A Campaign of Dice and Minis

by MrMakepeace

Vallengrad is a kingdom riddled with scheming rogues and snakes in the grass. Our story follows several of the nobles as their paths cross on occasion, and the politics of the land tear their lives apart. Everyone wants to be on the throne, but the world of Avelihr is cruel, and not everyone will make it to the throne.

Normally, I don't address the reader in a story I write, though I don't normally write a foreword either, but I felt I needed to give you a little context. I started planning this campaign several months ahead not that you exactly needed this information, but it becomes a bit more interesting when the characters of the prologue return later in our story. The afore mentioned characters were not written by my players, but by me.

Before the beginning of this campaign, I had a session zero where I went over the homebrew rules we were using, I told everyone a little bit about the world of Avelihr and the Kingdom of Vallengrad, and they rolled for their stats and finished character creation. I intended to run a one-shot that would have "nothing to do" with the actual campaign immediately following the session zero as a "test run" for the new rules. I handed each player a character sheet with widely diverse characters and the slightest backstory to what's going on.

These characters were not played again after this, nor were they thought of by any of the players after this game. What they did in this session quite effected the story of this campaign in a couple of ways, and I wasn't certain how it was going to resolve. I attempted to play their forgotten characters as if I were them, but who can pretend to be someone else pretending to be someone else better than said someone pretending to be someone else? It wasn't exactly the reveal of the characters that was shocking to my players, but the missed opportunity that came about due to their actions in a different game.

As for this campaign itself, you might have understood by the title of this story that I've named the campaign "A Campaign of Dice and Minis," and in case you had not noticed, it is a play on the words "A Song of Ice and Fire" in a way. This campaign is heavily influenced by "A Song of Ice and Fire" and Game of Thrones in that it is a political campaign, and the first of its kind under my line of work. Bare with us as I tell the story of our, at the time of writing this foreword, unfinished campaign. The world is tough, the story can be a bit of a mess due to our cooperative storytelling and our typical tangents, and I am attempting to fill in some blanks where we skipped ahead or forgot something.

Finally, it's been years since I uploaded anything to fanfiction, and I'm not certain the setup of the story is going to be correct in how it looks in the title and everything, but I hope that anyone that reads this gets some sort of enjoyment out of this campaign story. My players keep telling me we need to do a podcast until they remember their dirty jokes are most inappropriate for even the devil, but at the very least, I hope you enjoy my writing style, errors and all. I feel there was something else I intended to say when writing this foreword, but I can't quite remember. Without further adieu, please enjoy "A Campaign of Dice and Minis" as soon as I get some of the story written and published.