Coming soon to Kickstarter!
You’ve been waiting, and it’s finally here!
Land of Vampires: Slipping into Shadow
The first, full-length one-on-one 5e campaign from D&D Duet!
The individual chapters of Land of Vampires have been available for a while now, but it’s finally time for the fully compiled campaign and, hopefully, an expansion! Keep reading to learn more!
About the Project
Land of Vampires: Slipping into Shadow is a level 1-10 duet campaign from Beth and Jonathan of D&D Duet and Grove Guardian Press. This adventure will take you on a vampire hunt deep into the land of Steymhorod, where the PC and their companion(s) must navigate blood-thirsty enemies (plus the extremely powerful lord of the land, Draego), suspicious fae, terrified townspeople, and a whole host of hidden monsters creeping through the haunted forests.
In addition to the 15 chapters of the adventure, the campaign includes scale and leveling tips for GMs to adapt sessions and combats for one-on-one play. Tabletop gaming with one player and one GM (what we refer to as a duet) works best when GMs [game masters/storytellers] can individualize the story, challenges, encounters, and sessions to both their player and their player’s PC [player character].
If this style of play is new to you, check out our more detailed description in the “What is a Duet Game” section below! You’re also in exactly the right place to find out more! I’ve linked several of our intro posts throughout the descriptions below. You can also click “Getting Started” in the menu.
But there’s more to this campaign than a great adventure.
In part, that’s because a duet campaign is about so much more than what you’re doing and who you’re fighting.
It’s about the characters, their journey and mission, and their friends.
That’s why, in this campaign, you’ll find lots of helpful GM tips for scaling duet encounters. There’s also advice for guiding the PC through the campaign so your hero is in charge the entire time! The beginning of the campaign provides several ideas for personalizing the adventure to your PC’s backstory and tailoring the backstory to the campaign. In short, we provide all the guidance you need throughout the campaign so you can focus on having fun with your duet partner!
The Kickstarter campaign will launch on January 31st and run through Leap Day!
(Reading this after January 31st? No worries! The button above will take you straight to the campaign!)
Pledge options
You’ll be able to see more details once the campaign launches, but we wanted to go ahead and share the rewards plan with you.
We have three core pledge tiers: Land of Vampires in print, digital, and combined PDF + print.
Want to learn more?
- If you’d like to learn more about the Land of Vampires campaign in particular, check out “All about Land of Vampires” below.
- And if you’re still a little unclear about what exactly one-on-one 5e is and whether or not it’s for you, scroll down to “What is a duet game?” and we’ll take care of you!
- Finally, if you want to learn more about who we are, you’ll find us in the final section, “Who are D&D Duet?”
All about Land of Vampires!
Woohoo! Now we get into the really good stuff! Land of Vampires is a full-length one-on-one campaign. The 15 chapters of the campaign will take a PC from level one to level ten with plenty of GM guidance along the way.
The adventure begins!
The campaign begins in the fantasy kingdom of Azuria where your wonderful adventurer (or unsuspecting tavern guest), the PC, overhears rumors about children disappearing in the middle of the night. Seeking to learn more, they soon find themselves in the center of the search and wandering through hidden passages for the truth. They garner allies and encounter a few dastardly creatures in turn until, suddenly, they must make a decisive choice: Will they forever leave behind the life they’ve known in pursuit of a vampire, or will they stay, uncertain of when the bloodthirsty villain will strike again?
The plot thickens!
From here, I’ll assume they decide to go—and I will keep the description somewhat general in case you, dear reader, are as-yet unsure if you’d like to be the player or GM in this campaign.
The PC finds themselves in the land of Steymhorod, a mysterious, forgotten realm ruled over by the vampire Lord Draego who no one has seen for the last few decades. Pursuing their quarry (a still-powerful vampire) requires the PC to make alliances and difficult choices along the way. They must uncover mysteries and restore the natural balance of power to Steymhorod.
Though the land seems bleak at first, through their explorations, the PC finds a great variety of environments, allies and enemies, and civilizations on their journey.
