The idea of dynasty play has always appealed to me. There's something cool about playing a lineage of heroes instead of one singular guy is dope as hell. You aren't just Steven the Fighter; you are Steven of the Line of Tellibor.
I've also always loved the idea of West Marches. A slow hexcrawl west, as civilisation creeps out into the wilderness. Your characters slowly reaching higher and higher levels.
So here's the pitch, sling them together.
You start with maybe 2 characters each, who march off into the wilderness and settle a village. You get to make these characters: choose the classes and races, choose a profession (like a background) and give them a couple of magic items to act as heirlooms.
These are your elders. They start the campaign and are the men and women from which your lines are begun.
Every year, you get two phases: Summer and Winter. A year takes a week. Each character gets to do something in each phase:
- Travel: Your character goes off travelling, maybe to school, a nearby city or just to see the world. This does something. Maybe some XP, a chance at finding something cool or learning a new skill/language.
- Go Ranging: The wilderness gets worse every year it is left untamed. You spend a phase treating the symptoms by dealing with minor roving monsters.
- Practice Profession: Each character has a thing they do in the village, like smithing, farming, researching magic, building stuff, hunting, dealing with pelts, merchanting, being village priest or chief. You can assume that this stuff is done casually in your spare time by your character, maybe helped by an understudy, but if you dedicate a whole season to it, it gives you a cool bonus.
- Study (Under Another Character): Your character spends time learning from another character of the same class and higher level. At the end of the phase, they increase in class level by 1. This is probably the second quickest way to level up after going out and adventuring yourself, but it requires that high level teacher.
- Recruiting: By means other than procreation, you find another PC. Maybe he is a village pleb that you train up to a PC level or an outsider you invite to the village to live with you. This works, but the guy you find is completely random and probably worse. Either that or it costs a lot of gold.
- Find A Partner: Your character finds a partner of appropriate childbearing gender. This might be another character, an NPC or someone else in your village. This means you can now have kids. This is important.
- Have A Kid: Well done. Your line continues. Randomly generate a level zero baby that HOPEFULLY will live to the age of ~15, where it can become a first level adventurer of randomly determined class and stats. Kids probably have their own set of moves they can do, each of which bumps up a stat, gives them a new proficiency or pushes them towards a certain class when they are older.
- Adventure: The final and most exciting option. Your character goes one an adventure to dig into some dungeon, clear out a tract of wilderness, explore a savage land or deal with a monster camp. Run a one shot dungeon. Only the characters who take the action come with you and go on an adventure. This is the best way to get money. It's the best way to get experience. It's the best way to get magic items. It's the best way to keep the monsters away from your door.
That's the game. Maybe the group meets twice a week? Once over the internet to decide what there characters in their two phases of each year, once again to run any adventures you wanna do.
A vital part of this assumption is that you run multiple PCs, anywhere between 2-5. This means that even if half of your characters stay at home, at least one is available to go out on an adventure weekly. If you can't make it, your character does something else. Simples.
Once humans get old, their physical stats start to fall off and they stop being effective adventurers, and settle down to raise a family, train followers and practice a profession. Eventually, they die of old age. Every couple of real time months, game time decades, a new generation of baby adventures set forth and has to level up and do the thing.
The base assumption of this system is that most people are humans, who, comparative to everyone else, breed like rabbits. To stop other races being powerful, they get experience slower and are harder to breed and find partners, as well as having kids who take longer to grow up. I love the idea of keeping an Elf Bard, Dwarf Smith or Gnomish Wizard around for hundreds of years, training generation after generation after human adventurers. Even better, you could spend 100 years (2 real-life years) getting that one Elven kid ready for adventure.
So let me know what you think and comment below. If it gets enough traction I might write it up properly for 5e with a whole bunch of professions, random events and maybe the tables for generating new kids.
