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Donner und Sturm
From what we can gather, Donner und Sturm sounds like a hybrid between Cannonball Run, Ben Hur, and the Lord of the Rings. Each entry of the Adventure Log reads like a travel log broken down by daily activities. The Characters tab reveals a world full of interesting people from all over the continent of Aventuria, one of the primary locations for the Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) table-top RPG system.
The Wiki pages are full of trivia and interesting tidbits about Aventuria, the system of Das Schwarze Auge, and the characters inhabiting this world. Donner und Sturm also has a map of the ‘racetrack’ a 2000 kilometer run through the fantastic wilds of Aventuria. And then there’s the youtube videos! All this campaign is missing is the custom action figures. We had the opportunity to interview Meister about his campaign, and he had some very interesting things to share about it. Lets read on.
Interview with DM Meister
Obsidian Portal: How much of the campaign/system is original content developed by you and your players?
Meister: The “Adventure Log”, the movies (youtube) and some of the Wiki-pages are original created by me and my group. The texts about the cities (Baburin, Fasar) are mostly from www.wiki-aventurica.de, the official DSA-Wiki. I only added some parts and pictures from the internet. The tables, including the system of rules, are from the official “rule-book”, but also amplified by my own ideas.
Obsidian Portal: Your campaign has many youtube videos, can you tell us about those?
Meister: The movies are spoken by myself. They including information about the Quest. The pictures are from the internet, showing mostly the campaign-cover.
Obsidian Portal: Where do you get your inspiration the story?
Meister: There are storybooks in troops, but the most ideas came from movies and series like Lord of the Rings, Merlin, Legend of the Seeker and other fantasy stories. I also often read fantasy books and afterwards I have a new idea for a good quest.
But you get the most ideas while you’re playing the game. And this is why I love to play role-playing-games: As a GM you always have to improvise!
Obsidian Portal: How well do you know your players?
Meister: The players of my two role-playing-groups are my best friends. I know most of them since I began playing this game, more than 15 years ago.
Obsidian Portal: What kinds challenges are you faced with in your campaign?
Meister: The mainquest is a horserace by chariot over 2000 kilometre. Its a big part of the quest to fight against the other chariotdrivers or find some friends by the members. There are some unholy, demonish opponents, who are using there might to manipulate the race – of course, the characters have to stop them. In the end there is a great finish, because the characters (winner of the race) have to resurrect an old hero to fight against one of the most powerful demons in this world.
Obsidian Portal: What aspects of your campaign are you really proud of?
Meister: I think I can be proud of my whole campaign, but especially of the “Wiki”, because I’ve spend much time to create a well-arranged overview about the game.
We’d like to thank Meister and his players for bringing Das Schwarze Auge to our attention through their campaign, and for putting so much effort into their campaign here on Obsidian Portal, a truly international community of gamers. It’s good to know that when the chips are down and someone needs to race an angry demon to save the world, we’ll always have a handful of people ready for the job.
Stats & Art Contest Jan. 2010: The Giraffelich! 1/29/2010 – 2/12/2010
UPDATE: Results are here!
This contest will run till the 12th of February. As some of you know, the Facebook fanpage struck RPG gold by coming up with the concept of the Giraffelich. We’re so in love with this undead even-toed ungulate mammal, that we’re running a Giraffelich Stats & Art contest!
If you can come up with stats for a Giraffelich (including appropriate background fluff, and encounter group info as appropriate) for Rifts, 4.0e, Savage Worlds, Exalted, or Pathfinder; then you’ll have a chance to win a $25 US gift certificate to Amazon.com! We’ll pick the best three entries, and they’ll be our winners. There’s no limit to the number of entries, and you can win for more than one setting!
If you are artistically inclined, and you can come up with some bangin’ art of the Giraffelich, then you too can win a $25 dollar gift certificate to Amazon.com. Remember, the giraffelich is a cunning lich as well as a giraffe. Just making an undead giraffe isn’t going to cut it. Liches have rings and phylacteries and evil robes and what not. Capes. Again, we’ll pick the best three entries, and they’ll each win. There’s no limit to the number of entries, and you can win for more than one drawing!
Email submissions to dan(at)obsidianportal(dot)com.
Free System Friday, 1/29/2010
It’s Free System Friday! Are you tired of your current table-top RPG system? Try a new one for free! Today’s system is Wayfarer’s Song (2nd Ed.) from Mythopoetic Games.
Wayfarer’s Song (2nd ed.)
Set in a world of snowy, pinnacled mountains, dark forests thick with mists and tangled thorns, grassy hills as green and silken as the seas: Mithgerd is a world in a mythic age, an age of god-like men and monsters. It is a world rich with magic, in which sorcery is not a tool of man, but a dangerous and corrupting power, age-old, natural and eternal. It is the world that existed before the gods who made the gods walked upon this green earth, a world in which the dim memories we have of gods and monsters have more than a little truth to them, and the heroic may bravely do what they may dare, and perhaps become legends themselves.
Grab the Core Rules and start playing today!
New System Thursday, 1/28/2010
It’s that time of the week again, Adventurers! It’s Thursday and that means that we’re adding a new system to our list of over 100 supported table-top RPG game systems and settings. This week, it’s another twofer, as we’re adding Warhammer Fantasy 3E and Palladium Fantasy to the list!
Warhammer Fantasy 3E
From Fantasy Flight Games comes the third edition of an RPG classic.
