So. My players are wandering in Room 1 - the Forest of Dreams. Through methods that are a mystery even to myself, I managed to take the blurbs Anthony gives us in the book, combined with a few starter adventures or one-page dungeons, and turn them into several sessions of gaming and a whole overarching story with most of the trimmings. It was tense for a bit when they first arrived, picked out a room and I thought "Well... Here we go!" I kept it together for the rest of the session and then had 2 weeks to come up with NPCs, factions, some backstory, and a few fully realized adventure locations! I have been picking likely adventures out of my Trilemma Adventures Compendium (great for a time-crunched DM, but the adventures all need a bit of doctoring before play I find). I ran them through the old low-level Necromancer Games chestnut "The Crucible of Freya" but changed the monsters. Instead of orcs, it was demi-shadow needlemen (a sentence I never thought I'd type, but there you have it). Here is my hexmap so far, I also use Cone of Negative Energy's hex set: You can see the lake of fog up there, with the docks. On the left, the fog falls into a great 'ocean,' maybe there is something cool on the other side, I've no idea yet. Most of my decisions so far have been to give myself room to work if the players want to explore further, without doing TOO much work if they leave and never come back. The black&white areas are regions of perpetual night called "moonlit zones" where visitors may have their colour drained away, eventually leaving them shades like the other denizens. Of course there is some cool treasure in some of them too. I have towns full of shades under a strange curse, temples to forgotten gods, a sleeping princess & mad king - just good classic stuff mostly based on suggestions in the book. Everything is fallen-down and crumbling, for the visuals I am basically cribbing as hard as I can from Dark Souls (my favourite video game ever - too bad I lost my copy in the divorce). I could never do that in the 'normal world' of my game, so it is great to have these aesthetically distinct realms where a DM can really indulge himself in whatever wild thing is on his mind, without starting an entirely new campaign or turning his regular world into a completely mixed bag. Next session, the gang wants to press on to find the "Sage of Lune," (another Trilemma adventure) and hopefully they'll get some clues about the shadow-demons that plague the land. I'll have to deliver this info carefully though. They have a dangerous tendency to go after the first clue they hear about like a heatseeking missile, and they're only 1st-3rd level...