Mission Statement

Hardholme was created out of a desire to play D&D more regularly, without the tedious and sometimes frustrating aspect of getting 6+ people’s schedules aligned. I wanted to run a campaign where, while your character is important and influential, is not the main character in a story; allowing whatever story to continue without your character being present. This allows participation to be obligation free. Ideally, you WANT to play, but you never feel like you HAVE to. Most importantly, you never feel like you are holding anyone else back when you CAN'T.

From here I developed the idea of a town being the central character in this story, an almost collective character. You, the players, would all be part of this town. Your actions, directly and indirectly, would influence and shape this town. I want you to be invested in it’s success and prosperity. My idea is that regardless of what you’re doing, you are changing the town in one way or another. City-building, politics, industry.. A few of the themes I want to focus on, alongside good ol’ fashioned adventuring in Hardholme. How, though? Were you all born in this town? Why should you care about it’s success?

Enter the West Marches. I heard about this style of campaign and started researching it. It’s based on a very similar concept to what Hardholme has become, only with more responsibility placed on the players. The players have a home-base, and discuss outside of the game what adventure they want to embark on next. They set a date and time and propose it to the DM, who then puts it all together. It also introduced other concepts, like downtime activities and away-from-the-table development. What are your players doing while you aren’t sitting at the table? A single session can take place over the course of a day, weeks, even months sometimes. What happens in the months between adventures?

So, here we are. The discord server leading up to the start of the game has allowed us to really flesh out characters and get to know each other. Going forward, it will present itself as an opportunity to stay engaged with Hardholme on your own terms. Maybe you missed 2 sessions in a row; that doesn’t have to mean your character was stagnant the whole time. Maybe your character has an entrepreneurial goal that you cannot reasonably pursue at the table with 6 other people. Maybe you want to spend months drinking and being a generally disruptive citizen without the real-world consequences like prison and death, here you go.

The political, economic, and industrial aspect of this campaign aside, the character development really leaves no limit (as evident by these fucking amazing backstories, guys) when it comes to how we can use this Discord post-Session One. I also have a very large resource available to me with more generalized opportunities for downtime, that will be presented periodically on a per-player basis. I’m really excited for this guys, thanks for participating!