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Welcome to Xen'drik Expeditions, the third offering of Dungeons & Dragons Campaigns. In this campaign style game, you create your own character and play it at any RPGA-sanctioned event that features Xen'drik Expedition adventures. During play, you interact with the adventure's story and challenges, and your character's actions help determine the course of the game over the next year and a half by way of online adventure tracking. Adventure tracking also awards your character experience points and gold pieces for defeating challenges.
About the RPGA
The RPGA is the roleplaying arm of organized play at Wizards of the Coast dedicated to providing play opportunities and support for Dungeons & Dragons and other d20 System games. All around the world, on any given weekend, fans of these games play in RPGA-sanctioned events. These events take place at large conventions, midsize gamedays, retail stores, and even private home gatherings.
To participate, you must be an RPGA member. Membership is free, and you don't have to worry about continually renewing - it's good forever. Just show up at an event, fill out a membership card, and start playing. Details about joining are available on the Membership Page of the RPGA website. To find an event in your area, visit the Event Calendar where you may search by either date or location.
As an member, you may also choose to participate in a number of other programs including D&D Rewards and the GM Program. There's no fee for these programs. If you wish to run your own RPGA-sanctioned event or order free adventure downloads, you must join the GM Program and pass the Herald-Level GM Test. Details for all these programs are accessible from the GM Program welcome page.
Required Materials
To play in this campaign, you'll need some standard gaming supplies. These include the Eberron Campaign Setting, Player's Handbook v.3.5, Dungeon Master's Guide v.3.5, Monster Manual v.3.5, a pen or pencil, a set of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20), a miniature or token representing your character on the battle grid, and your RPGA number (so we can track your play). You will also need:
- Xen'drik Expepditions Campaign Standards document
- Dungeons & Dragons Campaigns Character Sheet
- Dungeons & Dragons Campaigns Progression Sheet
- Dungeons & Dragons Campaigns Magic and Stack Sheet
These documents are available from Eberron website on the Xen'drik Expeditions welcome page. The character sheet, progression sheet, and magic and stack sheet are included at the end of the campaign standards document or available to download seperately. Wizards of the Coast gives you permission to photocopy material from the these documents for personal use or for use at RPGA-sanctioned events.
Styles of Play
The Xen'drik Expeditions campaign offers three character generation styles. Detailed information for each creation style is available in the Campaign Standards document, but here's a summary of each one.
Fastplay: The RPGA produces a number of characters designed primarily for players who need a character but have little experience with Dungeons & Dragons, or don't have time to construct their own. Pick a character you like and download it from the Fastplay Characters page - it's that easy. You can play and advance these characters in the campaign as if you had built them yourself. At predetermined intervals called level kicks, the fastplay characters level up and new characters may be available. If you chose to play and advance a fastplay character before a level kick, that's still your character to play; you're not required to switch it for a new fastplay character. Each fast play character is keyed to a Dungeons & Dragons Miniature. If you play a fastplay charater with that miniature, it unlocks a bonus tailored for that particular miniature.
Coreplay: With theDungeons & Dragons core books v.3.5 and the rules supplied in the campaign standards document, you can create a personalized character for Mark of Heroes. The campaign standards includes basic rules from the Eberron setting to help you flesh out your character.
Fullplay: For the greatest flexibility while making your character, use the fullplay rules. Fullplay rules are an addendum to coreplay character generation using Eberron sources during character creation. To take full advantage of these options you should have a copy of the Eberron Campaign Setting.
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Campaign Cards
Campaign Cards are special cards that can affect your character and your play. There are three types of Campaign Cards: creation, general, and expansion. Campaign Cards are awarded to RPGA members as part of the D&D Player Rewards program, and promo cards are available at premiere shows such as Winter Fantasy, Origins, and Gen Cons.
Every time you come to an event where you play Dungeons & Dragons Campaigns games, you declare your Campaign Card stack on your magic and stack sheet. Each card takes up one slot in the stack. You have as many slots as your character has character levels. You must have the actual Campaign Card to have it take up a slot.
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D&D Campaigns Special Features
A number of special features distinguish D&D Campaigns from other campaign styles you many have played before. Here are some highlights of these features.
