The hard story beats should be as follows:
* Each player does a ‘last day on earth’ scene
* Get lectured by God/Goddess
* We’re on a mission from God
* Get characters made
* First introduction/cliffhanger for the new world
OK so this is much more ‘free form’ and more like my natural speaking voice type of writing. Here is where I plan on detailing what you need to accomplish to run an adventure like this. Most of what I’m writing here is a suggestion, you don’t have to specifically hit every beat or include every feature. This is meant to be more of a guide to running your own Isekai DnD adventure more than anything.
Session 0 is meant to be character creation. You should emphasize to your players that they are to create a person before hand. Name and occupation at minimum, but more can be helpful. Then you run each player through their final day on Earth. In my story, each players day ends with them ‘interacting’ with the truck. That specific animé truck that sends people to other worlds. If you want a different method of transporting, go nuts. Common options are:
Portals, rapture, falling asleep, VR game, regular game, suddenly blue square system box, Achieve enlightenment, voice of god, bitten by snakes in a jungle, bitten by snakes in a city, attacked by the city and allies found in group of friendly snakes . Talking pets, drugs, alien abduction... and many more!
Give a good fifteen minutes to each person, allow them to talk to other human NPC’s in their ‘regular voice’. Maybe spring the transition on them suddenly. I think that’s a fair amount of time to dedicate to this establishing of the baseline.
So they’re dead/raptured/whatever. Time to enter the realm of Isekai. I’m going with a standard “you meet god” kind of thing. What I’m aiming for with this story is to rip on Japanese Isekai stories and how they relate to more western style fantasy. Some of the planned oddities are as follows:
Animé Bullshit combat, until the players get involved and then things become DnD combat, this is quite the surprise for the animé bullshit combatants.
Kobolds being furry dog men, rather than small lizard people.
The Animé bullshit system is incompatible with the DnD character sheet. So the AB numbers are wildly different than the DnD stat numbers.
I’ll have to think of more as times go on but now it’s time to return to the game. We have to make our next step into the world.
We’ve had some Earth time, we’ve had some interminable plane time, so now it’s time to actually buckle down and do the math of character creation ‘in character’. This step is optional, but I want to foster a power gaming mindset with the players. This whole adventure is meant for ‘accelerated’ play. One level per session. Roughly 20 sessions total.
Take a moment during character creation to make ‘the system’ boxes of stats for the players. Something only tangentially related to their DnD character stats. This is for whenever an NPC asks to [identify] a player, they can either flash the card, or later on when they’ve got stalwart allies who don’t care where they came from they can flash the DnD sheet.
With characters created, drop them into the world. I want to run this game as a bit of a ‘keep yourself safe’ kind of thing. The world is hostile to Isekai protagonists. My chosen method of presenting this will happen with a DMPC. Make this character with your players as well. Have them announce themselves in the most grandiose fashion when they step into the world. Then have them be brutally murdered by animé bullshit.
Here is where you should stop session 0. Cliffhangers work in person just as well as on the page.
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With the above being written well in advance of what actually happened, let me put down what happened in the 'actual play' of Session 0.
You can, of course, see what I envisioned would happen by reading the original story.
Before this session, we had been playing a separate campaign and the DM was feeling a bit burnt out. I offered to run this and have the first four sessions planned out.
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Player 1 – Taro Nasaka – NEET
This player has as much of a love of the genre as I do. Their 'backstory' was a typical NEET day of watching animé after giving up on the job search. They ate some food that their mother left for them outside their door, then learned that the latest episode of their favourite is about to air, but they don’t have enough snacks. So they walked down the road to the nearest Kobini convenience store. On the way back home they were distracted by the cicadas in the evening air and were hit by a truck.
Player 2 – Brother Elon – Scientologist preacher
I know essentially nothing about Scientology beyond the south park episode. I did do a quick search for their headquarters, which is apparently in “Gold Base” California. The story was pretty much office work, because hell if I know what they actually do there, and Elon was roped into attending sensitivity training along with a number of other people. The obvious target of said training corrals Elon after the days work to get a drink. Target drinks too much, Elon starts to drive them home, target vomits onto Elon while driving, car crosses the centre line into a truck.
