Welcome to our Nerath Campaign The Nerath Campaign & The Nerath Timeline The current year for our Nerath campaign is set during the year 103AE. Inspired By Gary Gygax

Hello everyone. The old man is back to ramble one more time. I have a few folks that actually follow my gaming blogs so I figured it might be time to do a post and give an update on everything. Yes, I know ... I've been gone for a while and for that I am sorry but I've had a "lot" of various medical problems since last November that I will not get into right now but I am on the mend thankfully so I thought I would dive into something to suck up some of my free time. During this downtime a few things have changed, not by chance of course, but it's just been one speed bump after another. This will all be covered in a new post shortly.

This campaign idea was thought up several years ago but one thing after another came up and delays just kept slowing us down. We had a solid six player group going but one got married and went *poof*, another got a new job which took him out of state and the third just dropped but I have retained my oldesat core three players that have been with me from the start. Well, as you all know, Covid hit and that shut us down for close to 18 months.

Last year my father caught Covid and we almost lost him but I am happy to say he is doing fine now. The on top of all that I had some pretty serious medical problems kick in which I am pleased to say . . . I am on the road to a full recovery. It still might be April or May of 2023 before I am set to fire this thing off. So, yea . . . it's been a rough last couple of years for us.

During all of this I had decided I was going to take a break from Dungeons & Dragons just to take a break from it all. I can say first hand, it is super hard staying motivated with gaming when you've had a couple of years like we have all had but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel and the excitement has started to kick in.

Now on to the campaign description. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do with this campaign and one thing I knew for sure is when myself and my group started back playing I was going to give them the best campaign I could create. I ended up deciding to go with a classic campaign setting "for the time being" and eventually have it expand into other kingdoms and nations. The decision was made that we leave 5th edition. I'll make a new post covering this decision later but just know a lot of things has happened with the current state of Dungeons and Dragons which has left a bad taste in our mouths and it's time for a change.

This campaign is a long time in the making because for a long time I simply did not know what campaign setting I wanted to run my games in and trust me, it was a hard decision since I had been out of the game for so many years. In the end I decided Nentir Vale was where I would return to since it is a setting that really fits the more classic style of play of Old-School Essentials with it being the original default campaign setting for the Basic/Expert D&D systems. It just made sense to me, even though I know very little about Nentir Vale.

I'll be starting this campaign off with the Ruined Tower of Zenopus with four players. It will be live recorded and then edited and finally it will be uploaded to our tabletop Youtube channel. This opening adventure will be used as a stepping stone to expans into other adventures and create a long lasting campaign "or at least that is what we hope happens". It has been around twenty years since I ran any type of game for a group of players so I figure things will be a little rough around the edges in the beginning but will smooth out over time.

The main reason I chose Nentir Vale is because out of all of the campaign settings that are available this one just seems the most down to earth high fantasy setting of them all, even if it is slightly on the strange side lol. It was created back when people all about "the game". People weren't worried about what color skin the players had or making sure you had . . . ugh before I get on a long drug out rant I'll just say, classic D&D was and "is" the purest form of D&D and I refuse to leave it - what more can I say but thank god for classic D&D.

Ready, Set, Go! The Nerath Campaign & The Nerath Timeline The current year for our Nerath campaign is set during the year 103AE. Inspired By Gary Gygax

Hello everyone ... I have some things that I would like to touch on with those of you that are first time readers on this blog. The first thing that I kind of want to get into is what many call the "Matt Mercer Effect". I think one thing we all can agree on is Matthew Mercer is ranked in the top level of Dungeon Masters.

The man knows his stuff, but it isn't just about Matthew, his players bring a huge part of what makes Critical Role special to the table. To quote an old saying ... "it takes two to tango", or in this case, it takes a Dungeon Master and a group of players to make a game special.

As you can see by this blog, I plan to run my own personal Nentir Vale campaign setting with a little homebrewing added but still keeping with the original flavor of this land. I want to do "some" of my own reskinning for this setting but still keep it close to how it originally was. For the most part I want to keep this setting as close to canon as possible but from our starting point forward, I am sure things will start to ease into homebrew.

One thing I very much want to emphasize on is "I am not Matthew Mercer" and if you expect me as a Dungeon Master to be like Matthew Mercer then I would say "go find you another campaign to follow" because I am not on his level, nor will I even try to be and to be perfectly honest I am not sure if the world has a Dungeon Master that even comes close to his level of story telling "well maybe but I have yet to see one".

I try to run a good game where my players have a good time (plain and simple) and in the past my players have all had a great time so I guess I am doing something right. Critical Role is a staged game, with some scripting involved - Matthew and his players are all voice actors. When you watch his campaigns, this is not what Dungeon & Dragon games are really like. His campaigns are strictly constructed to bring entertainment to his viewers.

Next thing I would like to talk about is this campaign and how it will be ran. At the time of me writing this post, I have just started working on this campaign setting and this blog will still be a ways down the road before it really takes off so if you plan to follow us, please be patient. We have always ran classic 1st edition AD&D and up until recently when we jumped into 5th edition "huge mistake", but . . . things have changed that have sent us back to classic, specifically . . . Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy that you will read about above in another post.

About this Pandemic going on ... yea, its really screwed a lot of things up in my life. I will not go into detail about my personal life being affected by Covid-19 "yes, I have had it twice" but it had affected my work schedule "before I medically retired", and my free time and socializing with friends & family "just like I am sure the same has happened with many of you". It's just part of life and I'll find ways to work around it where my tabletop gaming is concerned.

Ready For Content The Nerath Campaign & The Nerath Timeline The current year for our Nerath campaign is set during the year 103AE. Inspired By Gary Gygax