What makes this campaign special:
In duet gaming, the story of the campaign revolves around the PC and their desires. To help with this PC-centric orientation, we have several unique backstory ideas and a few campaign-specific PC backgrounds to help set your campaign up for success from the very beginning. Character motivation is a key part of storytelling, so we recommend the player creating a character who is already invested in vampire hunting or who will quickly be pulled into the conflict of the campaign. There’s a special section at the beginning of Land of Vampires on how to tailor these suggestions to your PC and their backstory before you begin your campaign.
We’ve also found that duet gaming is more fun and immersive when the PC has someone to travel with! This character can take the form of a GMPC or a secondary PC/sidekick. We highly encourage the use of a GMPC in a duet game so the PC has someone in the story world to talk to and bounce ideas off of. It also helps to have a companion in combat to balance encounters and other challenges that are integral to the mechanics of 5e and fantasy storytelling.
As part of Land of Vampires being designed specifically for one-on-one D&D, we have included several unique NPCs to serve as GMPCs on your adventures through Steymhorod.
We call these companion characters Adventuring Companions and have a whole supplement just for them!
Our hopes for this Kickstarter:
We want to continue making immersive, high-quality, story-driven content for your one-on-one D&D table at home. In addition to that, we want to provide you with the guidance to make running a 5e campaign simple and fun!
With those two goals in mind, our first stretch goal for this campaign is a series of five videos, posted for everyone on our YouTube channel, on running the Land of Vampires campaign. These videos will range in degree of address so new GMs can easily get going and experienced GMs can find something new and challenging for their table.
And that brings me to another big hope for this Kickstarter campaign: In addition to providing the fully compiled campaign in print and digital to you at a discount, Jonathan and I are also hoping to expand the campaign! Land of Vampires is fully written and ready to appear at your home gaming table! But there’s still so much more story here!
Our second stretch goal is for Land of Vampires Part Two, where we expand the locations covered in the campaign to include two central cities of Steymhorod: Barasov and Rasonov. These additional locations and the adventures hidden therein would allow for more GM and PC choice in the order of the campaign AND allow for more adventures in Steymhorod after the first vampire is defeated.
What we would love is for the campaign we deliver to you to extend even further and more closely match the adventures in Steymhorod from our home game which includes a brief return to Azuria in an even bigger expansion to Part Two as our third stretch goal.
And finally, we’d love to add a Steymhorod world book to the campaign offerings! That is the fourth stretch goal for the campaign.
Once these bonuses are unlocked, they’ll be available as digital add-ons to pledges. We don’t want to slow down the production and delivery timeline of physical rewards, but if we hit our stretch goals, Part Two and the world book will be available for purchase in print later this year after they’re completed.
A few things to note:
- While Land of Vampires is perfect for GMs and players at any level, we do have an introductory adventure trip designed for first-time DMs and players called the Crystalline Curse trilogy. You can pick that up on DMsGuild here.
- This campaign does have darker, Gothic themes—plenty of vampire interactions, undead, sneaky NPCs, and creepy monsters! We have had people in our community play through the campaign with their kids, but we designed Land of Vampires with adults in mind.
What is a duet game?
What we refer to as a duet goes by a few different names: one-on-one gaming, tabletop for two, and, our favorite a duet. (Solo D&D tends to mean a self-run game, so one person is both GM and player.) It’s a departure from the traditional, group-focused way of playing D&D that instead focuses on one character.
When we first start talking about one-on-one D&D with someone new, people home in on the change to combat: How can a PC survive combat on their own when a creature’s challenge rating is based on a party of four? We have some simple strategies to help you manage that (and they’re really fun!). But these are questions of mechanics.
What we’ve found to be the more important shift is in the actual story itself. When you’re designing the story arc of a duet campaign, you’re going from a story designed around multiple protagonists/heroes to one. To pull from common fantasy examples, it’s the move from Lord of the Rings to The Hunger Games or Harry Potter. We’re not in Frodo and Aragorn and Gandalf’s story—we’re in Katniss’s story.
That is the shift our work is designed to make easy, straightforward, and fun for you! It is absolutely possible to adapt group-oriented campaigns to one-on-one play. But we think it’s even better to start with something designed, from the ground up, for duet gaming. Let your PC be the star!
What is playing in a duet like?
For the past five years, we’ve been helping people play one-on-one D&D with friends, loved ones, and acquaintances on the internet. And we’ve learned a lot about different tables’ needs and preferences during that time! But there are a few common threads that run through our community’s play styles.
