Tabletop RPGs

Based on Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. I have worked on multiple homebrewed one shots. Here are a few of the ones that I have created and led as the Dungeon Master.

Murder Mystery

This was my first homebrew one shot, that insoured me to get into Unreal Engine. My goals for this project was to create a murder mystery that didn't just devolve into players turning on other players and ending in them just killing each other.

I started by trying to figure out where they players could go where they couldn't just walk away once the actual murders started,. The immediate answer was a boat as that blocks line of sight based on floor and each individiual room. It also offered a reason for a bunch of unrelated people to be in the same location without feeling like they were shoehorned into a place.

This did bring in a secondary problem, as ships tend to be very large with a lot of people. In order to make sure the game still felt small and intimate, I needed to find a way to shrink the boat even further. I was able to accomplish this by creating a bubble that teleported the group into another dimension. This added a level of fear and confusion while also limiting their access to the outside world.

Another explicit plan for the one shot was to add in suspicious characters from the beginning. In order to add this in, I needed to create a boat that was inherently suspicious. The captain became a smuggler and many of the crew and passengers took advantage of the fact that the captain was willing to overlook certain moral standards.

Survival of the Quickest

For this game, my goal was to create a game that didnt emphasize combat at all while still maintaining a feeling of horror and tension. A secondary goal was to create a one shot that could be replayed multiple times with the same players while still giving a unique encounter each time.

In order to create that feeling, I started with coming up with an enemy that was too big to just go up to and fight, while still being benign enough that the NPCs in the surrounding area weren't crazy for living around and building an enitre city in. This led me to geology and the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Maintaining a magical feeling while also understanding that the game takes place in a location with no modern technology, it was decided that there would be three volcanoes in close proximity erupting at the same time with an underprepared town.

To build a feeling of horror throughout the game, I started by informing the players of the genre, and then taking a rather slow start to the game. This isn't to say that there was nothing to do, but that they were given time to get to know the city and the inhabitents,. They got to hear the gossip and take actions in the town such as going deep to the mines, and helping the local school out. In the meantime, they were becoming aware of how geologically active the area was with repeated earthquakes and dealing with the damage that came from that. Once the players were comfortable and had characters that they were attached to, then the other shoe could drop and the volcanoes would erupt.

In order to reach my second goal, I added in multiple valid escape routes for the players to take, each with there own obstacles and additional lore that would be interesting for players to encounter and deal with while still keeping pace and running from an overwhelming force. In the first game that we played together, they chose to take the Northern route where they came across a wounded golden dragon with an unhatched egg as well as a giant magma elemental. Both opportunites gave them the chance to use their skills to run, hide, or try to engage with the world around them, while also knowing that they couldn't completely stop to take long rests, so they were forced to content with resource management.