An Introduction

Your characters arrive to the City of Falling Leaves late in the evening, the streets shrouded in light shadows. The city is huge, the buildings towering tall enough to shroud the streets in shade most of the day, the cracked and worn structures choked with the vines and roots of red-leafed trees. The evening sun makes the leaves seem to burn and shine down, tinting every shadow a shade of glowing red.

As you make your way in, winding through the streets and among the towering trees, you find yourselves in what feels almost like a town square; a tavern is what you spy first, adventurers, traders, workers, and even supplies filtering in and out. Adventurers and explorers gather in a sunken amphitheater space that feels almost like a fair tent.

Lanterns are already burning, and chatter fills the air from adventurers and explorers returning from their expeditions for the day.

Further on you can see a market in the distance, lights and banners waving in the fading light.

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The City of Falling Leaves was a name that I've been juggling around in my head for a long, long time. At first it was an idea for a zelda-style dungeon built around trees and the use of smoke and stealth; a small city trapped in an eternal Fall, timeless and guarded.

Like bait on a hook, the idea slowly gathered others as I pushed them aside, an action game set in a sprawling, fantasy city where your character is searching for a home, and struggling to survive. And slowly the ideas started to stew together, like ingredients in a pot, slowly adding more and more concepts, like a maze-like map made out of puzzle piece-like sections, or districts. And even the idea of slowly growing a settlement, visiting and adventuring within it again and again, growing it further each time.

The City of Falling Leaves became a homebrew campaign I decided to run for the friends that I made at the beginning of the pandemic, trying to create a distraction from what was going on outside and make being stuck inside more bearable. And once it started, it started to grow just like the city did around the players. Systems became more fleshed out, and new ones, new ideas, were played around with.

And it's gotten to the point where I want to make this,

this city, 

this setting, 

this world stand apart from D&D and become its own thing.