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Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month March 2023: Ulea

Welcome to Ulea, a high level DnD 5 campaign where the stakes are high and the enemies are strong! Hordes of undead- check. Powerful covens- got them. Runic symbols and mysticism- in spades. Necromancers- of course! Black dragon- definitely! Ulea is non-stop, advanced characters, non-stop action for 2 groups to battle, and battle they definitely do! GM nicholas_charles_ allen has set challenge after challenge up before his players- and we sat him down to learn more about what makes him- and this awesome campaign- tick.

Tell us about the person behind the GM screen. Where are you from? Where can we stalk you on the internet? What do you do aside from gaming?

I’m originally from New York, but have lived all over – spent a lot of time in New Orleans and now live in Virginia. I don’t maintain much of an online presence – this campaign page is probably where I post most outside of school. Outside of gaming, I’ve got a wife, three kids, and two dogs, spend a lot of time on work and school. I like to run, lift weights, and cook. Outside of TTRPGs, my wife and I do play a lot of boardgames.

You run D&D 5E- What do you like about it? Are there any things you dislike about it?

Truthfully I began running 5e because it seemed to have the lowest barrier to getting people to pick up and start playing. Running these campaigns was a return to the hobby after a few years off for life-related stuff, and I didn’t want to spend too much time going over rules, and wanted players to pick up and play quickly as well. 5e has such a huge presence and so many resources and videos for players to watch that it was a great place to start.

After playing for a few years, it’s probably not the best fit anymore. Encounter building (especially for high-level parties) has become kind of a pain, and I’ve found myself homebrewing lots and lots of stuff to keep things interesting for myself and the party. One campaign will transition to Pathfinder 2e next month, and we haven’t decided where the other will go – possible Free League’s Forbidden Lands. The campaigns will still be set in my homebrew world (heavily inspired / cribbed / ripped-off from all my favorite pieces of media).

How regularly do you play?

Right now we play once a week – I have one campaign that meets every other Sunday and the other one that meets alternate Sundays.

How did your group meet, and how long have you been together? You have a group of 11- how do you manage such a large group?

I actually run two separate campaigns – so not all players in one, although there is some overlap. One campaign has 7 players and the other has 6. Although their campaigns are not directly connected, the things that one party does in one has consequences in the game world (Ulea), and so can affect the other campaign – it’s been very fun!

We met in lots of different ways – a number of people are friends from college, people I met at work or in the military, and some are people that I met online through reddit when I first moved to the area a decade ago when I was first trying to find people for a game. We’ve all become very close. Through all through all the years we’ve all ended up moving a part, so the groups are spread out all over the country and we play almost entirely through roll20.

If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal helps you with the most? Do your players get involved on the wiki too?

Keeping the adventure log is huge for me to keep everything straight in my head across all the campaigns; it also helps me to emphasis plot points or clues that players may have glossed over during the session so that we can stay on track, and leaves a great story to read through when the campaign wraps up. The players also use it all the time to look up places and NPCs.

The players don’t help with the wiki – but I think that’s something I should probably start doing! I do have my players write journals after each session from their character’s prospective. If they do, they get re-rolls to use in the next session. It helps me to understand what plot points they are following, what ones they don’t care about, what things are important to their character, and to find new hooks and motivators for the characters.

Where do you draw inspiration from when preparing your game?

The largest is the books I’m reading (I would say that the Malazan series has probably been the single biggest influence on the way I set up campaigns now, but also lots of other fantasy and Scifi helps to inspire me including the Black Company, A Land Fit for Heroes, the Fifth Season, Between Two Fires, The Forever War, HP Lovecraft). I don’t get much time to play video games anymore, but I have always pulled inspiration from there – especially when trying to put together unique combat encounters. I listen to a lot of metal; crust, sludge, death, black, etc… I pull a lot of inspiration from the imagery and just overall fucking radness of it.

Metal and TTRPGs have pretty much gone hand-in-hand for me for the last twenty-five years. I also crib quite a bit from pre-written campaigns and adventures – Paizo writes really great stuff, but there are so many wonderful third party publishers out there who can really put together something great. I like to take these as starting points and then adapt to my world, my players, and what I think is fun. I think that’s really the great part about this hobby – it all goes back to a bunch of friends sitting around a table sharing a borrowed players handbook, a shitty set of dice, and trying to re-imagine the Wheel of Time or Elric of Melnibone or the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – but different.

