Before we get into the fun stuff, I feel like I need to restate my position on this. If you use “AI”-generated content, please do not follow me. Or better yet, stop using that crap and make your own stuff.

Anyway.

I’ve mentioned before that Karatera started its life as a Dungeons and Dragons setting. And indeed, I’m still using it for that very purpose. I promised to talk about Karatera RPG stuff last week, though that was kind of a hasty promise, I think. I wrote that literally the day before I posted it, and I don’t think I actually considered what I would talk about. Do I write about the campaigns I’ve run in Karatera? Do I dump a bunch of stat blocks and numbers on the screen and hope that you guys can decode them? Still need to get used to this weekly post schedule, I think.

I’ve run two campaigns through Karatera as the dungeon master (basically the game’s ‘referee’, for those who don’t know D&D). I might as well talk about those, because there’s a specific feel for Karatera that I only really developed through running those first two campaigns, both of which were run using the 5th edition version of the game. It was originally meant to be a low fantasy setting, but I learned pretty quickly that D&D was not a game that was meant to be played with low magic. So, I had to make some adjustments, both to the system and to the world.

I made the critical mistake of running these two campaigns at the same time while I was still pretty new to DMing. I didn’t really know how to plan out a campaign back then, and I wrote the whole thing in the style of one of those pre-written adventures you can buy from games shop – which, as it turns out, was not the best approach, because it meant that I wasn’t leaving much room to tie character backstories into the plot, and the end result was certain bits where the characters were being pushed along a single path, without much room for deviation.

Still, my players had fun. And we’ve got plenty of great memories from those campaigns, many of which I’ve built into the canon lore of Karatera. I think there’s a limit to how much I can talk about the campaigns without getting into spoilers for some of these stories or getting too technical. I might post stat blocks or rules discussions at a later date, but I think I should get some more stories out before I do that, so I’ll finish up this post with an update on Tales from Karatera. Story 2 is, at time of writing, currently being beta-read by a few of my friends, while story 3 is currently about halfway through the first draft. Story 3 is going to be set from the perspective of a dragonkin warrior, being trained in the army and sent to fight the Redbloods. My plan for that story is to highlight how dragonkin society works, and how the Bluebanes operate as a whole. It should be up on the site in… well, I’m not sure. Sometime within the next two months, I think? We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I’ll see you guys next week!