Deserts And Dragons

I currently play in a D&D 5e campaign we call "Deserts & Dragons". We meet monthly over at Distinct Games, over in Belper (in Derbyshire in the UK). We have a pretty stable group but the sessions are structured so that each session we start out at a base and at the end we return to the base so there is no problem if any characters are unable to adventure in each session. I have come to appreciate this is an excellent strategy for keeping an ongoing campaign going as it easily handles not all players being available. I was unable to make last session (along with another player Glyn) but it's been the first session I've missed; we started in January 2019.

I've blogged before about this campaign, writing up the party's adventures from the perspective of Tarquin, my human bard. You can view the posts using the "Deserts & Dragons" tag.

We mainly use a Facebook chat group to communicate and have also used a full Facebook Group for another group (which one of the players uses for a campaign he is DMing) to communicate. We're all friends on Facebook (although it's not a requirement) so it makes it all very easy to communicate.

The members of our group are all reasonably local to Belper, where the game is hosted. The furthest away I think is Derby, 30 minutes on the bus or about 10 miles. When we can we organise lifts for one another. A few of us met up for a few beers a month or so back. It's all very social and laid back which really suits me.

All the players (as far as I can recall) met at Distinct Games as in 2017 Jono, our DM, setup a game as "resident GM" for the shop which was an open table where he ran loosely related one shots. I think there were around 12 of these and I joined about half way through. These were run as half day sessions and two sessions were run each day. Sometimes just one player turned up (which was still an excellent session with just me and Jono), sometimes I think we peaked at 7 players.

When Jono finished those one shots he had a break for a few months but the new campaign was started as full day (10:30 - 16:30) sessions with two groups, one was the "hard core" players from the previous sessions who had really gelled as a team and the other session was for the kids, allowing Jono to tailor the sessions accordingly. I believe there is another group  run in the week as well. Each session costs £5 and the shop keep a tab we pay at the end. They sell snacks & drinks but allow us to bring in our own food as we usually raid Birds or Greggs at lunch time.

One of the interesting things about this campaign is that the other groups play in the same world and the actions one group does are reported to the other groups so the world is fluid, even when we are not playing. The world is set after some sort of terrible apocalyptic even and all the characters live in a city in the middle of a desert. The city has reached capacity and the characters are tasked with exploring the surrounding area in the hope of finding resources for the city and possibly somewhere else to start a settlement. So its mainly a hex crawl with short encounters and is working out really well.

We usually level up after each session so I needed to level up Tarkquin to level 6 and I did so last night, choosing my local The Talbot to level Tarquin up and write him out on a new character sheet.

As with many RPG groups two of the players Chris & Glyn have also turned up to play RGQ at a separate venue, Boards & Swords.

So shortly I'll be off to Belper, catching a bus (as my car is in the garage) which takes about 30 minutes. Our session is 10:30 to approx 16:30.