How much time do you usually take to prepare for a session?

Usually about 30 minutes or so – I tend to do a lot of work up front before the campaign starts; collecting maps, art, etc. Usually getting a skeleton that goes pretty far out so that I can just hang stuff on it. Every three or four months I will spend a few hours building things out and adjusting the skeleton based on what has been going on. I used to be a chronic over-preparer, but I found that most of what you do ends up living in you head and never making it to the table – and the PCs rarely do what you expect them to do anyway, right?

Aside from DnD I’m sure you have played other systems too, what are some others you enjoy?

Yes! I have played a lot – Call of Cthulhu has been a favorite of mine that I have been running for just as long, although almost all lots of one-shots (some day I will run Masks of Nyarlothotep, though..) I used to play and run a lot of Pathfinder 1e games, as well as the FFG Star Wars / Genesys system. In the last few years, I’ve been able to get in some one-shots of the Aliens RPG and Mork Borg as well. Someday I’d like to get a Blades in the Dark game going – or at least play in one.

What would you say has been the best moment your table has had thus far in your game?

Wow, there have been a lot… one that stands out was a stealth mission where the party had to go into the brothel, find a patron (a member of an occupying army) who had information that they needed, get that information and leave the guard alive, and unsuspecting. There was lots of planning and great roll playing and some absolutely improbably dice-rolling (natural 1s and natural 20s abound) that ended up with several people dead and a brothel in flames. Another was a party finally slaying an ancient black dragon that had harangued them for months – first driving the party off, then escaping to it’s lair after a rematch, and finally being slain in it’s lair with nearly the entire party being unconscious… it was a close one.

Okay, before we get out of here, give us some of your best GMing pearls of wisdom…

Read! Look at different systems, different adventures – you can always pull something cool into your game to challenge your players and to keep you from getting burnt out. It’s ok to write lots of stuff that the players might not find out about – or will only find out through exposition. Don’t worry about having to find a place to get all your ideas out on the table, just let the game go. If you think it’s fun to world-build, do it! Plus, if the players don’t use it, you have ready made encounters and adventures you can drop into your next campaign, or fill with stronger baddies to be used later in the one you’re in now. You have to have fun, too!

I think especially today as TTRPGs are kind of hitting a mainstream stride again (and with the surge of popularity of actual plays and twitch streams and the like) there is a lot of pressure on GMs to create epic, sprawling worlds with extremely tight storytelling and endless unique and engaging NPC so that players can kind of just show up and roll dice. Just relax and have fun – let players guide the story with what they are interested in and build from there. The fasted way to burn out is thinking you have to have everything 100 percent perfect and 100 percent prepared for every outcome.

That’s all for this month folks! Don’t forget to head on over the the OP forums to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!

Creator Spotlight | An Interview with Author Lou Anders

This week, we’re talking to Lou Anders of the acclaimed Thrones & Bones series!
Fans of all things Viking should be particularly excited, because Anders’ world is an ode to the rich history of the Norse legends and traditions, with some personal tweaks of his own that make for a truly fantastical setting. Based on the titular book series set in the lands of Norrøngard, Anders has brought his world into the world of tabletop gaming (currently compatible with D&D 5E, but read on for a sneak peek on what else to expect), allowing fans of the books an immersive experience of gameplay, and a whole new audience chances to tell their own stories in this richly-detailed world.

He has a whole line of materials that flesh out the world with playable classes, monsters, and adventures all stemming from Norrøngard.

He offers us insight into how he created this series, what it was like to bring that world to a different format, and what else we can look forward to from him in the future!

What initially drew you to the Norse mythos as an inspiration for your world, and what was it like to adapt your research into the world of Norrøngard?

