see and how you’d like the game to go, or if you want to clarify a distinction between something said by your character and how you actually feel, by all means post in the OOC. Otherwise post in character as often as possible.
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