POWER OVERWHELMING - Jumping into the Deep End with D&D

As a gift to myself (and eventually, the world,) I took the plunge and got the three core books for Dungeons and Dragons (5th edition - the latest, which I think is about a year old.) I've been in the process of creating a setting, and I hit a chapter called "Creating a Multiverse," and I was immediately taken aback - I've dug too deep. The power here - it could kill us all!

I am in nerd heaven (or should that be Elysium?)

Despite being a big fan of computerized RPGs from Chrono Trigger to Skyrim, I only in the last year had my first experience with tabletop RPGs, playing as "Maester Liom" in the Song of Ice and Fire RPG, joining the Night's Watch, shooting Wildlings with a crossbow while I stitch up my brothers.

And while it's a ton of fun, the world of Westeros is fairly grounded - our enemies are almost always humans (though I had the joy of attempting to do an autopsy on a corpse that rose as a wight in my infirmary,) and I wanted to push things a little farther into the fantastical, and I also thought it would be fun to run a game.

For the uninitiated, the three core books for D&D are the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual.

The Player's Handbook is more or less your basic rulebook, but also includes a lot of information on how to create a character, giving detailed descriptions of races and classes, as well as listing abilities, traits, and such for said categories. It actually seems like it wouldn't be too hard to create new versions of these (races probably easier than classes,) but as a novice, I'm going to stick with what we've got. The Player's Handbook tells you how combat works, and how various skill checks and such work, but also gives you models for how to resolve tons of scenarios - like how much harder it would be to cast a non-instant spell on a ship that's being rocked by waves, or the effect of cold weather on your progress through a landscape.

The Monster Manual is the simplest of the books - it's a list of tons of different kinds of creatures for your players to fight, explaining their backgrounds, stats, and usually having a picture to give you an idea what they look like. Lots of monsters have variants (the section of Dragons, as you might imagine, is pretty huge.) It also looks like an experienced DM (not me) could definitely do some tinkering to change their levels or create whole new monsters.

The Dungeon Master's Guide does have a lot of stuff describing how to build a dungeon and how to construct combat encounters that are an appropriate challenge for your players, but a huge swath of the book is basically a fantasy storytelling guide. It's amazingly comprehensive, and while there are certain elements that you'll generally need to stick to (like ensuring that there' are appropriate deities or religious movements dedicated to various values like Light or Trickery that have mechanical expressions in-game,) it's very open-ended. They explain how you could use the rules of the game to describe anything from their own established Forgotten Realms setting to a stagecoach drive across the Wild West. The book includes formulas for coming up with NPC characters that honestly are similar in comprehensiveness to a lot of writing classes I've taken.

Anyway, I've spent the last day and a half constructing the world of "Sarkon" and I've begun to reach out to my tabletop friends. I'm sure that I'll post more about the progress of the game as it goes.