New D&D campaign

So me and my friends started a new D&D 5.1 campaign and it’s unusual for me to be running so much homebrew. I usually run modules. It’s strange to me because I feel so much more guilty when PCs die (so far two have died across three sessions) or when I try to find the notebook where the special treasures are or when I’ve missed a prep area and have to fall back to tier three truths much more often than when using modules.

I also did not make the campaign deliberately extra deadly “to teach them a lesson to be careful what they wish for” after they wanted to go back to D&D from Fate but I’m really worried that they will believe I did.

Overall I’m having a lot of fun and loving the campaign because the players have been bringing their A-game. I’m so impressed by them and grateful for them.

I created my homebrew world where instead of “elves”, “dwarves”, and “hobbits” we have Skajra, Daab, and Skirm (pronounced more like “skeerm” than firm or squirm) and so on. And 1960s tech like jeans and guns. Inspired by new wave SF like Caves of Qud and James Tiptree. It’s called Gåvoplaneten which is a bit hard to translate… “Gift-related planet”, “gifted planet”, “the planet is a gift” or something like that.

I practice radical transparency when DMing (even when specific instances of it are really really annoying to players who just wanna immerse I think the overall policy has huge benefits for buy-in and stakes) so I’ve truthfully said things like:

• I’ve not prepped anything outside this forest and the surrounding closest patch of salt desert yet but I wanna do that later. I haven’t decided what is outside yet but this planet doesn’t have plants or normal animals
• While it’s set in the distant future, 612 years after the human spacecraft that they had been saving for generations to eventually leave this place broke down, and the humans left Mexico in an alternate Earth timeline branching off in 1971, all my settings take place sort of concurrently because portals between them can cross time as well as space, as you returning players know from how my take on Zakhara had portals to 1994 and 1938, and you new players should know that, but, I haven’t put in any such portals yet so that’s not gonna be the big reveal

I mean things generally fall into:

• yes, there’s a reason and that reason is known to your PCs and it’s this
• yes, there’s a reason and I the DM know it but your PCs don’t know that reason yet so I’m not gonna say yet
• yes, there’s a reason but I haven’t figured it out yet and it’s not part of the prep
• yes, there’s a reason and it’s not secret so let me come up with something right now and write it down

…and I’ve been trying to brutally honest about what is what. Maybe that is an overcorrection but I came up in the “cult of GM secrecy” era of 90s gaming and I really belatedly ended up resenting and regretting that playstyle.

It’s actually the year 613 already, diegetically, because our first three sessions have spanned three hundred and seventy-nine days.

We have a ton of houserules in place old and new. We use spell points as per the DMG option, and when it comes to hitpoints, hit dice, and exhaustion, a short rest is 10 minutes while a long rest is a full week, and it takes a year to level up (which is going to become two years later). And we use the “roll high or low, not middle” from Suldokar’s Wake. The players really really hate that rule so far!

As for choosing 5.1 over 5.2, that’s not as slag on 5.2, it’s just that we’re all still on old books. I did give them the option to do PCs that are either…

• full 5.1 (main and sub)
• full 5.2 (main and sub)
• main 5.2, sub from 5.1, but only for subclasses that aren’t in 5.2 yet

but that we’re using exhaustion and stuff as per our pre-existing, already heavily houseruled 5.1 setup.

So far no-one took me up on that and all showed up with 5.1 chars and I appreciate that since I don’t have the 5.2 books available yet. We’re not saying 5.1 is better or anything, it’s not edition warring, it’s just what we’re doing practically.