While building my new character for my friend's campaign, I suffered a crisis of "faith". Nothing as important as my religious beliefs but instead my confidence in the soundness of the design of D&D 3.5.

If you've read even one of my columns, you’ve come to realize I'm a Wizard’s fanboy. I like the D&D books and I like the minis. And I like DMing.

I just never realized how over the top the rules have become. And that led to my current dilemma.

First, though, what do I mean about the over the top? I’ll give you two examples.

Psionics bug me because the caps on power level are removed. By pumping power points into a power, a manifestor can generate effects well above his level.

This problem has always been a moot point with regular spellcasters because they have caster level caps on spells. Until now. I’ve discovered that by the time I get my evoker to 13th level, I can have an effective caster level of 17 when casting evocation fire spells. One class feature change, one feat, and one prestige class combined together generate this much power.

Now, you may point out that I'm messing around with a lot of rules here and I should expect for things to get broken. Maybe. Except all my choices make good roleplaying sense and all fit in with my concept of a battlefield tactician caster. Hell, I didn't even have to try that hard to find this option.

My other example is that certain spells now grant other, permanent abilities. A fire spell gives the caster fire resistance 3 permanently! And for no understandable reason that I can find.

These two problems go well beyond the "oops we didn't know you could do that with this new rule" syndrome. Instead these new options change the core base of the rules, by busting caster level caps and adding in powerful new defenses just for learning a spell. These changes make the new choices much more powerful than previous ones.

Sigh.

If it was only the arcane caster, I might have looked the other way. But we also have clerics who can now take divine feats. At first, I liked this idea. Divine feats meant I didn’t have to include undead in every adventure for the cleric to blast.

But now, the divine feats have gotten more powerful. Instead of a minor hit point boost and movement increase for a few rounds, divine feats now allow clerics to use turn undead to heal their entire party of damage as well as do minor damage to undead. I'm not making that up (see the Player's Handbook II).

Aftermath

With my faith in the balance of D&D 3.5 weakened what was I to do? Over the last six years, I've seen arguments on the weakness of the bard to the great and terrible power of the warlock. All of those arguments could go either way, in my opinion.

But these new, sweeping changes are hard to ignore and even harder to eradicate. The only real option seems to not use the new options.

Which is really too bad. The new polymorph spells are great and immediate actions add a whole new dimension to the game. Some of the new classes in the Player's Handbook II fill in the gaps in the current base classes.

So what to do?

My Solution

One of my players made the off hand comment that we don't necessarily need to use all these rules or even the minis. The story is what matters. I actually listened.

I decided to make a radical change in my game. A change from the way I've done things for years to a whole new way of running the game.

For character creation, my players will only be using the Player's Handbook.

***sounds of crickets chirping***

What?! For me, that is a big deal. I know a lot of DMs out there only use the core rules or still play AD&D. But I like the cutting edge stuff; I like the shiny new covers and artwork. How the heck am I supposed to make this work?

For me, it became simple (I think simple solutions are best, even though I don't always follow my own advice). If I let the players use only the Player's Handbook I could back way off on directing character creation. I wouldn't be needed so much for advice and guidance (as I am now since I have the books and have read them all in my geekdom). In fact, I could take a hands off approach, only jumping in when asked.

The freedom this would give my players really appealed to me. Rather than requiring them to wade through many books and many options, I could encourage them to go with their gut, in much the same way that I DM, which is to say by the seat of my pants. Don't tell my players but I may not actually really know what I’m doing. Which may explain how I got myself into my current situation. But I digress.

The Campaign

What to do with my campaign? Ah, the canny reader always asks the difficult but most important question.

Over the last few years of this column I've created a few worlds and run a few games. I've tried Eberron and I've had a successful roleplaying experiment with Star Trek in D&D.

In both of those cases, the world worked well but the rules slaughtered the game. Hmmm, I'm seeing a pattern here.

New stuff like the artificer class and psionics derailed the game at higher levels. Every player did not take those options and things go out of control. My fault, of course, as I'm the DM. I need to pay more attention and make better choices.

Which is not to say that the core rules are balanced. The archmage prestige class did boost caster level. And I mean, come on. You have a choice. You can add +3 to Use Rope checks or you can have a whole other character to play who is 2 levels lower than your PC as well as a small army to command. Which feat do you pick, Skill Focus or Leadership? In all the years I've played, I've never seen Skill Focus taken.

However, the archmage is optional. And Leadership is an optional feat. As is Improved Familiar. And rightly so, because when Monte wrote the Dungeonmaster's Guide I think he saw the potential pitfalls of too much power.

So, my campaign. What to do.

I considered going back to Darkness Falls and picking things up where we left off. Most of the players liked that world.

However, Darkness Falls had a lot of the rule rubbish I'm trying to clear out choking up the setting. I'd have to do a lot of house cleaning to make it work.

Then, an idea I've had in my head since D&D was simply called Third Edition came to me. The World of Crossroads.

The World of Crossroads

Way back in the distant mists of time, Wizards put out two 3rd edition books for DMs. One was Deities and Demigods. The other was the Manual of the Planes.

In Deities, the idea of a two god pantheon was advanced. And in the Manual of the Planes, the idea of a planar road rather than a wheel was detailed.

The campaign setting of Crossroads combined both ideas. The material plane was the crossroads between two planar roads, one stretching from good to evil and the other from chaos to law.

In a similar way, the world itself had a crossroads continent. This continent, Kreados, was surrounded by four other continents. The other continents had older, more settled civilizations with each tending toward one alignment extreme. And they all met on Kreados, a war-torn and wild continent where everyone came together to settle differences either with words or with swords.