When you say “initially” we have to go back to 2010, because the world was born first in the pages of my children’s novel before it was an RPG. In 2010, I was an editor in science fiction & fantasy publishing, running the Pyr books line, but noted anthologist Jonathan Strahan and I teamed up to co-edit a sword & sorcery anthology for Simon & Schuster called Swords & Dark Magic. It featured new and old authors of gritty fantasy writing S&S, including Michael Moorcock, Glen Cook, Steven Erikson, Garth Nix, C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, others. During all this, I got inspired and tried to write my own short story (not for the anthology) about a “female Conan” who was half human, half frost giant. The story was, frankly, terrible. Really bad. But the character wouldn’t leave me. She stuck around, and then one day I realized that what was interesting about her was not her as an adult, but her childhood, what it was like to grow up half human in a village of giants. And that became my novel Frostborn. But I’m not a fan of monocultures. I never wanted to write “Viking Planet,” so from the start it was important to me that Norrøngard was just one country on the edge of a vast continent. Before I even started plotting, I had worked out their history across thousands of years and who they had interacted with in that time. I think I had twenty or so countries, many with their own gods and naming conventions and detailed history, before I ever wrote a line of prose. But as I started working out Norrøngard specifically, I looked at both history and mythology to build their culture. A lot of it was building out a backstory for a country the same way you’d build a backstory for a character. Figuring out where they came from, what they’d been through to get where they were, and who they were today. Also, it’s not 1:1 Norse myth. The Norrønir have their own creation myth, a different if analogous set of gods, a slightly different afterlife, and are at least a century passed their raiding period and living under an era with a Norrøngeld with their nearest neighbors (a “tax not to raid” that the king collects, inspired by the Danegeld of our world.)

What was the process like to shift this world from a set story into a world that people can play in?

A lot of hard work! In Frostborn, we start in a human farm and a small giant village, visit only one city briefly, and spend most of the book in the wilderness. For Thrones & Bones: Norrøngard, I not only detailed the city of Bense but nine other Norrønian cities, with maps, details of their histories, key locations, their jarl, etc… Just the lore itself went through a major expansion, which doesn’t even begin to talk about creating the mechanics of ancestries and subclasses and rune magic and a bestiary, and all of that! It was a massive project that took over a year of full time work.

What was it like having multiple groups playtesting these supplements, and were there any surprising insights you can share about the playtesting process in general?

The best advice I can give about play testing is sign up way more groups than you need because half of them will never get to it and the other half will decide to veer off the rails and go in a direction that doesn’t help you much!

Your work clearly respects the Norse tradition and practices and having an actual Norse language consultant proves your dedication to authenticity. What was it like to work with an actual translator, and how much of their input helped to mold the world outside of just spelling suggestions?

Trond-Atle Farestveit is wonderful. He didn’t just translate things for me from English to ancient Norse. He’d work with me to get at the heart of what I was trying to do and help me pull from the culture to make sure it made sense in those terms.

-You’ve got a seriously robust bestiary, and aside from the Linnorms, my personal favorite is a tie between the Butter Cat and the Iron Dwarf. What was it like to playtest all of these creatures?

Playing with something you created yourself is a blast. Hearing from other folks playing and enjoying it is even more so. I’m really proud of a lot of those creatures and how their traits and actions keeps to the heart of how they are portrayed in myth and folklore.

Will fans of the books be able to see any familiar faces in these guides?

I deliberately kept the principal characters out of the game. The timeline in the RPG picks up one year after events in the books, and while I haven’t settled exactly where Thianna Frostborn goes after her journey to Thica, I know for a fact she’s not in Norrøngard right now. Neither is the dark elf Desstra. Karn *may* be back on his farm, or he may have gotten sidetracked heading home. But I didn’t want to “stat them out” and make them NPCs. So Stolki’s Mead Hall is in Bense, and Helltoppr is still in his barrow, but other than that, the RPG is populated with new characters. That being said, there are illustrations of them in the books – so you can technically see them.

Personally, I’m a sucker for any type of in-world games and activities that players can play as their characters. What was it like to make Thrones & Bones, Knattleikr, and Flyting as playable in the game?