In our experience, people playing in a duet:
- love the storytelling aspects of the play style. It’s incredibly immersive!
- enjoy not having to worry about scheduling! Coordinating calendars between two people rather than five is much easier, especially if your duet partner already shares their home with you!
- enjoy the RP [roleplaying] aspects of duet gaming. I frequently receive emails from new duet GMs about how much they’re enjoying their sessions or campaigns, and then they’ll ask if it’s normal to spend a couple hours talking back and forth as their characters without any combat—My answer is yes!
Who plays in a duet?
The other common way of asking this questions is: Do you have to be in a couple to play, and the answer is no.While I get emails from husbands every month ecstatic that they’ve finally gotten their wives to play D&D with them after years of asking, we have lots of people in our community play parent and child, as siblings, and with friends!
Duet gaming is great for people who are shy/reserved and are worried about role-playing in front of a group of people. It can also be a great way to learn the game, rules, and mechanics for those who are new!
It can also be an amazing option for the forever-DM in your life! They will so appreciate the chance not just to be the PC, but to be the protagonist of an entire campaign! If that feels like too much, Jonathan and I have also found that duet gaming sets pairs up well to switch GM and player roles. Players can run a one-off session for their GM’s GMPC. (We even have an add-on adventure pack perfect for exactly that!)
Who are the creators behind D&D Duet?
Finally, you may be wondering who we are! I’ll include our bios below, but the short version is that we are Beth Ball and Jonathan Ball. On January 1st of 2019, we launched our blog, D&D Duet, and created a place where the tabletop gaming community could learn more about and share their ideas for one-on-one D&D! (We are still celebrating our business turning five at the beginning of this year!)
From there, we created a small press to expand our offerings, Grove Guardian Press. Beth also started writing and publishing epic fantasy novels, many of which are inspired by our duet games and include the characters from our gaming table!
Beth Ball
Beth Ball is an ENnie-nominated tabletop RPG designer who specializes in adventures and advice for one-on-one D&D. Her designs tend to feature druids, nature, and dark fantasy. Beth is the lead writer for the D&D Duet blog and has also worked as a freelance writer and designer for Kobold Press, Hit Point Press, and Jeff Stevens Games.
In addition to her work as a game designer, Beth is a fantasy novelist spinning stories of druidic magic and the power of nature that span the high fantasy realms of Azuria and Eldura—many of these novels feature characters from her duet game with Jonathan! Find more of Beth’s fiction here.
Outside her fantasy work, Beth helps other writers as part of the Storytelling Collective and is a literary scholar.
Jonathan Ball
Jonathan Ball is one half of the D&D Duet team, the “forever GM” in the couple, and responsible for the bulk of the adventure writing. His adventures have won multiple Adamantine and Mithral Awards on DMs Guild, bringing the delights of one-on-one DnD to thousands of players. He has enjoyed collaborating with Dungeon in a Box, Kobold Press, and others.
When he’s not writing D&D, Jonathan works in public education as a teacher coach and has aspirations to become a principal. He loves reading on diverse subjects and loves to cook.
Thank you!
Before we conclude this overview, I want to add a special-shout out to the patrons who have supported us over the last several years. Whether for a month or since we started, we are so incredibly grateful to you! Your passion and belief in our work have helped see us through to this point of realization for this project, especially through the difficult times of the last few years.
We’d also like to thank the amazing community on our newsletter, the Circle of Story! Thank you for your support and for being part of our community. Thank you for purchasing our adventures and for writing back when I send out letters. In short, thank you for being there for us! We love interacting with you!
And last but certainly not least, a huge thank you to the wider D&D and tabletop gaming community! To our fellow game designers, your passion, drive, and creativity are a constant source of inspiration to us. Thank you for all of your hard work and for the times when you’ve sent curious fans our way! To the visual artists who are part of the community, and to the map-makers as well, we are constantly in awe of your talent and so inspired by creativity!
Lest I forget you—thank you so much for being here and for checking out our work! If you’re already part of our community, welcome to our newest project! You can follow the campaign and be notified upon launch here.
And if you’re new here, I hope you’ll stick around! Please reach out if you have any questions—we’d love to hear from you! You can use the contact us page on our site or the comments box below.
Happy adventures in Steymhorod!
We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions!