Home is Where the Deed is

There comes a point in one’s campaign where granting the party some sort of physical home base just starts to make sense. Let’s explore how passing a set of keys to your game group might look like.

We need to start with a premise – why is the group even getting a chance to own some permanent property in the realm? Lots of reasons, right? They could be evicting some unwanted monster squatters by force. Maybe the property is gifted to them as a mission reward. Or, they could simply just find an abandoned fixer-upper and lay claim to it. Lastly, maybe your DnD adventure module has carved out its own reason.

In our case, the Acquisitions Incorporated D&D 5e module did just that. The boss man is a colorful character named Omin Dran and he treats everything like a Corporation. The game group eventually gets an opportunity to earn an adventuring franchise and even their own property at Tresendar Manor.

DM Ben likes to intermix his own home-brewed encounters and missions so he decided to introduce a land-grab opportunity a bit sooner in their campaign. At first, the group was just going to tell this crazy Night Hag what time it is and clean her clock. Then, he thought why not just let the players keep her cabin in The High Forest as a reward?! Our property “why” is set.

Now our campaign is amongst a bunch of coworkers (killer bonding xp btw). We play once a month on a Friday night at the office. The location works out pretty swell because come 5:00 PM, we just order some pizza, all saunter over to the conference room, and then just start dropping dice. It becomes an “away game” for DM Ben so he has to pack everything up and bring it over (not too fun) but he’s got a pretty good routine going in that regard.

The reason we’re even mentioning where we play DnD is because this unique locale gives us even more of a reason to acquire property in the game. Like any business office, there are always a few empty cubes sitting here and there. Our space is like our office water cooler as we huddle around it each morning, peruse the latest print, and chat it up. And right now one of those cubical spots houses our 24/7 3D Printing Twitch channel (you’re a free subscriber, right?).

So you can see off to one side, we have a little space that houses fresh stuff from our Prusa printer. We’re gonna clean that up and start to build out this cabin-in-the-woods scene there. It will start with one exterior building and then the very first interior room within it. As the group expands its property, we’ll add more rooms and have a little fun watching it all unfold between our eyes.

Now we understand our group situation is rather unique but you could do the same thing in your own game space via a basement (lucky bastard), home office, or spare room in your own home. Get your proud prints “out in the wild” where everyone can see and admire ’em. Think of it like a Xmas tree village but for DnD and out all year round. 😉

Anyways, let’s talk about a fun starting game prop here. DM Ben wanted to create a cabin deed item card to represent the group’s big victory in obtaining their very first property! Again, we’re big item card RPG players here so we had to whip one up using the handy Felraider RPG PDF Card tools!

We’re going to make our own card front (a pic of an official deed) and then put the specifics on the back. For anyone playing the Acquisitions Incorporated D&D 5e module, we’re keeping the Tresendar Manor encounters intact but completing that mission will be about becoming an official franchise of Acquisitions Incorporated (and not the Phandalin property itself). DM Ben is using our Kinda Sorta Portal Pocketwatch to allow them to (hopefully) teleport back to their main base here in Waterdeep as needed.

Lastly, there’s a cool magic item in the module called a Documancy Satchel that Omin uses to send documents back and forth…because what’s a Corporation without a mountain of pointless paperwork, right?! DM Ben wants to use the Kinda Sorta Portal, some Sending Stones, and then this cool Documancy Satchel to allow the game group to communicate to others across multiple cities so that further side missions and hijinx can ensue.

So now maybe your game group can use a similar hook and some of these complementing item cards to spruce up those fun levels!