Thrones & Bones came first. It dates back to when I was writing the first novel, Frostborn. The Norse played a game called hnefatafl before they discovered chess. In the novel, my female protagonist, Thianna, is a skilled knattleikr player. When I realized I needed a male co-protagonist, I wanted to give him something to be good at and it couldn’t be sports. So Karn Korlundsson because a hnefatafl player. I realized early on that I needed to know the rules—and there aren’t any. Not that we know. The Norse never wrote them down. There are quite a few reconstructions based on what we do know or can infer, and the various games in the tafl family can differ from each other a lot, right down to how many squares on the board and whether dice are involved. The more I looked into it, the more it made sense to create my own original game in the taft family. I built a board. Then I cherry picked rules from several of the best hnefatafl reconstructions, mixed in some of my own rules, and then play tested. I was fortunate in that my two oldest nephews were both chess champions in our state at the time, so I took them to Starbucks and set the game down between them, and they played each other for hours. I actually had to pry it out of their hands! That’s when I knew I had something. When it came to translating the novel into the game, including the game-within-a-game was a no brainer. Knattleikr came next. The rules for the sport are the only bit of text in the core book I didn’t write entirely by myself. I’d written rules, but then I hired designer Brian Suskind to write an adventure for the companion book, Sagas of Norrøngard. Brian didn’t like my rules and rewrote them. He fixed some things, but then he had me thinking about it, so I took what he did and made some changes, and we passed it back and forth until we had something we both liked. Flyting was a late addition, but I realized I needed all three of these Norse pastimes in the setting guide. And then it ended up coming into play in the second starter adventure.

You offer a lot of unique ancestries and class options for players in the Player’s Guide, what guided you through that process of progression, and do you have a personal favorite character build to make?

With all the designs, I wanted to go to the actual Scandinavian myth and folklore, especially with monsters and subclasses. My favorite build, and one that’s proving popular with players, is the huldra völva. Originally, the huldra were just monsters. But they are the “hidden folk,” and they interact so often with humans, I realized there were probably a lot of huldra living among the Norrønir in secret, and if they are there, then you should be able to play as one! The völva was tricky. But mostly because I put myself into a corner and then had to see my way out. My neighboring country of Araland is a faux-Celtic setting, so in my mind Araland is where you get druids. I was thinking of the völva as another spellcasting class—the name translates as “carrier of the magic staff” so I was trying to make them wizards—and it was just so much trying to force them into a box they didn’t want to go in. Finally, I took a step back and looked at what the völva actually were – wandering seeresses who could shapeshift, see the future, and control the weather, and I went, “Doh! That’s a druid.”

To take a quote from the introduction to your setting guide, “A map is nothing without a viewer.” 
What has your experience been like working with artists to bring the world of Qualth to life with visuals with world and battle maps?

Working with artists is tremendous. I was an art director in SF&F publishing for 10 years, so I come to game design with experience working alongside illustrators and a deep appreciate for their talent. I’ve always been a visual thinker, so when I was writing novels, I was commissioning artwork and maps as I wrote—not for publication (the art in the book falls under the purview of the publisher’s art director), but just to help me visualize the world as its being created. From the start, I commissioned a lot of art from Andrew Bosley and maps from Rob Lazzaretti, while Justin Gerard did a lot of work for the novels that he kindly let me reuse for the game. When it came time for battle maps, there was no question it would be Heroic Maps. They are hands down my favorite cartographers in that space. I’m fortunate to have several great artists for the game I’ve worked with more than once—folks like Ksenia Kozhevnikova, William O’Brien, Craig J. Spearing, and Bryan Syme. One of the fun things too has been to work with William on “aging up” my three protagonists Thianna, Karn, and Desstra (she joins in book two). They are around 13 years old in the novels, but the game isn’t targeted at the same age group as the books, so I wanted to include “what they look like now” illustrations of older versions of my heroes. Then Effincool Minis actually made a 3D printable sculpt of the older Thianna, which thrills me beyond words.

One of my favorite items you’ve made is the Brúsi Shield (found in Sagas of Norrongard), a special shield that can summon a spectral goat’s head to make ramming attacks a few times per day. What has it been like to make unique weapons and artifacts, and what was your process to playtest them?

