This article aims to provide a starter scenario for D&D 5E campaigns inspired by the Isekai genre of fiction. Most popular in anime, this genre generally focuses on protagonists who have been taken from our modern world and placed in a fantasy setting. Popular examples include Sword Art Online, The Saga of Tanya the Evil, and Magic Knight Rayearth.

I will say up front that there are better systems for running an anime-influenced Isekai campaign, like Big Eyes Small Mouth, the LUMEN hack This World Summons Too Many Heroes!!, or .dungeon. Instead of doing that, I settled on the more questionable method of using Ultramodern5 REDUX and the standard 5E Player’s Handbook and a couple of third-party classes picked to tempt specific players in my group.

I had my players pick a “real world” class from Ultramodern5, specifically from among the Civilian, Face, Martial Artist classes, and a “fantasy” class from the Player’s Handbook. The Warlock and Monk classes were banned at this stage, due to the Monk overlapping in non-fun ways with the Martial Artist and the Warlock not fitting nicely with the theme.

Sylvan Station

“You wake up to the rhythmic ka-chunk, ka-chunk sound of metal wheels rolling over poorly-maintained track. As you look around, you see that you are in a train car with rows of blue seats and gray handles hanging from bars along the ceiling. Outside the windows, you see trees slowly passing by. You feel the car begin to slow, and female text-to-speech voice announces ‘Sylvan. Station.’ The car comes to a stop beside a concrete platform covered in fallen leaves, with blue benches every few feet. The yellow doors of the train car open with a slight hiss.”

Sylvan Station is a single concrete platform in the middle of the woods. At one end is a buffer, indicating that this is the end of the line. From the other end, the tracks extend into the woods, becoming progressively more overgrown until they become impossible to follow.

The platform has a vending machine which contains sandwiches and bottles of water, denominated in the local currencies. Every night at roughly midnight, a portal opens on the back of the inside of the machine, allowing a stock boy in a distant location to refill it and remove the money.

Currency

Sylvandale and the larger kingdom to which it belongs denominate their goods in Crowns (₢) and Fifths (ƒ). Crown coins are made of five wedge-shaped pieces held together by mild magnetism. The coins are gold, with a jagged silver pattern inlaid in them. When five pieces are put together into a single coin, the pattern looks like a crown, or perhaps the sun during a total eclipse.

The obverse side of each Fifth piece contains the year of manufacture, and one of the key virtues of the kingdom: Diligence, Courage, Strength, Service and Hospitality. These are written in the courtly dialect known as High Speech, but any literate citizen knows the plain meaning of these words.

One Crown is equal to a standard 5E Gold Piece, and a Fifth is equal to two standard 5E Silver Pieces.

Sylvandale

Sylvandale is a small town deep in a lush forest, near where a barbarian king’s secret capitol once sat. The people are kind and helpful. Wooden walls surround the town, leaving only a single gate on the south side.

Mitch, former adventurer. Mitch is a skinny guardsman who carries a pike. He used to be an adventurer until he settled down with his wife. He guards the main gate to Sylvandale.

Connelly Reagents

Connelly Reagents is a two-storey building near the center of town. Its ground floor is filled with vats, presses, and boilers. The second floor is where Bailey Connelly lives, and is filled with the accrued belongings of her, her father, and her grandfather.

Connelly Reagents turns the goop from dead slimes into dried cubes of alchemical reagents, vital for the production of healing potions and similar products. Connelly Reagents will pay one Crown per bucket of slime goop brought to them by adventurers.

Bailey Connelly, alchemist. Bailey is a short, thin woman with a pair of goggles on her forehead or around her neck at all times. She speaks quickly and can be quite tactless, since she speaks faster than she thinks.

Barnes’ General Store

Barnes’ General Store is a single-storey, wooden building with a cellar. Most of the inside is taken up by shelves of goods, leaving a small standing area for customers, separated from the shelves by a counter with a cash register on it.

Barry Barnes, shop owner. Barry Barnes is a short, plump man with thick blond hair. He always greets his customers with a cheery “How ya doin’?”

The Sylvandale Adventurer’s Guild

The Sylvandale Adventurer’s Guild is a relatively small and under-equipped outpost. There are a few cotsand a couple of spare weapons to rent, as well as the equipment used to register new adventurers, but nothing more impressive than that.

The floors creak and the roof leaks, but the clerk is friendly and the fireplace is warm. A few locals can usually be found here, resting between slime-hunting expeditions and enjoying each others’ company.

Most weapons can be rented from the Guild for 20% of their Player’s Handbook-listed purchase price per week. Cots can be rented for 1ƒ per night.

