"God Damn!"

One of the tasks assigned to each of us, was to come up with a god that could plug into the pantheon of our chosen setting. Since we chose The Forgotten Realms, I decided to make a lower god in the pantheon and tie them into the setting by having them serve an established Deity.

The god itself is called Shazek, and he serves Cyric, the god of death and destruction. My lesser deity is actually based a little on the Cthulhu mythos's Nyarlathotep, a trickster god that shifts form.

So the god is based on deceit and masks, its followers gives it their identities and in return gain powers of shifting, control over shadow, and significant increases to bluff checks.

Now the player characters can become significantly involved with the god by choosing to walk the path of the veilbinder, a class that gains their powers from an agreement with Shazek. Or by running into its particularly large and invasive cult the god controls.

So now we get to see how not only mine, but the other gods fit into the campaigns story!

"Getting Classy"

The key to a successful D&D supplement has always been 3 things.

New Races
New Monsters
New Classes.

The first two are in the bag as of right now, so this past week we focused on classes! Once again, we ran into the same problem we encountered while brainstorming new races and monsters, everything is covered! This meant that we had to expand into professions and dynamics that not even eberron could touch. A daunting task indeed.

But over the course of a week and a half we broached, argued over, and eventually settled  on a few classes, including one of my own tweaking!

"The Veil Binder"

The veilbinder is a class that in many ways resembles a blank slate, the class is similar to both a bard and warlock as it excels at not one skill (using masks to augment his abilities) and his powers come from a pact with an external force (Shazek, messenger of Cyric, and god of deceit and faces).

When it comes to the character, the backround could be anyone who desired power, enough to sacrifice their own identity, so they summon and make a pact with the god Shazek, who is the source of their powers and feats.

And of course, after the character makes their pact with shazek, they are granted 3 masks, which could be removed or added to augment the players abilities in game. 

Overall, I am glad with how the lore and backround turned out, all that is left is playtesting. Stay tuned for further veil binder build updates!

"Expanding the Bestiary"

One of the hardest parts of this class so far, has been brainstorming for new races and monsters. The biggest problem is that the official supplements are brimming with both classic and new monsters, so once we get an enemy idea, name, and nature going, we realize it was in a dark sun supplement 8 years previous.

So we fell too reversing established fantasy tropes, as we turned our territories elves into musclebound, brutal savages, or mixed animals into a humanoid shape with the rest of our races. These include a Phoenix born, mushroom man, spider man. While we have since written plenty of filler and racial modifiers to make these races quite fun, the overall development process was basically a big game of "simpsons did it".

However, even with these pitfalls, we came up with quite a few good ideas, and hopefully these ideas will bear fruit!

Running Large Groups

As of this post, I have run two games in my current campaign. The characters are great, the setting is standard enough to be accessible to both veterans and newcomers, and there are plenty of surmountable challenges to keep the players on their toes.

However the current adventuring party is made of 12 player characters. This has made problems arise at an alarming rate.

• Combat takes longer (especially when factoring 12 players and then 4-8 monsters)
• The dense collection of characters don't give the players time to explore properly
• It is easy to lose focus while waiting for your turn in combat
• The game can get a bit loud as many players vie for attention from the DM

And while all of these problems can seem daunting, there are things you can do to alleviate these headaches. 

• Get rid of initiativerolls, just go clockwise around the table to speed up combat encounters
• use random rolls on specific party members too keep them in the action.
• Do not spend too long on any one object and keep the story going.