Factions: The campaign features four factions that characters belong to. No matter where you live in the world, you can make a character of any of the campaign’s factions. Members of the factions pursue faction goals, or to try to unlock mysteries involving the Caldyn Fragments—a group of draconic Prophecies they are trying to discover the meaning to, manipulate, or both. In fact, you can have a character in each faction, if you’d like. We created the factions to let the casual player have a full campaign to play, while those who wanted to immerse themselves in the campaign even deeper, would have a ton of adventures opportunities. The factions are:
- Blackwheel Company: A faction created to serve all thirteen dragonmarked houses’ interests in Xen’drik. Smart, mercenary, and out for sometimes competing “corporate” interests.
- Cabal of Shadows: The members of the Cabal are dark, mysterious, and often misunderstood. In the Cabal, alignment is not necessarily an issue.
- Covenant of Light: A faction filled with the zealous, righteous, and pure of all of Eberron’s religions, faiths, and philosophies.
- Crimson Codex: The most philosophical of the four factions. The Codex is contemplative, certain, and true masters of the esoteric.
Multiple Adventure Types: There are three types of adventures in Xen’drik Expeditions. The first are the faction adventures. In these adventures members of the factions adventure together to achieve faction goals. The second type of adventure is the popular DM’s Mark, where individual DMs get to flex their creative muscle and make fun and unique game experiences geared toward their group or their local audience. The third type of adventure are expedition adventures. These are large sprawling epics that take place in strange locations in Xen’drik, as the PCs explore and race to affect the Caldyn Fragments’ prophecy in some way. These adventures are big—typically three standard RPGA rounds of play, and more in some cases—and allow the factions to mix on the gaming table.
Online tracking: D&D Campaigns tracks your adventure successes and debacles online. The outcomes of these encounters shape the future campaign plot. After an event is reported, those bits of information are also added to your online Character Record to determine your experience and gold piece awards. Your character records are accessed from the Members Page using your Members Sign On. Once you've signed on, you will be able to view your character list to set up characters, retire characters, change your default character, or view and print a character record. This record shows the character's name, class, race, first creation Campaign Card chosen, play history, experience, gold, and lets you know if the character is dead. Once you set up a character, a print option will appear on the character record. When you're getting ready to attend an event, be sure to print your character record as part of the official documentation need to participate. Character records expire after about a week, so make sure your print out is current. Character record expiration dates fall on the same day of the week for every character in the campaign.
 Miniatures and Fastplay: Aside from their easy of use, fastplay character have additional features. Each fastplay character is keyed to a Dungeons & Dragons miniature. If you play a fastplay character using that miniature, it unlocks a bonus that works exactly like a Campaign Card but is tailored for that particular character. The unlocked bonus sits in your stack like Campaign Cards.
Taking One for the Team: A player can play one of the fastplay characters but gain experience points his or her default characters. This character swapping can only be done with the cleric, fighter, rogue, or wizard fastplay characters, and only if no PC at the session has a character with any class levels of the fastplay character's class.
Reequip: D&D Campaigns deals with wealth, equipment, and consumable items a bit differently than other campaigns. Taking into account your stack, level, and choices made during character creation, the campaign assumes that your character has a certain equip value (EV) to use for an adventure set at an event. For example, lets say you go to a session and play two Xen'drik Expedition adventures. In your magic list you have a potion of cure light wounds. When you drink that potion in the first adventure, you benefit from the curing magic it bestows, but you can't use it again in that adventure. Your very next adventure, though, your equipment list resets. So even though you drank the potion in the first session, we assume that you have restocked the potion for the next adventure. You can use it again in the second adventure. Resetting your equipment between adventures this way does not effect your equip value; your EV remains constant during an adventure set at an event. Note, if you don't use consumable equipment like the potion of cure light wounds in the first adventure, you don't have extra equipment (two potions of cure light wounds) for the second adventure. When play results are reported for the event, your equip value is adjusted to reflect both gold earned and spent during the adventure. Between events, you can retool your equipment list or keep what you had before and add to it based on your new equip value. To allow this flexibility, consumable items cost five times their published cost in Dungeons & Dragons Campaigns.
Level Kick: It's never too late to join Xen'drik Expeditions. As the campaign moves forward, so does the level of play. At the launch of the campaign, you start play with a 1st-level character. Down the line, the campaign features level kicks that increase the starting level of the campaign. Existing characters that have not yet reached the new starting level are advanced to the new campaign level. At each kick, new fastplay characters are introduced and the campaign standards are updated to reflect the changes. Level kicks ensure sessions are well balanced at events and that every player can keep pace with the campaign.
Optional Materials
Xen'drik Expeditions uses a number of optional sources. While the following books are not required, having them increases your ability to expand your character.
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