Blog Archives
Matt James on Campaign Creation
Creating a campaign can be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding events an avid gamer and storyteller can experience. At its core, you are performing the art of creation- taking something from nothing and breathing life into its delicate core. What you create will be harvested and digested by the players and readers that comb through your hard work and spark the neuropathways of their brains. How freaking cool is that?! I’m not trying to be poetic, just provide some perspective so the next time you run your own home campaign, you can see how your creativity may be affecting others.
I am convinced that humans naturally crave inspiration in life. We are creatures that are motivated in ways that no other animal can claim. The mere sound of a song can spring us to action while the most endearing words can bring us to tears. It is for these reasons that I believe roleplaying (and roleplaying games) are vital to a healthy and balanced lifestyle. Sound a bit cheesy? Well, it is. But you would have stopped reading long ago if you could not relate in some small fashion. People love to be inspired and your players are no different.
When creating your campaign, you want to first lay the groundwork that will spring your story into vibrant life. Take into account the type of players you will have and adjust to their needs accordingly. Robin Laws, one of the greatest game designers in this writer’s humble opinion, states in one of the gaming industries greatest books Robin’s laws of Good Game Mastering that “what really makes the difference in the success or failure of a roleplaying session is you.” The same applies to the entirety of a campaign. It is up to you to design and write an efficient and effective story that will compel them to stick around for more.
This takes time. Very few people are gifted enough to sit down with little to no experience and generate extremely compelling stories that will make others yearn for more. Even the greatest of them all claim that it is a skill gained, not gifted. So while it may appear an impossible task, if you are willing and able to put in the time and effort- you too can be a great storyteller and campaign engineer.
When I create custom storylines and campaigns, I try to keep a few simple and easy to remember tips in the back of my mind. They are by no means all-inclusive- but you may find them to be of use in your own designs.
1. Aim small, miss small: Don’t try to build too much too soon. Start small and build up each subset until you have enough to work with. In example, I would start by creating a small hamlet or village; perhaps a building or structure that houses a specific type of person such as a royal guard keep, or a healer’s temple. I would focus a good amount of resources in developing these areas before moving on to the next building (and so on and so forth). Before you know it, you’ll have a short story that details only this small village- one that will easily draw in your players.
2. Grey on the Horizon: Every good story needs some form of conflict. It does not necessarily have to involve bloodshed or combat (though that is often the most fun), but it needs to provoke your players into action. Here is where you start to create the external areas of your small village. You can now, in example, start to add a creepy forest or even a troll-infested swamp. Whatever you choose, you start to slowly paint the canvas of your overall world and in turn your campaign.
3. Keep it simple: Writing a complex story arch is difficult. I still struggle with this and I like to think I am somewhat experienced in both writing and game design. If you keep it simple, your players will easily grasp the ideas you are trying to present and will find it more enjoyable.
4. Take the ‘simple’ and build upon it: Complexity will come in time and you will be able to integrate more and more as your players experience your world. One day you will look back and realize you have created a deep and immersive setting. In most cases your players will write the story themselves with their exploits in your game. Keep them apart of it and your campaign will grow.
Above all, remember to have fun. If you are having difficulty in creating the fluff of your campaign, take a small break. Remember the goal is not to become a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. You do it for enjoyment and you do it to feed that primal desire for inspiration. There is so much more I could write on this topic, but I hope you have found your own inspiration in here somewhere. I would love to hear about your experiences and welcome you to share them with me on Loremaster.org. I highly encourage you link your Obsidian Portal campaign so that I can take a look- I love seeing what people come up with.
-Matt James
Freelance Writer & Game Designer
Loremaster.org
Downloadable Campaign backups – part 2
In Part 1, I discussed some of the possible formats and asked for feedback. The response was very positive, and it was clear that many, many people were excited about getting backups of their campaign.
Version 0.1
Taking the custom XML schema route (based very loosely on Atom), I worked on this over the weekend and made quite a bit of progress. I’m happy to say that we’ve launched version 0.1 of the backups. Why 0.1? Well, I’m not ready to say that it’s fully complete, yet. It contains all your wiki pages, adventure log posts, campaign forum posts, and characters. However, I’d like to get some feedback on the XML schema, and also let me know if there’s anything else that is missing and should be included. Remember: At least for now we’re not going to mess with uploaded images or maps. Maybe in the future.
How to do it
To get your backup, click on the Edit Settings link on the campaign sidebar. From there, scroll down near the bottom of the form and you’ll see a place to download your backup. Click the button and save the xml file.
HTML? PDF? I’d pay for that!
A lot of people wanted an HTML or PDF version, and that’s too much to ask at this stage. However! With the source as XML, it’s fairly straightforward to convert or translate to HTML, and I assume it’s not that bad to go to PDF (I’ve never done XML -> PDF, so I could be wrong there). If there’s anyone in the community who wants to step up and create an XSLT (or the equivalent for translating to PDF), we’d love to have it. I’ll offer a free 1 year Ascendant membership, a t-shirt, and our eternal gratitude to the first person to do it. However, hold off for now, until I can say for sure that the schema is locked down.
