Jesper Bentzer
LEVEL. NARRATIVE. DESIGN
Strange Acquaintances
The adventure takes place in the kingdom of Heartland as a band of adventurers looking for their own goals stumble into a Kingdom haunted by Eldritch cultists, a celestial song unifying all living things into a singular choir and ruins of an old giant kingdoms dark past that still leaves a mark on the world.
Key Learning -
Personal Contribution
- Designing plot points, story arcs, worldbuilding, and creating characters.
-
A better understanding of balancing battle encounters, puzzles, and rewards.
- Problem-solving, foreshadowing threats, and creating timelines.
Strange Acquaintances
Genre
Roleplaying Tabletop
Production Time
Under constant development
Team size
Me, myself and I
Role
Gamemaster, writer, level designer.
Strange Acquaintances is a world created for Dungeons & Dragons and a project I'm constantly developing and expanding as well as Dungeon Mastering in. I have created worlds before for my own enjoyment but never a world to be shared with others or as big and long-lasting as this project has been.
When I created Strange Acquaintance I wanted to make a campaign focusing on a small part of a larger world with hints and stories of history from long ago. I also wanted to have current conflicts bubbling up as this kingdom that is reaching the end of a long-lasting peaceful age to having mysteries and discoveries that excites and engage the players to want to figure out more and dig deeper into history and plot points.
So to do this I started small, a simple town with a thieving problem and the players gave chase. One thing leads to another and they started to see hints of cultists and the eldritch demons they brought into the world.
After this short introduction to the world and one of many plot points, I had to work from here to create the image I had in my head for this world.
I started creating noble families, towns, cities, and started to think bigger.
I knew I wanted to have Eldritch horrors, ancient dungeons, and lost history as the main focus of the current world. So I used this as my foundation, creating the past and then basing the present on the past's mistakes and history building a world on top of another world giving the world layers of discoveries and secrets to be found.
As a part of creating the old ruins and past mistakes, I started using online tools to create battle maps and planned out encounters, scenarios and balanced them for the players to engage in and overcome.
One of such places is the ruined giant's guard tower now haunted by the ghosts of the past.
Clues and names of this place scattered in the long-forgotten halls could be found amongst the dangers.
The plan here was to have a drawn-out battle giving the players little time to rest. Having ghosts appearing from walls and floors possessing them and making sure the players had to be ever alert and think about how to best protect themselves from these Etherial foes.
Ending it all with them tired beaten and battered falling down to the lower parts of the ruins without a way out.
The lower levels gave the players new hints to the mystery and new types of dangers to fight against.
Having not seen any obvious way down the players fell into the hidden underbelly of the tower.
Finding themselves in the middle of a ruin filled with unnatural growing mushrooms poisoning them and giving them little time to rest as infected denizens started to rush them from their burrows.
The idea behind the entire dungeon is to give the players small hints to what has happened here in the past. Having wooden rings carved out of dryads and living leaf armors made out of fey-creatures hidden in old vaults and chests.
I always plan and make sure that I don't tell the players right out what has happened but instead leave hints directing them towards the conclusion that they themselves have to puzzles together giving them the satisfaction of figuring out the puzzle for themselves.