Bringing an Open World into 5e

Heart of Darkness began as a simple story - the party is tricked into a pact with a fiend and must find a way to free themselves before it's too late. This core idea, very much inspired by the Witcher 3 DLC Hearts of Stone, quickly grew in scope after I decided to open up the world that the party would explore. As a longtime fan of open world video games, I decided to use a similar design philosophy to craft a DnD campaign that wouldn't railroad the players along a set path.

This of course is not the first ever DnD campaign to take a more sandbox approach. Curse of Strahd comes to mind as a prominent example and point of comparison. However, one thing that was crucial to me when writing, illustrating, and laying out the book, which I felt was lacking in many of the official 5e campaigns, was ease of use.

The campaign book boasts several features that make it accessible even to newer DMs without sacrificing its narrative complexity - each location in the open world begins with an overview of the relevant background information, lore, and prominent NPCs, notes, tables, and flowcharts are used to present important information that might otherwise be lost in a paragraph of text, and narration is employed sparingly to avoid bloating the page count of dungeons and minimize page flipping.

The open world is divided into distinct regions, each with its own themes, factions, quests, travel encounters, settlements, and dungeons. Your party might not be interested in some regions and can still complete the campaign without ever vising those. To highlight the modular nature of the book, each chapter has a unique color scheme that makes it instantly recognizable while scrolling or flipping through the pages. Each chapter also has its own dedicated statblock section for the denizens and monsters of that particular area. Since the book features a total of 75 new statblocks, attempting to find a specific one in a single appendix at the end would be near impossible.

Now that the Kickstarter is live, you can help bring this book to life and get a number of exclusive rewards. Outside of PDF and hardcover copies of the book, you can get a poster map of the overworld to use in your game, a booklet featuring an optional introductory adventure, and other add-ons.

If we manage to meet and exceed the funding goal, I will continue work on the setting of Heart of Darkness, expanding it with more adventures, locations, player options, and conversions to other TTRPG systems.