Monthly Archives: May 2025

Campaign of the Month May 2025: Nightfall

The 2000 year old Tengen Empire is in turmoil. After an abrupt and mysterious end to their fifteen year war with the magic-believing people of Midros, the Tengen Gods, the Taywa, suddenly face an even greater, almost unthinkable threat – insurrection within their own lands, led by new heroes ready to challenge their divine power and end their enslavement of souls. Join us in talking with GM alliedaines through the beautiful and fantastic world of Nightfall!

Feel free to tell us more about the person behind the GM screen. Where are you from? What do you do aside from gaming? Alter Egos? Life partners? Family? Where can we interact with you on the internet?

Hi guys. My name is Alison, I live in the UK and have been roleplaying for what seems like a lifetime, but in reality has been around forty years. I love writing, pc gaming, my adorable husky and of course DMing. When I was in my 20s I went through a prolonged period DMing every day, but now, as online play requires a lot more work and I’m starting to feel my age, a couple of times a week is enough.

Did you build your Night Fall campaign on Obsidian Portal yourself? While building your campaign, what tools did you find useful? Do any of your players get involved in the campaign website’s design?

I have a great partner called Justin who is a musician and a developer. He helped me a little with some of the CSS but a lot of the background code used on the site has evolved over time through trial and error and hundreds of tweaks. I use AI art sites these days to generate nearly all of the artwork and other things like tokens I create or manipulate myself using Corel’s Paintshop Pro.

Many of my maps are made in programs like Wonderdraft and Dungeondraft. My players also love to create things as well, but as they work full-time jobs and play in other games, I do most of the site myself.

One of my players, Cate, recently used Suno to make a whole album of songs inspired by the party’s adventures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cby4zBjBfvs) and I myself created another album of songs for a musical town of Kenku that proved tremendous fun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AC6tLydHnU). Other players have created stories, in depth write-ups of their session 0s, assisted with the Previously on Night Fall weekly summaries and contributed art. It really is a collaborative effort and I am so happy to have such talented devoted players.

You’ve been running Night Fall with your group for over 2 years. Does your group, with your latest Chronicle (the 95th entry!) dating to March 10th, 2025, meet up in person or do you play online? Tell us a little more about your players and their characters!

We play regularly online using Roll20 and Discord, on a Monday night for around three hours and are all UK based. I think since the homebrew 5E campaign began, two years ago, we have only missed half a dozen weeks. I got to know my players first by playing with them in another game as I needed to know we were all going to be a good fit and I wanted them to get to know me first, my various foibles and sense of humour. It was still strange for them though as I did things a bit differently than other DMs they had played with. The biggest initial change was the amount of input I had on their backgrounds. They gave me a document outlining what they wanted for their character and I then took each of them, individually, through several session 0s of their childhood, teens and key events. I gave them families, friends, places in the world to grow up and we all relaxed into our respective roles. I have always felt like a character in a big campaign should feel connected to the world and NPCs in it and extensive session 0s help with that. The players immediately became invested in their characters’ fates. It takes a lot of work at the start, but it pays off long-term with plenty of content, mysteries and plot threads to explore.

I love to present the world as a living breathing place. Things happen in it regardless of whether the players are there or not and I believe almost every NPC should feel grounded to that world and alive, not just a sign-post for players to read and move on from.

The current player characters are Edlin (Cate) – a fey-cursed Living Spirit and Warlock of Valen with a Gloom familiar called Yarikh; multiclassed now as a Bard of the World Song. Nix (David) – a light-hearted Divine Soul Sorcerer, Torment (Neil) – a 3000 year old amnesiac war-forged sorcerer and Warlock of Skarkrux and Orel (Sarah) – a samurai paladin of the Taywa who is only around every other session and spends half her time as a ‘ghostly’ entity on another plane of existence.

Each of the players enjoys roleplay and piecing together things about the world and campaign. Sometimes they get together to theorise on what is happening when I’m not there. Which is crazy but they seem to enjoy it.

For those readers who haven’t yet read through Night Fall’s Timeline and the amazingly detailed Chronicles (Adventure Logs), could you give us a rundown on the story behind your campaign setting, and the events that are transpiring as your campaign progresses? In what direction, without spoilers, do you as the DM aspire to go with Night Fall?

The world is homebrew and fantasy with a hint of Eberron-style science and tech. When I first dreamed up Night Fall, I began with two premises. The first – the idea that everything in the campaign would revolve around events that had taken place during the previous Night Fall war, 1000 years before, then an event called The Long Night, 300 years before. And that these events, over the course of the campaign, would slowly reveal their importance to the players. Second – how the players themselves and the theme of lost memories would play a pivotal role in the unfolding story, with players and their characters piecing things together as they went.

The next idea that really appealed to me was this: What if at level 1, I gave the players access to an ancient powerful hybrid flying vessel, filled with magic and science, capable of travelling a 1000 miles a day, filled with several kingdoms worth of treasure and around 30 magical items left behind by the previous crew who had ‘died’ in mysterious circumstances? What would my players do with this? Where would they go? What would they discover and how could their actions influence the next Night Fall war?