So, the Brúsi Shield is a bit of an in-joke. “Brúsi” is the Old Norse word for “he-goat,” and the earliest version of the tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” we have comes from Scandinavia, De tre bukkene Bruse. It’s a small spoiler to say so, but the shield is found in the adventure “From Svartálfaheim, with Love,” right before you encounter a troll on a bridge… As to playtesting, that’s the best part isn’t it?

Your game materials cover far more of the world than Karn and Thianna are able to visit and see, was there any area in particular you were personally excited about getting to explore in more depth?

All of it. I really worked hard to make each of the new cities we explore its own unique place. So Herkeby is laid out like a giant Trelleborg (ring fortress), Sindholm sits above an enormous cavern in which longships dock, Umsborg is bisected by a lava flow, and so on. With the recent Kickstarter, Vengeance of the Valravn, which takes place in Sindholm, we have adventures that take you everywhere but Oslendhom and Umsborg (though the lore from these two locations is, of course, in the core book). There are still places I want to explore one day though!

What work might fans look forward to in the future from you?

There is so much in the pipeline, and the recent OGL kerfluffle has only upped the number of projects. With the usual caveats about the “best laid plans,” here’s a run-down. Vengeance of the Valravn is in copyedits now. I hope to have it out in March. Then I’ll immediately Kickstart the already-written Tales from Stolki’s Hall. After being out of the editor’s chair for seven years, I’ve put that hat back on and reached out to some of the best fiction writers I used to work with. Stolki’s Hall is an anthology of adult fantasy stories, written not by me, but by ten other authors, set in the land of Norrøngard. It’s fantastic, and I can’t wait for people to read it. I’ve also just signed contracts for two conversions of the campaign guide, Thrones & Bones: Norrøngard, to two other systems. I’ll probably turn to Kickstarter again for those, not for the budget (it’s a done deal with budget already set aside), but for the visibility. Beyond that I’ve got an idea for something “mythos related” in the world of Qualth that I want to do. I’ve already outlined and started commissioning and receiving art for the next Big Project, which is the first adventure set outside of Norrøngard. It starts off in Nelenia, a country that is in the middle of the continent of Katernia, about a thousand miles from Norrøngard, and modeled loosely on Switzerland.  I’m really excited about this adventure, which I hope to announce by year’s end, but given the aforementioned list of projects, it might slide into 2024. When it does debut, it will most likely be multisystem, so they’ll be 5e, Pathfinder 2, and other versions. I think it only makes sense going forward not to put all the eggs in one basket, which means my tiny indie, Lazy Wolf Studios, is set to grow whether it wants to or not!

Lou Anders is the author of the novel Once Upon a Unicorn, as well as the Thrones & Bones trilogy of fantasy adventure novels (Frostborn, Nightborn, and Skyborn), and the novel Star Wars: Pirate’s Price. He has also done role playing game design for Kobold Press, River Horse, and 3D Printed Tabletop. In 2016, he was named a Thurber House Writer-in-Residence and spent a month in Columbus, Ohio teaching, writing, and living in a haunted house. When not writing, he enjoys playing role playing games, 3D printing, and watching movies. He lives with his wife, children, and two golden doodles in Birmingham, Alabama. You can visit Anders online at louanders.com, on Facebook, Instagram, and on Twitter at @Louanders.

Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month February 2023: The Domain of Dread Council Meeting.

It may have been some time since you have heard the name “Ravenloft”, but in this DREADFULLY exciting campaign, you will hear it again. GameMaster ElMuggs has concocted a scenario where some of D&D’s BADDEST ever BADDIES have got together to remind people the true meaning of FEAR once again, in The Domain of Dread Council Meeting.

First off, feel free to tell us about the person behind the GM screen. Where are you from? What brought you into the world of TTRPGS? Where can we interact with you on the internet?

Well I grew up in rural Australia and was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons when my stepmother caught me playing Castle Adventure on my Dad’s computer and asked ‘Are you playing Dungeons and Dragons? You know some people played that on acid and KILLED someone?”

Being a seven year old girl this very much left a impression on me as obviously Dungeons and Dragons had to be the coolest, most extreme game EVER! But being that there was nobody to play with I had to rely on the videogames until in 2017 I stumbled upon three people sitting at the back of the room at the game store that had opened up in my home town.

