Tides of Ruin

From the Table to the Page

I’ve been playing D&D since AD&D, and running games, 5e since the playtest, for fifteen years now: at four different game stores, at conventions, at fundraisers. A few years back I helped build a custom epic one-shot for a children’s hospital benefit. Running tables is what I do.

This particular world started small. Three years ago, right after COVID, a few friends decided to start a weekly game, and I got elected GM. One session, we ran a “new player night” with a theme: swashbuckling. That single night is where Athea was born; the islands of Freeport, the smell of salt and trade-wind politics, a world built to answer one question: “what does a pirate campaign feel like when nobody’s pulling punches?”

We took that seed to my regular table and just… started playing. No outline, no safety net, The Trade Parade, run almost entirely from the hip. By the third or fourth session, we hit a wall every GM running ships eventually hits: the ship-to-ship combat rules we had access to felt clunky and dated. A few of us were already playing Daggerheart on the side, so I sat down and built something new, a ship combat system designed for the kind of table we actually wanted to run.

I wrote it up, printed it for the group, and kept going. Somewhere in there I started building out the backstory the table kept asking about, and fleshing out the NPCs they wouldn’t stop interacting with. After several days of writing deep into the night, I looked up and I had a lot more than session notes, I had a world.

Two Systems, One Table

That ship combat system didn’t stay 5e-only for long. Because half our table was splitting time between D&D and Daggerheart, I built the system to work for both from day one, which meant everything downstream of it had to work for both too. That’s not a marketing decision; it’s how this campaign was actually built and tested.

Right now, a second group at our local game store is running the Daggerheart side in parallel with my table’s 5e game. The changes between the two have been mostly narrative, Daggerheart just paces differently with one real structural challenge: converting a 20-level D&D framework into Daggerheart’s 10-tier structure meant building a conversion system from scratch, not just reskinning numbers. That work is done, and it’s been playtested at two tables, not one.

How the World Grew

The campaign didn’t start as a campaign. It started as two ideas: a trade war brewing in the islands, and something ancient stirring beneath the water. Everything else grew out of running the game and paying attention to what the table responded to.

One player in particular pushed the world further than I expected it to go. He builds characters that think sideway. His current one is a runic Warforged gunslinger spy and running that character honestly meant I had to build things I’d never have gotten to otherwise: the Dwarven Clans, in real detail, because his backstory demanded it; a general store NPC with an actual name and stock and opinions, because he wanted to talk to her every session. He needs the world to be consistent and specific to stay oriented in it, and meeting that need is what pushed Athea from “a setting I run games in” to a world that holds together under close scrutiny.

Two more players gave me the gods themselves. One built a cleric who’d lost her entire family to a storm at sea, except for her brother, and in the origin scene she wrote, she stood in the bay and held the waves back with a power she didn’t understand and couldn’t yet name. That scene became Neptunia: the sea’s raw power, and, just as much, a nursemaid who heals. Her brother, played by someone else at the table, her actual brother, became a sailor working through grief he doesn’t talk about, someone with no interest in gods or faith, who his sister meets between voyages when she can catch him. The chaos he carries without any belief system to hold onto is what gave me the Grinning Mask.

None of that was planned. It came out of three players building characters that needed a world to actually answer to, and a lot of what makes Athea feel real exists because they asked better questions than I was ready for.

Calypso and Thanatos were already part of Athea before any of this, foundational to the world I’d built long before this table ever sat down to play in it. (Thanatos, in fact, started life under a different name, Kelvemore, before a reskin to steer clear of licensing concerns with names too close to existing IP.) What the table gave the pantheon wasn’t its existence, but its texture, Neptunia and the Grinning Mask arriving out of play, standing alongside gods that were already there. When I sat down to rework “The Well Goes Dark,” I found the Aboleth as the perfect critter to bring the mild horror that’s part of this campaign. The Aboleth arc clicked into place, and that’s the session where I realized this wasn’t six disconnected adventures it was one very large campaign, with a shape and an ending.

The Art

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel and photograph old sailing ships, abbeys, and castles along the way, and a lot of what you’ll see in these pages is drawn from those references, real stone, real rigging, real weather-worn architecture, filtered through Athea and my pencil.

What This Kickstarter Is

Tides of Ruin is Tier I of that campaign: six adventures, levels 1–5, fully written and already played at the table, twice, once per system. But it’s not the whole story by a long shot. All four tiers of this campaign are already outlined, and most of the writing is done, this isn’t a pitch for an idea, it’s the first release of a campaign that already exists in full arc, tier by tier, play-tested as it’s created. We ran Escape From Sirona Bay, the opening adventure of Tier II, just last week. At the pace we’re going, Tier II should finish playtesting right around the time this Kickstarter funds.

The plan is to release it the same way it was built: one tier at a time, each fully playable on its own, each building toward the same ending. When the full campaign is complete, the plan is to bring it together as a single print-on-demand campaign book, the whole thing, bound, on your shelf. That’s down the road. This Kickstarter is where it starts.