Pre Session Zero: Yeah, I’m Doing This
It’s session zero day. I’ve spent months prepping for this, which is ridiculous because I still don’t feel ready. Not even close. Somehow I’ve built the start of an entire website, written lore entries, mapped out floating wizard districts, invented a bureaucratic magic economy, and yet I’m staring at Roll20 like it’s my first time opening a PDF.
This is Chronomancer’s Gambit. A time-travel campaign with a 12-hour loop at its core. Act One plays out over a single day. At the end of that day, things go very badly, and then it all starts over. The players don’t know that yet. They know the title. They know there’s a funeral. They know it’s time-travel themed. But they don’t know they’re going to die before the real story begins.
I’m not trying to shock anyone. I just want the campaign to open with tension already in the walls. I’ve run homebrew before. I’ve spent years obsessing over world-building. But this one feels different. This one feels like I actually want people to see it.
We just finished a full run of Tomb of Annihilation. It took two and a half years. Short sessions, most weeks, and somehow we stuck the landing. That campaign gave me enough momentum to believe I could do something original, build a world from scratch and try to make it mean something. This world is one we’ve played in before, though that version was rough and half formed. My first campaign after coming back to DnD, during covid, was set in my homebrew Wuh-Zhei. An ancient version of it that was underdeveloped in a campaign that dragged on for literal yeas and never finished. I learned many lessons from that, which is part of what these behind the scene posts will be. Lessons learned.
I tried to run a time loop campaign before, but kept putting off the loop over multiple sessions until it never happened. One of the best lessons learned was; if you want the players to notice something, put it front and center. AKA Don’t hide your campaign’s secrets.
A huge part of what is so weird about today is that I’ve spent all this time making the world feel real, but now it has to feel welcoming. I’m not trying to impress my players. I’m trying to make it easy for them to walk in the door.
I’ve prepped the site to hold everything: lore, mechanics, backgrounds, gear. But I’ve also created simplified handouts in Roll20. The idea is to reduce friction. You shouldn’t have to read 3,000 words about magical plate-structure zoning laws just to know how to move your character across a map.
I’m pitching a clean start: just the new 2024 Player’s Handbook and my homebrew. If a player wants something outside of that, some old subclass, some niche race, some idea that doesn’t quite fit, I’m asking them not to import it, but to collaborate. Tell me what you’re aiming for, and let’s make something new that fits the space. Not a clone or a compromise.
I’m not planning to bring out the loop or the meta mechanics tonight. No dice rolling, no save states, no “gotcha.” This is just table-setting. Some of the players have never played together. One hasn’t played in years. I’m going to ask everyone to say a few words about what D&D means to them, what they’re looking to get out of this game, and what kind of experience they want. Then I’ll talk about my obsession with this world and why I built it like I’m trying to impress a wizard licensing board.
Eventually, I want this campaign to become a module. Something publishable. That sentence makes me want to hide under a rock. The space is overcrowded, the standard is high, and the people doing it already seem impossibly good at everything. I see their work in Discord servers and PDFs I’m scared to finish reading. Who the hell am I to throw mine into that pile?
But I’m running it anyway. I built this world whether or not it ever gets published. And if I’m going to run it, I might as well keep a record. That’s what this blog is. It’s not just campaign notes. It’s not just recaps. It’s me documenting the process of doing something dumb and ambitious and extremely personal, and trying to make it matter to people who weren’t there.
These posts will go up before and after each session. Some will be short. Some will be tangled. None of them will be written because I’m trying to optimize engagement. I’m writing them because I want to see what this becomes. Maybe someone else does too.
And maybe two years from now, someone stumbles on this blog and binge-reads it from the top. Maybe this post feels like the start of something. Or maybe it’s just the moment where I told the internet: Yeah, I’m doing this.