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This is a brand new campaign set in Eberron, using DnD 5e. You will play freshly recruited magicians at the institute. Starting level is 3, and you will play one of the premade characters offered in the campaign. The focus of the game will be exploring the magic of Eberron through storytelling and character development. The game will be story and writing rich, with a less of a focus on game mechanics and combat.

Please carefully read the RtJ information and the public threads in the game before applying.

I've received a few questions about why I'm running this with premade character concepts. This seems to put people off. Here's an explanation why:

When I was setting up the game at first, I left it relatively standard, with the players proposing the characters. Then I brought it up in my tabletop group, when I was asking for their permission to run it for the second time on RPoL, and all four of my players kinda encouraged me to offer the concepts I offered them in the first place [note: this is an online game I'm running in parallel to the same campaign offered to my tabletop group]. I must admit, their motivations were pretty base; they wanted to see what other players would do with "their" characters (if they chose the same ones), and what direction the game would take for them. I have a campaign arc, but I'm more a "guided sandbox" kinda DM, so things could diverge wildly.

So, why the premades? First, controlled environment. I also want to include the actual premades in the DM's Guild adventure I might make out of this in the future, as developed concepts with hooks, and also, with opportunities throughout the adventure to tie them in into the plot. So, through them, I'll deliver content a DM can use for different characters. I don't want to write up a WotC type fully railroaded campaign arc. I want it to be a guided sandbox project, so the DM can use it as a resource for crafting their own story about the Twelve.

Then I got thinking about it, and there's more reasons why I'd offer premade characters. I want people who can tell a story, or at least, who are interested in telling a story. Not the kinds of players who want to play out a concept they had in their head or that perfect build. Nothing wrong with that, I'm like that most of the time. Just not for this game. Character concepts do work here - they encourage the player to pick up a suggested concept and make it their own. More like acting, or collaborative storytelling, than just designing a character.

I also want to make the game about Eberron's magic, but from the point of view of the Galifaran Dragonmarked "scholarly artifice". All concepts take that as a baseline, but have hooks in different magical traditions of Eberron. That's important as a sort of a theme builder - the same starting point, but players' can choose the direction of the game and what to explore through the concept. You could say, they could do that in an even better way through their own concepts. You might be right, but I don't want them playing an Aereni mage or a Sarlonan tiefling psychic. I want them to explore those things as scholars from Khorvaire.

Now, since I opened the game, another added value of the concepts appeared. It seems to have stopped the inundation of quick applications. I've read elsewhere PbP games in Eberron in 5e get dozens, if not hundreds, of apps within the first hours and days. Not like that now. Seems like people are reluctant to jump in with quick concepts or something they had laying around when I'm asking to seriously entertain the concepts suggested. We'll see if that's good (or if that's the real reason, maybe everybody thinks the proposed game is too much work and boring, dunno :)). It might limit my pool of players to choose from, but for now, it feels much more comfortable and hopefully a good strategy for looking for the kind of players I'm interested in.
This message had punctuation tweaked by the user at 09:52, Sat 05 Dec 2020.

Thanks for all the applications, for now we have a full roster of characters.