I am so happy to present to the world the City of Rainfall, a setting for 5th edition D&D.
I thought with this inaugural blog post, I’d share a little about myself and the history behind my project as well as some of the inspiration I’m drawing from.
I have always loved games. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had some kind of game in my hands. I started a long time ago with a Gameboy and Pokémon and its only gotten more complex from there. Ever since I got my hands on Oblivion, my passion has been in roleplaying games. Its a bit embarrassing how many hours I have in Oblivion, but suffice to say, the world of the Elder Scrolls is very special to me. Eventually I would move on to World of Warcraft, a game which ate up even more of my childhood.
It wasn’t until I got into high school that I picked up D&D, at the time it was 3.5. I couldn’t put the game down. I spent every second of my time pouring over books and building ever more ridiculous character builds. D&D 3.5 still has a very special place in my heart and a very large space on my bookshelf.
I quickly ran into a problem playing D&D though: I wanted to play a different character all the time. I had so many ideas for characters and the stories they might play out that I couldn’t play them all. My DM at the time suggested to me that I take a look at being a DM myself after I brought up what was probably the 10th character concept I’d been working on to him.
So that began my time as a DM. For the next 4 years of high school, I played D&D every day of school, having helped to found a D&D club at my school. For a while, I was playing D&D twice a day every day, once at lunch with the formal club and once after school with some friends. There were many times that the teacher whose room I was using after school yelled at me for “wasting time” and “being too loud,” both things that I was probably doing.
Then came college and I found a whole new group of people. After a few years and a couple campaigns, I graduated and moved out into the world. Playing D&D with a life is hard sometimes, but we’ve been making it work with a game a week.
So that brings things up to the present, right? Well, sort of. How did Rainfall come out of all this boring personal stuff? I’ve always been one for making homebrew worlds for my games to take place in. In fact, only one of my long running campaigns actually took place in a premade world, that being Dark Sun. Most stuff I’ve run with has been very improvised, having me make the part of the world my players were going to be in the night before they went to it and pulling whatever lore was necessary to push the world forward out of thin air whenever someone asked. I’m no stranger to world building.
I started out trying to fully flesh out a setting in the last year of my time in college. As I built it, I became a bit disheartened. The whole thing was so bland. It was a lot of high fantasy tropes laid over a thinly veiled American colonial setting. I was basically slotting fantasy races into some stereotypes about various groups in the American colonial period. It was pretty lame in my opinion.
I dropped work on that setting not too long after I got into my job and started looking for inspiration for something better. I wanted to build something that isn’t swimming in fantasy tropes.
I spent a lot of time at work listening to audiobooks. That’s when I first really got into Lovecraft. I got a hold of the full literary works of Lovecraft on audiobook and spent lots of time listening to it. I loved it all. Fantastic books from a pretty terrible person.
Those books did get me thinking though. What is the worst case scenario for Lovecraft? At least from the point of view of his stories and not his politics. I came to this: What happens when those entities from cosmic horror stories came to earth and actually paid attention to us? What happens when a child decides to use their magnifying glass on those ants? So that scenario formed the first thoughts for Rainfall. When the Lovecraftian entities descend on the world and bring it to an end, what happens afterwards?
But Rainfall is more than just about Lovecraft. Some of the other sources of inspiration for the setting include the works of Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, the Fallout franchise, and the Lord of the Rings, the source of most modern fantasy. I wanted to bring together the more modern feeling of post-apocalyptic stories with the fantasy that I’ve always loved, putting it all under the lurking shadow of a cosmic horror background.
So that’s how Rainfall came to be. A long story with not much of substance in it. I’m very excited to show off what I’ve made and what I’m continuing to make. Hopefully it’s something people can enjoy as much as I do.
City of Rainfall 