The Shadowvale Campaign (The beginnings)

This will be a summary of the 5E campaign I ran over the past couple of years, named The Shadowvale. This campaign started in the Fall of 2015, I was new to 5E D&D and all of my initial players were all brand to role-playing games in general, in fact this would be their first game ever. I quickly familiarized myself with the rules, which I was initially quite impressed with, I feel that 5E harkens back to the 1st and 2nd edition of the game while keeping some of the character customization of 3rd edition...so win win to WoTC for that.

I had few notes that I had been working on for a homebrew adventure which would be the starting point. My initial points of emphasis were a sleepy border town, a corrupt and ambitious leader / mayor of this town, and a powerful artifact which use would bring about some questionable moral decisions for the group. Over the course of this campaign (3 years) I would have a few players come and go, but the central group consisted of the following:

Edric >> halfling cleric (Aaron)
Caedryn >> half-elf rogue (Brian)
Brugal >> half-orc fighter (Scott)
Trar >> human druid (Daniel)
Petros >> half-elf warlock (Rob)

Before play began, I continued to flesh out the world I envisioned a bit. These were all new players and I was still finding my feet a bit with 5E, so you'll see as this continues that I did not deviate from a lot of the standard fantasy troupes. A few other points I want to establish about this world were the following:

• Fallen gods. Though this would be unknown the natives of the world, the gods were living among them as mortals so to speak.
• Decline of the elves and dwarves. Both races were hidden away and the remaining population within the human culture were extremely low.
• Things are too quiet. The main protagonist, Darius, had discovered the hidden truth of regarding the Gods and he was going to make a power grab for godhood.
• The players enter the scene with things already set in motion, but not too late to "save the day".
• The artifact of power, the Book of the Shadowhorn, is ultimately evil, but it is the key to Darius's end-game.

I roughly formed up a map of the region, I'm certainly no artist as you'll come to find out.

Glasspring would the starting area and "homebase" for the PC's throughout the early part of the campaign. I was robbing a few itemsI enjoyed from the Rise of the Runelords adventure path for the start as well. The players begin in a festival, then an attack occurs allowing our heroes to be heroic, moving to an investigation phase. My hope was that they would start to grasp the rules and skill checks available in 5E. So, how did it go? Stay tuned.....