A new age is beginning. The winds of magic blow strongly, and the Old World’s two moons shine brightly in the night sky. Storms appear out of nowhere, and the land is rife with conflict. From the north descend savage groups of chaos marauders, men dedicated to the four Ruinous Powers of Chaos. They are seen side by side with degenerate beastmen and profane daemons. Their raids are striking further and further south, yet they are only the scouting forces.Within, the lands of the Empire are besieged by Orcs and members of hidden cults. The Orcs delight in battle, and are laying waste to all they can find. The enemy within is rising up and striking vicious blows that mankind is unprepared to face. War is coming on all sides.
What side of the battle will you be on? What dark truths will you unwittingly bring to the peace-starved people of this wartorn world? Make a Warhammer Fantasy 3E campaign now!
Palladium Fantasy
Speaking of classics, from Palladium Books comes the excitement of Palladium Fantasy!
The Palladium World is one of epic fantasy. A world torn in conflict with the non-human barbaric races, creatures of magic and supernatural forces.
Non-Human playing characters provide a host of unusual creatures as regular characters. They include the feared changeling who can assume the shape and appearance of any humanoid. The giant races of troll, ogre and wolfen. The small and agile goblin, kobold, gnome and the mighty dwarf, as well as elf, human, and dozens of “optional” creatures found in both the Palladium RPG and Monsters & Animals.
The skill system embellishes characters with knowledge and abilities that make him or her more than a simple fighter or mage.
Combat is realistic, with strikes, parries, dodges and considerations for shields and armour. Yet it remains extremely quick and playable.
An Experience System in which characters are rewarded for acts of ingenuity, ideas, cunning, discretion, trickery and bravery. Not hack and slash.
Magic: Over 300 spells, plus elemental magic, circles, symbols and runes are yours to command. The most original forms of magic found only in the Palladium RPG are the Diabolist and Summoner. The Diabolist casts no spells, instead he uses the nearly forgotten magic of wards (mystic symbols) and circles of power. The Summoner too, is versed in the mystic arts of magic circle making, but his is a far more dangerous and often malevolent power, for he dares to summon and command creatures of magic.
The wizard, warlock, priest and other more traditional characters also break away from their more common game molds, with a vast array of spells and abilities that make them truly unique.
Come see why they call it the Rifts of the Fantasy RPG genre. Make a Palladium Fantasy campaign now!
Long Day at the Salt Mines
In case anyone is curious about what it’s like to run a website, I submit today’s adventures as evidence…
I awoke this morning to an inbox full of 500 errors. Apparently, sometime during the night something went bonkers on the server and now people were seeing errors whenever they tried to view their profile.
Some quick digging showed that it was related to an SQL query that pieces together the recent updates for your friends. I managed to fix the query, but the underlying problem was…nobody had any friends! Either OP had gone through a massive hate-fest where everyone unfriended each other in a mass exodus, or something was wrong. I knew it was going to be a rough morning. I called Ryan, and luckily he was available to help. So, we both got to work.
We quickly narrowed it down to two possibilities: a bug, or an intruder. The worst case scenario was that we had an intruder on the server who thought it was funny to unfriend everyone. This isn’t standard operating procedure for hackers, but who knows what goes through the minds of those jerkos. But, we take security seriously and decided we needed to be absolutely sure. So, while Ryan combed the code looking for a bug (the most likely scenario), I started looking through server access logs to see if our server had been compromised.
Surprisingly enough, someone had been trying to break in. More accurately, an automated brute force login script was running against one of our servers. We have a program to defend against this, but it had apparently crashed silently the day before. Someone had spent 24 hours trying to break in. I was 99% sure they didn’t succeed, but coupled with the data loss it was extra suspicious.
Luckily, while I was trying to gather more evidence, Ryan found the actual bug that caused the problem. We could breathe easy knowing no one had made it into the system. All our problems were due to my own incompetence. Still, while we were down in the guts, it made sense to tighten the security a little. Web security is a long scale with your grandma’s unprotected AOL account on one end, and your bank’s ultra-secure website at the other. We’re proud to place ourselves much closer to the bank than grandma. We use SSL to encrypt your login credentials, and we also use salted hashing to disguise your password in our database. So, even if someone did manage to break in and steal our database, they would never be able to get your password. (Note: This is why we can never send you your password: We don’t actually know it!) Plus, we try to keep our server very secure so a break-in is practically impossible.
We updated some of our security procedures and put in place some practices we’d been meaning to do for a while. The end result is that we spent about 6 hours each making tweaks and adjustments and you, the user, will probably never see any difference. That thought always depresses me a little, but I’d rather it be like this than have to send out a massive email explaining that we were sloppy and someone stole or deleted all your data.
Finally, as I’m writing all this (11:30 PM, Eastern), Ryan is restoring all the deleted friend data. We keep offsite backups of all your data, just for cases like this. Being prepared for a worst case scenario is part of our strategy.
Not exactly an average day: Responding to lots of “It’s broken!” emails (which are very helpful, by the way, so keep sending them), sifting through server logs looking for the boogey man, fixing bugs, tightening security, and finally restoring data. I’ll probably get to bed around 12:45 tonight after verifying that everything is running smoothly. Things are usually quieter, but we’ve had days that were crazier.
I hope you enjoyed this glance behind the curtain. We love working on OP, and that’s why we’re here banging away on it late into the night. I just hope everyone out there loves using it as much as we love working on it.