Being a big fan of Julian May’s Many Coloured Land books I then incorporated her system of metapsychic powers, careful not to intrude too much upon the traditional D&D 5E rules. Then, as I am also a fan of the BBC Sci-Fi show from the 80s called Blake’s 7, I made the group prisoners, deemed criminals because of their magic, gave them the ship, the Ancient, and an evil Empire to oppose. And that’s kind of where it began.

There is a threat to the world – well, a few actually – but then isn’t there always in big campaigns? And each of the players has specific goals from their backgrounds to achieve. But overall, I like to think the core of the campaign remains: What are the characters going to do with their super-powerful ship? Where are they going to go and how involved will they become in world events?

We are now nearing our 100th session. A bit of a milestone, as I know many campaigns regrettably fizzle out, long before reaching that number, for a variety of real-world reasons. And we just concluded and are now in the epilogue of a major arc centred around David’s character Nix. The players often joke about how they thought they’d stop at the Dominion of Krel for a day, find Nix’s lost friends and then leave, but ended up spending a year there in real world time, around sixty sessions, and getting a bit traumatised in the process. Now that they have finally escaped again, it’s time to get back out into the world and have some crazy adventures. Well… until fate comes knocking.

Are there any specific sessions you have had that stand out in your memory as being particularly fun for you and your players? Feel free to add any pictures or links, as well as any feedback from your players.

I asked them and they said the following;

David – “I have 3 standouts that come to mind. The first being session 1 – the way the group met being VERY different to any other DnD campaign I’ve taken part in. How we had to work together to help some others, like getting Rain down off the cliff. I just liked how different it was to the usual meeting in a tavern or being summoned by some lord. Second would be the attack on the Syndicate. That was just an awesome experience stretching across multiple sessions and involving such a variety of skills being utilised. And the culmination of fighting Imada was great fun too. Finally, the battle in the city to kick the tyrants out and get the people to freedom. The use of a different system and bringing together multiple factions was so engaging and such good fun especially since I hadn’t really known what to expect beforehand.”

Neil – “Discovering the Ancient. And the eventual escape on the Ancient.”

Cate – “The first thing that came to mind for me was all our session 0s before we even started the main campaign. I know we did them individually, but I’d never done anything like that before. It took me from having a 1 page sketch of an idea for a back story to being able to imagine Edlin as a living breathing person and Tifa as a real place. There were even times I could smell the spring flowers and the mulchy scent of the woods. That grounding in my character and the world from the very start meant I was totally invested from day 1 and felt supported to role-play, as I had so much already to pull from.”

Sarah – “One session that really sticks in mind is session 73, which felt like a fairly momentous convergence of different storylines, especially in the rp afterwards, as we began to discover unexpected connections between our characters. Session 94, I am Krel, I really enjoyed for similar reasons, as well as having the opportunity for Orel to face some character-defining moments. I would also like to add the opportunities I’ve had to delve into Orel’s memories between sessions. They’re a great opportunity to flesh out Orel’s character, are always very compelling and completely above and beyond, since I had no expectation of anything like that happening when I first joined the game.”

Having been a member of Obsidian Portal for four years, what would you say are the most useful benefits for you as both a Campaign Designer and as a person running a campaign?

First and foremost, Obsidian Portal just makes things easier. I used to build my campaign websites from the ground up but the OP’s tools and interface allow me to spend more time focusing on the actual story and campaign. I don’t have to worry about hosting or updates to things in the backend and can just get stuck straight in. I also love the search function. With a campaign as complex as Night Fall, I struggle to remember everything. The search function can usually pinpoint even an obscure entry in a page quite quickly, which is truly a godsend. Yes I would like to see additional things – such as the ability to click on images in a carousel and expand them to full-screen – but as it stands, the Obsidian Portal is stable, reliable, customisable and perfect for my needs. I love it.

As a final question, we always ask for the GM’s “pearls of wisdom”. What GM insights can you offer the community this month?

Hah. You want my pearls? I think my dog ran off with them. OK. Let me see

One of the best things I picked up in the last few years from another online DM was the idea of having a role-playing channel in Discord. I have a Discord server specifically for friends and players and whenever the players want to continue their rp outside of the session, we create a separate thread in the rp-channel to do so. This means the sessions tend to flow better and the players get to explore all sorts of aspects of their characters and NPC interactions during the week, at their own pace. Some weeks we have had half a dozen threads on the go, with more than 200 posts in each of them and it has really transformed the campaign. For a story-driven rp-heavy campaign, I cannot recommend this enough!

Finally, listen to your players. Check in on them regularly and ask them how the campaign is going. Leave any ego at the door. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been DMing, there are always new and better ways of doing things, if you remain open to them. Be willing to change plans, shift gears and direction for the campaign. Remain flexible, open to feedback and take time to relax. Role-playing games are meant to be fun for everyone involved. So make sure you find a little personal nugget of joy in every NPC, every plot twist, piece of world history and reveal, big or small.

Love to the OP community… x

Alison Daines, Feistykitten, Kittenchops, Husky Mom and DM.

Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure June 2nd, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!