They were the Redbook Roleplayers and did a total OMG You’re Playing Dungeons and Dragons can I play tooo OMG !

Yeah I’m that cool. I don’t use much social media but you can find me on the Obsidan Discord or Twitter (while it lasts!) as @ElMuggs

You have described “The Domains of Dread Council Meeting” as “a comedic misadventure through the mists of Ravenloft”. In a “nutshell” please explain to the Obsidian Portal Community what your campaign is all about.

Well that’s basically it, but to see why this campaign is a bit different let me ask the characters what they think it’s about?

Strahd (Vampire Ruler of Barovia): It is my duty as the first and greatest Dread Lord to show these lesser nursery rhymes villain what it means to be terror incarnate! Honestly these modern day dark lords, they can barely manage to lure backpackers into the woods, or leave a blood soaked message on the wall! Back in my day you had to do better than a jump scare or two! Here now Vecna, let me tell you how we used to do it in the old country! I’d climb into a coffin and lie in wait for hours on end, even weeks, just waiting for the right time to jump out and go BLEAGH!!!!

Daniel (Unkillable Tiefling): I don’t know? The Awesomeness of Awesome? I’ve been though the dark and the light and the light and the dark and it’s all the same. Apart from my Super-Awesome Domain but theres nobody in it, just me and the Hamstercows – but that was the Mistake. Maybe Llamacows? Then I found the perfect people to bring along but SOMEBODY ended them. Terrible Train accident! I’m all shiny though – got a shiny butt!… Problem with Tieflings though is that they can’t wear hats.. uh.. What was I talking about?

Vecna (OG Litch and God of Secrets): It’s my unjust punishment for getting involved with the other Lords of Dread.

Tasha (Witch and Best selling Author): Pft, always so dramatic! In truth Poor Vecna hasn’t had much to do for years, and Strahd.. well he’s so just so PRIMITIVE. He really needs to move with the times as the scary vampire in his castle pining over a poor women he’s obsessed with is just so cliche!

So then I thought why not invite one of these new Dreadlords to our secret little Council? The invisible one had the wonderful idea to ride out and spread some fear. But then Daniel showed up, Strahd got us lost and things have been going downhill ever since!

You seem to have started out the campaign with players taking on the main PC’s at HIGH LEVELS. Did this present any issues in building up the characters of the players?

The Campaign started by accident after a bit of silly in-character conversation between our ForeverDM talking about his love of Curse of Strahd. Soon he was roleplaying Strahd talking about how he was the greatest big bad in DND and it was hillarious. I immediatly wondered how Vecna would react to this? It didn’t take much to convince the others to jump in with their own characters.. and session 0 quickly ended up with the characters riding out on their first adventure.

The big challenge was getting a grip on the lore as playing with Strahd, Tasha and Vecna required doing a deep dive into the history going all the way back to 2nd Edition. Vecna had been a Dreadlord back in 2nd edition but escaped and outside of Critical Roll he hadn’t really been seen in 5th edition. Likewise Tasha also had a lot of gaps in her history as Wild Beyond the Witchlight hadn’t been released yet.

Then there’s Daniel who was a PC from our first campaign together. While we loved him there was the small problem that he died and being brought back to life via Wish had left him immune to the Dead condition! If that’s not wild enough for you there’s also the Invisible Person. Their unique power is that they are so invisible not even I know where they are at all times. This is because the player works, and so doesn’t make it to many games, so when they arrive I ask them where their character was and we fill in the gaps from there.

All of this works because I tend to avoid worrying about balance and CR ratings and instead look for what makes the most interesting challenge for the players? A lot of the game is about leaning into the personality of the characters.

What version of Dungeons and Dragons have you used for the campaign and what inspired this decision?

Our group has always used 5th edition+ UA Playtest material and a good chunk of Homebrew. In terms of story it takes place sometime after the events of Wild Beyond the Witchlight.

I like 5th edition because it gives you plenty of space to shape the rules around the story you want to tell. While DND is simpler then 3.5 etc. it’s also really flexible both for players and DMs. As a new DM the biggest issue I find is that if there’s a ‘Rules as Written’ sometimes you can end up feeling trapped because it doesn’t make sense for the situation or story you’re trying to tell.

