DREAD - Game Design and Intention

D.R.E.A.D.

Dangerously Rare Elixirs And Decoctions

Statement on Game Design and Intention

D.R.E.A.D. is intended to test a few concepts less usual in D&D5 than your typical vanilla fantasy.

The 2 main test objects are following:

• a "Gold as XP" ruleset
• Level of the characters and level-based NPCs capped at level 8

Other intentions are:

• Use monsters as base ingredients for Alchemy
• Alchemy as a way to overcome the lvl 8 cap and continue progressing

DREAD's Flair

DREAD should be everything but flamboyant: (potent) magic is rare, civilisation is scarce and far between, monsters roam or rule the land.
Beasts are omnipresent and very strong, but those harnessing the monster’s innate capabilities can wield powers beyond imagination.
Heroes wander in mud, pay their heroic deeds with blood and scars and exchange their might for addiction.
This is a grim world, where fighting monsters is a way to greatness, cursed with its own burden.

"Gold as XP" ruleset

While D&D5 doesn't implement gold as XP rules, it is easy to implement such rules. My point of view, though, is not that XP should be awarded on receiving gold, but on spending it. It then allows for a factoring of the conversion rate to steer the campaign in a certain direction (for a kingdom building campaign, you could have building cost on a x2 factor in the to-XP-conversion - A x2 factor on carousing would bring a more Conan-the-barbarianesque feel to the game, and so on).
I will develop my rules for factoring later on.

Level Cap at lvl 8

Why level 8, you will ask?
Well I tend to see the second tier of play (Levels 6-10) as the sweet spot for 5E gaming. Level 8 brings access to lvl4-spells to limited teleportation, but no resurrection or true teleport spells (like teleportation circle), but still allow for a second “feat or attribute”-choice.

What else to do but hunting Monsters?

Hunting monsters for their parts is a typical motivation in this setting. But what else is there to do, to ensure that adventures won't get boring and repetitive?
Well, there is plenty to do , without even leaving the “Monsters & Alchemy” trope:

• Recover the recipe for an amazing potion (where else, other than in his own tomb, would a mad alchemist store his potent alchemical recipe, after his demise?)
• Tame a monster to create a quasi infinite supply of some alchemical component
• Protect a herd of tamed monsters from depredation - other monsters ? Another country/organisation ? Rogue alchemist ?
• Monster breakout ! Recover the beast, with minimal damage to the civilian population, without killing it. In the middle of the capital. Did we mention it took hostage the daughter of the Count?
• Ecological espionage. Someone in the far east knows how to tame and herd gelatinous cubes. We need their gelatine for a potent potion. Their price for it is extremely pricy. We want to produce this gelatine within the kingdom. Get there and learn how to do it (think of the secrets around the silk in the middle ages)
• Alchemical espionage. Same as the one before, but for alchemical secrets (Their blue gelatine is much more potent than ours. Find out why and how to produce it!)

The typical fantasy low-level missions go well in this setting:

• Work as guards for a caravan transporting valuable alchemical reagents. If the alchemical substances are perishable, then time is of the essence. Even if the substances are inert by themselves, combined with other stuff, they might get very potent.
• Monsters are on the outskirts of a small town - go and protect it. And could you harvest a few bilary glands from the monster at the same time?
• Be the bodyguard or henchman of a noble on a quest for an eye of a gorgon or the heart of a dire wolf. Or maybe does he only need some stinking hellebore (nobody's will tell you that flower is also named for a reason "bear's foot")

On the Setting behind DREAD:

Humans are not wanted
In this setting, humans are refugees, coming from another plane, where their gods sacrificed themselves to allow them to exit a plane where they were loosing the war against forces of darkness.
On this new world, they are seen as parasites, aggressively carving themselves strongholds and fief or even conquering older "monstrous" settlements.

Only a few playable races
I decided to  build my universe around the traditional fantasy races and the monsters (sometimes organizing them in societies, kingdoms or even empires)
my playable races will be:

• Humans
• Elves
• Half-Elves
• Dwarves
• Half-Orcs
• Halflings
• Goliaths (as half-giants / giants experiments - a fallen Giant empire will have a significant role to play in this setting)

I might allow monstrous races to be played later on... Not sure about that yet...

That's all for now.
A lot of what is spoken of in this article will be further developped in a separate article