Update: The prize has been claimed by Kyle. He has created a kickass design for displaying the backups, and we’re working on figuring out how to integrate it into the download package.
Feedback welcome
Give the backups a look, and tell me what you think.
Free System Friday: Guilddom Adventures Made Easy
It’s Free System Friday! Tired of your current tabletop RPG system? Try a new one for free! Today’s offering is Guilddom Adventures Made Easy (GAME).
Welcome to Guilddom Adventures Made Easy (GAME), a simple yet delightful “paper and pencil” fantasy role-playing game.
GAME is unique among role-playing games (I think) because its rules and setting are specifically designed for a narrator and a single player.
Because of its simple rules, GAME is well suited for a player’s first exposure to “pencil and paper” role-playing games. However, an experienced leader is needed since these instructions cannot provide a proper introduction to running a game.
The rules are free, so grab a friend and give it a try!
New System Thursday: Dr. Who Adventures in Time and Space
Grab those sonic screwdrivers timelords, because this week we’re adding a new system that’s quickly becoming a fan favorite. Introducing Dr. Who: Adventures in Time and Space!
Imagine you could go anywhere. This world or countless others, encountering strange alien races, new cultures or hostile environments. Now imagine you could travel to any time. See the pyramids and the Sphinx (back when she had a nose!), discover who (or what) really built Stonehenge, meet the first Emperor of Japan, or travel into the far future as humanity spreads to the stars. Where would you go?
Where will you go indeed? Well? What are you waiting for? Those Daleks aren’t going to exterminate themselves. Grab some friends, grab the rules, get in your call box, and make a Dr. Who: Adventures in Time and Space campaign now!
Downloadable campaign backups
An often requested feature is for the ability to download all your campaign data locally, in the unlikely event that Obsidian Portal implodes or the staff is replaced by evil dopplegangers who want to restrict your access to your own content. We’ve finally bumped this feature up to our short-term goals list, and I’d like some input on what people want.
What you’ll get
First off, let me clarify what I mean by a “backup.” I’m speaking primarily of the text content: wiki pages, adventure log posts, forum posts, and characters. We’re going for a “good enough” solution here, so we’re not going to include uploaded images. Finally, there’s no guarantee that hyperlinks will be preserved, either.
Backup, not import/export
Another point worth mentioning is that this is not intended to be an import/export feature. It’s only 1-way. We don’t intend to support importing a backup file, since that’s a big technical issue, and we don’t think it’s necessary.
Formats
We want to make this a useful feature that allows you to take your work elsewhere if you choose, but we’re not familiar with any particular formats or standards. I’ll toss out a few ideas, but I’d like to hear suggestions from the community.
Atom
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of the Atom protocol. We use it to syndicate our campaign data to Pen & Paper Games, and that’s been a huge success.
Considering that the Adventure Logs would fit an Atom feed, it’s got something in its favor. However, things like wiki pages and characters don’t fit nearly as well. I could cram them in without too much trouble, but it’s definitely not a perfect fit. Plus, there is no good way to split the GM-only content from the public data. The worst fit would probably be for the campaign forum, where it would be very difficult to manage the parent-child relationship between forum posts and topics. I don’t think Atom has any support for that kind of thing.
Custom XML
If we can’t shoehorn everything into an Atom document, then we just give up and make up our own custom XML schema. This is kind of the default answer to most things, and while it works, it’s not great. It just means that if anyone ever wants to import the data, they’ll need to write a custom parser.
CSV
I’m just kind of throwing this out there as a straw-man argument. CSV would be a horrible export format for this kind of data, but maybe someone disagrees?
Zip of HTML files
All the formats so far have centered around cramming everything into a single file. It’s also possible that we could generate HTML files for each different page, then provide a zip containing everything. The upside here is that you would be able to open the pages in a browser without needing any kind of import tool. The downside is that HTML has very little semantic knowledge in the markup, meaning that anyone who wanted to write an import tool for the data would have a difficult job. It’s much easier to consume semantic XML than HTML.
Plus, this approach would be considerably more difficult, technically. We would have to generate the files on the server side, zip them up, then pass them off to the browser to download. I’ve never done that before, and while it intrigues me, I’d rather be working on other stuff. I’m sure most of you would also prefer me to work on other features.
Others?
If anyone knows a good standard for this kind of thing, please toss it out there. I’m always interested in learning new standards.
No promises!
As always, there are no promises here. We may decide that it’s too difficult or not valuable enough, and put the idea back on the Someday pile. But, if we can come up with a solution that is the right mix of useful and quick, then we’d love to do it.
X6 Core – Free System Friday
It’s Free System Friday! Tired of your current tabletop RPG system? Try a new one for free! Today’s offering is the X6 Core Rules system.
x6 is a universal system for pen-and-paper roleplaying games. This core edition presents the basic game
mechanics comprising the x6 system, along with a basic selection of character abilities and equipment that
would suit a contemporary game setting. With some work, the information presented here can be adapted to suit a science fiction, fantasy, horror or almost any other roleplaying genre.
Grab the rules here, and enjoy!