Registering as a member of the Adventurer’s Guild is simple. You pay 1₢, the attendant prints a card with your chosen name and picture on it, and then you prick your finger and let a drop of blood fall onto the card. Once that happens, the card is linked to you permanently, and shows your current class levels. This card lets you carry weapons and equipment normally off-limits to commoners, in return for an expectation that you’ll do good for the kingdom in both peacetime and times of crisis.

Monica, adventurer’s guild clerk. Monica is a short woman with curly black hair and a sunny disposition. She handles the administrative affairs of this branch of the Guild, registering new adventurers, renting out weapons, and so on.

The Tomb of Madrix

In Eons Past, barbarian king Madrix ruled these lands from a buried fortress in the forest. When he died of an aneurysm, he was buried in its lowest chamber, and all its doors were sealed so none could rob it.

In More Recent Times, a colony of slimes has claimed the tomb as their home.

The Door

The Tomb’s stone front door is partially broken, but needs to be pried open the rest of the way. This is a DC 17 strength check, which is very high, but a recent wind storm has broken many strong limbs off of the trees of the forest, and if the party uses them as levers, they will have advantage on this check. The door opens to reveal stairs downwards.

The Entry Hall

The first chamber of the Tomb is a large room whose roof is supported by rotting wooden pillars. pair of old, bleached rugs about twenty feet in length and ten feet wide covers the floor near the entrance.

Party+1 Basic Slimes are in this room at all times, and will attack the party upon noticing them.

At the far side is a set of stairs leading downwards.

The Second Floor

This floor is split into two rooms by a wall and a metal portcullis. A capstan is visible on the far side of the portcullis, and there is a crack in the wall just barely wide enough for the smallest member of the party to squeeze through if they take their armor off.

The main room has four tables, one to the west side of the entrance and three to the east. The west side table has a set of four six-sided dice sitting on it. There are no numbers on them, but instead there are shapes: Square, circle, triangle, and a line. The remaining two faces are blank.

Unfortunately, it appears that the rope attaching the capstan to the portcullis was cut and partially removed when this place was abandoned. If the party attempts to attach the two pieces of rope, they will find that about two feet more is needed. If the party does not have any rope and cannot come up with a ridiculous or clever solution, remind them of the piece of cloth in the first chamber.

Once the capstan is repaired, it needs to be turned to raise the portcullis. This takes 10 rounds (60 seconds), minus one round for every two points over 10 in the user’s Strength score. The portcullis makes a horrible screeching noise as it raises, which attracts slimes from the nearby rooms. 1d6+2 Basic Slimes in total, split equally between the eastern and western rooms.

The room behind the portcullis has a comfortable chair with an axe and a sword leaning against the back, crossed.

A door on the west side of the main room leads to a kitchen where a few slimes lurk, and a door to the west leads to a warren of servants’ chambers.

The Kitchen

To the west of the main room is a room with a cookstove, broken shelves and a few sealed casks of wine. The shelves are completely empty. Not even potatoes remain here, having long been consumed by the slimes.

The Last Chamber

In the deepest depths of the Tomb is the resting place of Madrix, where his body was lain upon the royal bed. Now, this area is occupied by the Grand Slime. Madrix’s skeleton is floating inside of this slime. Of course, since it has long since rotted away, it could be any skeleton, but it’s likely Madrix.

Slimes

Basic Slime

The most basic slime is the Basic Slime, a purple, translucent amorphous blob. The Basic Slime slides around forests, absorbing nutrients from low-lying plants. If they use up the whole forest, they start spilling over into the nearby farms.

When a slime “dies,” it collapses into a pile of formless goop with alchemical uses. A dead Basic Slime will fill a bucket.

Grand Slime

The Grand Slime is a Large, purple mass of jiggling goop with the skeleton of a human man floating inside of it. It periodically buds off smaller, independent Basic Slimes which search out nutrients and then re-combine with the Grand Slime. Despite its bulk, it can fling itself at impressive speeds.

Afterword

Thanks for reading! For this article, and the campaign I’ll be running for my group, I’ve decided to break from my usual gritty, vaguely-OSR sensibilities and write something cheerier and cheesier. Thus, JRPG slimes and an adventurer’s guild.

If all goes well, I’ll be able to write another article set in this world in the near future, so look out for that!

-Garm

Downloads

You can use the button above to download Sylvandale – The Tomb of Madrix map, and I have listed many of the map asset packs used below. You can also find many more on our Map Gallery.

Support the Creators

Garmbreak1
Former esports wannabe, current TTRPG streamer and TTRPG creator interviewer. I like science fiction and I have a soft spot for licensed tabletop RPGs. You can find all the campaigns I’m in and interviews I’ve done over on YouTube.

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