Home Brew Project Brainstorming

[Sception]

Ok, so the Don has suggested homebrew projects as a means of shaking off the rust on these forums. I'm not sure how much juice I have in me, certainly not much before october, but there are several projects I've been thinking on and off about over the years that might qualify...

D&D: A Necromancy/Shadow Magic/undead themed homebrew expansion book for D&D 5e/5.14. A bit outside of this forums usual wheelhouse, but I do have more mechanical familiarity here to work of off, and it is a tabletop game that sometimes involves minis with some necromancy mechanics and themes that have unfortunately gone pretty underexplored in official 5e/5.14 content. Only officially though, we'd be wading into territory that's pretty heavily populated by other unofficial/homebrew/3rd party sources.

Old World: In theory you could do a homebrew arcane journal with bloodline rules... but that's not really how faction splatbook content has worked for Old World so far. Separate armies for each bloodline is kind of too many in one book when all the others only have 2, if even that many. On the other hand a huge bloodline system layered on top of the (already very powerful and detailed) VC legends pdf grand army also feels like too much. My counter proposal would be splitting some or all of the bloodlines out into campaign supplements. The two I've thought about so far include:

• Homebrew Campaign supplement covering the Von Carstein wars, retelling the history, introducing scenarios for iconic battles, homebrew rules for Von Carstein and Imperial Armies of Infamy, rules for the special characters involved. Von-Carstein specific characters, rules, and army list would live here.
• Homebrew Campaign supplement covering an original concept war in Nehekhara set in the current Old World time period. With Settra and most of the Tomb Kings away on campaign in the North, an alliance of Arkhan and Neferata march on Khemri in an attmept to usurp control. Khalida and Khatep, who have been left out of the Old World system so far, lead the defense. Army of Infamy for Neferata's Army of the Silver Pinnacle. Khatep would use the Mortuary Cult army list from the existing TK arcane journal. I'm not sure if Arkhan and Khalida would need bespoke armies of infamy or if they'd just use the regular Tomb Kings grand army. Either way, special character rules for the four big heroes involved, scenarios for key battles, lore for the campaign's progress. Lahmian specific characters, rules, and army list would live here.

We're seeing something at least in principle like this coming out officialy for Old World in the not too distant future, a campaign supplement themed arcane journal coving more of Settra's Campaign in the north with new armies of infamy and accompanying the release of new plastic hero models for the Tomb Kings. I'd want to see how that book is structured before working on something like this so as to maintain consistency with official design concepts and format.

Age of Sigmar: as with Vamp Counts in the old world, the current rule set paradigm for Age of Sigmar leaves us without bespoke rules for the various Soulblight Legions and Dynasties, at least apart from the Castellai, who have an Army of Renown in the Soulblight battletome. Armies of Renown are pretty minimal rule sets, so I don't think it would be very hard to put together additional Armies of Renown for the rest, plus maybe Legion of Sacrament as a historical ruleset. And since I like to embed homebrew mechanics within a lore based context, and because GW seems determined NOT to cover it it any detail officially, we could put these within a homebrew campaign supplement coving the civil war between Neferata and Mannfred that has supposedly been raging since the end of second edition, with the various other dynasties all being pulled in and forced to pick sides between the two Vampire Mortarchs.

 

[Disciple of Nagash]

All are great ideas, although admittedly my knowledge is definitely limited on some! D&D I have never yet experience - I hope to one day, but it's still on my list to do!

Bloodlines in The Old World - now this is the one I am keen on. I'm certainly up for discussion on how we best to it that fits in best with how everything else is evolving there, I have some of the supplements myself (such as TK) so I've seen how they've been presented. We could definitely focus the some of the ideas around them...but then there could be the argument there are so much more involved creating a full supplement. Perhaps we could do both - start with some suggest rules alterations for members to playtest for balancing purposes, and then working on wrapping them in a supplement in the longer term?

AOS - whilst I never got into the game, I didn't mind the lore. I do need to catch up though, so will need to read more on this!