Player 3 – Crispin “Crash” Chicane – Stuntman
BBC stuntman. Doing stunt work for an Anti-Terrorist TV show. First stunt went well, run down street bump into trash cans, jump over lady and walking dog (fake dog). Talk with fake dog walker lady extra at the kraft services table. Called to do second stunt. Second stunt goes well, run away from Mi-6 agents, jump off of 3rd story parking garage onto safe fall boxes, all good. Truck dolly with camera loses control and accelerates off the parking garage and falls onto Crispin.
Player 4 – King Kane – Butcher
Dark and stormy day in Jackson Mississippi. Cutting steaks for a restaurant order. Not enough meat currently available due to storm delaying delivery. Restaurant calls and shouts about the late delivery. King apologizes but restaurant isn’t having any of it. The loss of this account will bankrupt King. Closing up shop and about to drive home, their car starts making a knock noise and the check engine light goes on. Trudging home through the pouring rain, they are hit by a truck.
Player 5 – Milo Heart – Mascot
Milo has been working at a theme park in Vancouver Canada as the mascot Dynamo the Giraffe. Some kind of electric power giraffe mascot. The job is terrible, the costume heavy, the children love the mascot and hugging, Milo will get fired if he doesn’t hug back.
Torque diesel side story with fast and furious inspiration. Happens as the B story the entire time.
Milo’s story continues with rivalry between another Mascot, a grumpy walrus. Tiny awful breaks. A bad power tripping boss. A final show that closes out the day.
Torque diesel stops the terrorists and drops the truck out the back of the plane while shouting “family”. Said truck impacts on top of Milo.
The above section took roughly one and a half hours. Zero dice were rolled.
Next up was the white and pink goddess section. The six ‘people’ (DMPC Hugh included) were greeted by the “terrifyingly perfect” goddess whose eyes matched the firmament of this in between world. (Taro instantly recognized the DM will give himself a super OP player character) A brief call to action to the players who instantly accepted.
The goddess said “I got enough power for one new body, the rest of you will get the spares.” Did the pulling of empty coat racks out of nowhere bit. And left the now five spare skin suits to be chosen by the players.
Crispin took a ‘lizard folk’ suit. Which I haven’t covered in the actual story yet. (This is a secret that will help us later.)
Taro took the dwarf suit. Their rock of choice was Corundum. So they’re mostly blue with white streaks. They chose Onyx for their eyes.
Elon got the human suit. The body formed and I did the ‘It hurts too much for words’ bit. It got a BEAUTIFUL pitiful whine and moan out of them. 10/10 would do again.
King got the halfling suit. The events of that one were kinda experimental and somewhat confusing. But I think they got it well enough that when I said “Describe the halfling you see before you” they described what they want to look like.
Milo got the elf suit. They went with a pygmy rabbit.
The above took about an hour.
From this point it was group character building. I handed out the diagetic character sheets, the character sheets that exist ‘in game’ and ‘in world’ for the characters. I fully encouraged talking, collaboration, and power gaming. We rolled stats (4d6 drop lowest) and everyone got roughly above average of point buy.
I’m not certain I did it perfectly though. Everyone basically bent their heads to the paper and got to work on their own. If I were to do this a second time I would demand everyone to do a show and tell of not just what their build is, but how they made it too. This way any flaws would be apparent and could be corrected.
Taro - Paladin
Crispin - Fighter
Elon - Cleric
King - Barbarian
Milo - Druid
Character creation took about an hour.
Characters built, the goddess 'activated' the 'system' for everyone. Specifically I provided an index card for the 'status screen' that players should use. You can find an example in the cover art for this 'story'
the goddess threw treasures, an extra dimensional inventory space, and magic equipment at Hugh. Gave pink tunics the other five. The mission of "Kill God" permanently marked their character sheets with red ink. A final warning of “bend your knees” before dropping them in the world.
Hugh landed perfectly, the VERY FIRST skill check roll of the night was an acrobatics ‘save’ that two of the five failed which earned them a ‘landed hard on their back’
Hugh lead the way towards a nearby road. Caravan showed up, Hugh got peppered with arrows and became a “reverse porcupine” and died.
The briefest of conversations with Gil the caravan master and the night was done.
We started around 5 or 5:30 p.m. and finished up a little after 9 p.m. I think this was a good length for a ‘session 0’.
We’re playing Session 1 one week later due to player schedules. Normally it’s a two week break.