That’s a super fun concept. Warhammer 40k does something similar with the emporer of mankind, who is either dead or nearly dead and on life support for thousands of years. I feel like it’s less known now but in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books there is a part that talks about the emporer of the galaxy who was placed in a stasis field during his dying moments. I haven’t ever actually tried to look it up but always wondered if one was a nod to the other.
iirc, for awhile the first and only user flair available on r/196 was “trans rights”
I really like your map! Especially that you can swap out tiles for when track switches change, that’s clever and your game sounds really fun :)
I DM a couple 5e campaigns in the same game world, one which is more active lately is a spin-off where my players are all goblins and kobolds, with regular player levels on top of the monster stat blocks. They’re incredibly weak so the game centers around goblin antics rather than combat or serious dungeons.
One of my regular players recently got back from being out of the country, and joined this game as a kobold warlock. Their character origin is, they unwittingly gave their name to a fae and spent a year in servitude without a name, then their new patron, Tiamat, learned of this, gave them her name for their own, and a level in warlock, so they escaped the fae and became Tiamat the Tiny!
This is touching on the really inflexible damage system in DND. My games tend to have real hospitals/clinics for dealing with the wounded and sick in a way that can’t really be expressed with the DND hit point system. This is fine for my games though, usually this kind of medical care is addressed through roleplay and outside of combat. NPCs often get wounded in a way where a healing potion or spell will only stabilize and will not make whole.