The piece I was missing was how to allow for characters who did not serve the one good deity. Not every player wants to be an awful good paladin after all.

And it all came together. Serving everyone who did not worship the good god or the evil god were druids. Once strictly neutral, these druids now face a crisis of faith as some of their sect embrace good or evil as well as balance.

All of the faith-based classes now fit exactly into the world of Crossroads. Paladins and clerics serve Elishar, the good god, and druids and rangers revere nature Herself.

In addition, all the neutral creatures in the Monster Manual would serve as civilizations being wooed by both good and evil. Making an ally of a race not dedicated to one's god would make that god's cause that much stronger.

And the great thing is, a lot of intelligent monsters in the Monster Manual are neutral. More than I realized. Here’s a partial list: halfings, aranea, behir, cloaker, delver, doppelganger, locathahs, water nagas, and two types of sphinxes.

Which takes me back to Star Trek and D&D.

Star Trek and D&D

In Darkness Falls, I tried to include the idea of paladins roleplaying with their enemies and trying to convert them to good. This idea broke down when I used the shadar-kai and the drow in these roles while keeping both races evil. The built in game mechanics of the paladin did not allow for any leeway in negotiating with evil races in many players' minds.

With Crossroads, I can avoid all those issues by using strictly neutral races for interaction and the occasional rare non-evil individual of a normally evil race. I would be encouraging the good characters to roleplay with the neutral creatures on two levels. One, every ally gained can help in the fight against evil. And two, every ally gained is one less potential future enemy.

This idea keeps my original vision of diehard roleplaying being integral to the campaign, while allowing good characters to smite evil. The next question is how to implement my ideas.

The End of the World

I considered converting either Darkness Falls or Krarvell to Crossroads. I considered starting the PCs off at higher than 1st level.

But all my instincts told me to start over. A terrible price to ask my players to pay. After all, they've invested a lot of time and effort into their characters. It isn't fair to ask them to change just because I got some "better" idea stuck in my head.

However, that's what I’m going to ask them to do. I want to fundamentally change the way we create and run PCs. I can't do that with pre-existing PCs.

I want to be clear here that I'm excited about Crossroads. Not just interested or behind the idea but excited. Darkness Falls had high level plans but no passion and I didn't get behind Krarvell as much as I thought I would. But Crossroads hits a powerful chord within me, a chord that resonates with energy and potential. It haunts me. I'm going to go for it.

Even with my enthusiasm, though, I don't think this idea will go over well with my players. To ease their pain I'm going to compensate them in two ways.

First, I'm going to print off a player's guide to my campaign setting to show them just what I think they will be gaining by switching. Second, I'm going to commit to running this campaign for at least two years (barring moving or job or family commitments that require me to stop). I'm going to stick by this decision come hell or high water.

I've never been more terrified in my life.

The Beginning of the World

I'm going to write up my campaign world. I'm going to write up a first adventure. I'm going to get the players on board. And we will all start a long-term journey that will be about the experience, not the destination.

Sneak Peek

Here's the Table of Contents from my new campaign setting. My players will get the whole doc and I’m going to do an additional column in a couple of weeks that covers just the campaign setting.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
   • Your Story Begins
   • Making Your Hero
2. House Rules
   • Changes to Random Variables in Character Creation
   • Change to Sources of Divine Power
     • Elishar, God of Light
     • The Force of Nature
   • Change to Turn Undead
     • Destruction of the Undead
   • Modified and New Races
     • Aasimar
     • Dwarf, gold
     • Elf, gray
     • Gnome, stonehunter
     • Halfling, stout
     • Human, Amperian
   • New Class
     • Captain
   • New Feats
     • Daunting Presence (General)
     • Fast Move (General)
     • Master Manipulator (General)
   • Prestige Classes
   • Starting Level
   • Treasure Division
3. Races of Crossroads
   • Aasimars
   • Dwarves
   • Elves and Half-Elves
   • Gnomes
   • Halflings
   • Humans and Mercs (Half-Orcs)
4. Classes of Crossroads
   • Barbarian
   • Bard
   • Captain
   • Cleric
   • Druid
   • Fighter
   • Monk
   • Paladin
   • Ranger
   • Rogue
   • Sorcerer
   • Wizard
5. The City of Anbegriffon and the New World
   • The City of Anbegriffon
   • The Plains of Naramis
6. Calendar, the Night Sky, and Religion
   • Calendar
     • Days of the week
     • Months of the year
     • Beginning date
   • The Night Sky
     • Arcaneus, the indigo moon
     • Battle Everlasting constellation
     • The Captain constellation
     • The Diplomat constellation
     • Doth, the Blackstar
     • Ehlonna, the green planet
       • Lune, the red moon
     • The North Star
     • Shar, the Silvery Sun
     • Telchur, the white planet'
   • Religion
     • Holy days
     • Tenants of the faith
7. The Planes
   • Bloodfire, the plane of woe
   • Celestian, the plane of weal
   • The elemental planes
   • The Material plane
   • Plane of Elishar
   • Plane of Toldoth
   • Planes of chaos and law
   • Planes of traveling and storing

A Little Help Here, Please

If any of you out there reading this column have any devious ideas on what a beholder, evil dragon, devil prince, or lich might do to an unsuspecting world I'd love to discuss that here. Also, ideas on running a full-blown war or staging a natural disaster in the middle of a campaign would be appreciated. Also, any other ideas on shaking up the status quo (the Great Modron March for example) would be great to hear. Thanks.

Next Column

An additional column is coming with the Crossroads Campaign Setting doc I handed out to my players. I'll be building on this doc for the next two years.

Next Month

The first adventures. Where the players want to take us next. And maybe the initial work resulting from the help and advice I get from all of you.

Fear nothing,
Charli