I was asked to spell our burnt out forever DM in the face-to-face 5e campaign, so I took up the mantle. They didn't want 1:1 time or any BROSR stuff, just good ole 5e, but other than that I was given free reign.
So I SHOULD have read the PHB DMG and MM and run them through Lost Mine of Phandelver or Dragon of Icespire Peak or somesuch...
INSTEAD I used an old set of Settlers of Catan to generate a hexmap of the region with resources, terrain, and productivities, and Tony Bath and William Silvester to populate it with civilization, muster able regulars and standing militia in preparation for a wargame. The Bickering Duchy of the Implacable OverDruid.
A small-town adventuring party had five members of radically different alignment. They rescued a powerful Druid from a megadungeon. Their diametrically opposed alignments pleased his True Neutral alignment and he took the party over. They became known as the Bickering Six. When he got a Barony, he assigned each of his Five Counties to one of the party members. Boom, there's your backstory.
I created a separate random encounter table for each region based on the alignment of the monsters. Each County has an undiscovered megadungeon in it. Until the Patrons find it, they will lose peasants and resources. Once the dungeon is found and adventurers start delving it, this penalty will be lifted for that county. Boom, there's your interaction between the high level Braunstein/Wargame and the Session level adventuring parties.
I had AI help me name each City, Town, Village, Hamlet, Castle and Farm, and I used the Clay/Brick hexes as water nodes, routing rivers between them and away from Mountains and Hills. I may share this technique with my friends on The Random Table tonight. If I do so, I will come back here and post the link.
The only rules differences so far with Vanilla 5e are that I added 4GP = 1 XP, (Thank You Alchemic Raker) so that not all advancement is combat driven. And I am introducing player grading to the session reports. E = Excellent S = Superior F = Fair P = Poor. This is based on how well you played your class, your role and your alignment in the session. Not sure on the impact of the grading, but I'm playing with a percentage multiplier on XP based on average rating, much like how 1e handles 16+ in prime requisites. Boom, there's your difference.
