Murderous bands of gnolls slaughter and vanish! Demons conspire with mortals! The restless dead walk the land of the living! Who can save the Monarchy of Casusia?

Some stories of heroic adventure are noble works of literary art, some are trashy stories of violence and looting, but all of them gloss over a lot of the practical realities of the profession. Our protagonists (a traditional, if "unoptimized", ensemble of characters) realize this, but they take up the profession anyway.

Empirical Gnollage by Epicanis (pseud.) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Okay, are they gone? TTRPG Players and DMs: this is a simulated "sandbox" campaign, and the "system" is the well-known Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition SRD. My challenge here is to create a coherent, logically-consistent, and entertaining story within the constraints of the rules as I would want to run them in a "live" game. I'll be exploring how to interpret the rules of the official SRD in ways that make a good story while avoiding "exploits" and the rules intruding into the narrative. Our protagonists are starting as level 1 characters of classes defined in the Creative-Commons licensed SRD. The setting will try to stick to the same tropes, themes, and interpretations that are common to the commercial materials as much as it can without trespassing on anyone's Intellectual Precious. Brief explanations of where the "system" fits into the narrative will be provided as subtle "hovertext" tooltips, with more details to be posted separately elsewhere. Everything I publish around "Empirical Gnollage" is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, including custom subclasses, spells, items, locations, characters, creatures, and plothooks that show up in the story, and in supplemental material. This story will not be "stubbed" and put behind a paywall anywhere. And, if you don't care about any of that, you can still enjoy the story all by itself. Thanks for reading!