The other reason is that it’s very easy to slip in rules from other games and editions. One of the Domains turned the characters into teenagers and had they stayed there I was planning to bring in some of the rules from Tales from the Loop to go with the 80s suburbia vibes.

Likewise the ‘Levelling for Dreadlords’ rules call back to 2nd edition as my first experiances playing Baldur’s Gate II. In earlier editions Vampires where much scarier as they could drain your XP and suddenly you’d lose all those levels you’d worked hard to gain! There’s also some older edition spells that were missing in 5th edition that also make a comeback in this campaign.

You obviously have a great love of the Ravensloft campaign. How long ago did you first play in or GM that campaign, and are any of your current players returning from that time? Have there been any issues in updating the concepts to suit your current campaign?

So first up I need to give props to James Haeck’s Strahd Must Die Tonight – in Space! https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/895-strahd-must-die-in-space which inspired the idea of bringing in new genre’s to provide a new take on old DND adventures. Having now had to deal with Ravenloft Castle I have a lot of respect for Will who DMed this for us as a Halloween One Shot back in 2020.
It was the first time most of us had played in Ravenloft and set up the events that lead to Castle Ravenloft no longer being part of Barovia.

One reason I’m excited about people learning about this campaign is that the Setting Information is what I like to call the “Ravenloft Remix” as I really wanted to set up each Domain to really feel different from one another. So it was a chance to really bring in things that my players wouldn’t expect and each domain has it’s own little world. Because it’s the players that provide the comedy there’s really nothing to stop someone else using the material as part of a more ‘straightforward’ adventure.

Our group has a long history of working from older editions. The actual world that this campaign fits into is a big Planescape adventure that’s been run by multiple people over probably 10 years or more? We’ve done all sorts of crazy things from Tomb of Horrors to escape Dark Sun and Spelljammer (before it was 5e).

To date the biggest challenge for me as DM has been going back to Ravenloft Castle. I wanted to make sure I was keeping it in line with what the players knew and remembered of the campaign while avoiding any major spoilers for Curse of Strahd. I decided to use the map from the original 2nd edition adventure and age-up the Castle so that just enough things had changed while Strahd was away that even he didn’t know what to expect.

The timing was also perfect to bring back two of the heroes of the original adventure! Poor Strahd came home to find that his Castle now belonged to a young, handsome elven vampire who looked like he’d just stepped out of an Anne Rice Novel. Meanwhile the top half of the Castle is a fallen Solar who’s hell-bent on ensuring the Castle is destroyed!

There are some very innovative design modifications in your campaign, including a custom built navigation board. Who is responsible for your overall campaign design? Can you share any useful “design tips” with other OP members?

That would be me! At high school I wanted to be a web designer so I learned a lot of HTML and CSS. The nav bar is a recent addition and at some point I’ll probably find myself getting curious about what kind of Javascript functions are possible.. but not today!

Looking at past COTM was really inspiring early on to see what was actually possible but the hardest bit was deciding what to do. Odd as it sounds I wanted to try and replicate the feel of a mouldy old book the players might stumble across in Strahd’s attic. So a lot of work went into using code to capture that sense that it should smell of old books.

In terms of tips, One thing I learned studying CSS and web design is to be careful with images. You need them big enough to not be blurry, but too large and the file size will cause your site to become unusable. This site uses a lot of repeating elements because once you load an image it’s usually cache’d so you can use it over-and over again without any problems.

The other big trick is the Google Web Fonts – I have a love/hate relationship with them as when they work they’re amazing, but they can also be a pain because you often need to adjust the text size to make them readable. The Adventure Log uses a lot of them – but the actual posts just use a normal font. This is because it’s not easy to read a full page of text in script, so most of the time it’s usually just used for headers and special effects.

Finally learning to find your way around the Inspect Elements tools can make it a lot eaiser as you can test things without actually changing the site itself. There’s also nothing to stop you making up your own tags like this:

Lets me mimic those ‘comment’ boxes from Tasha’s Cauldon of Everything:

How important are the Adventure Logs to your campaign? Who creates them? How involved are your players in the process?

The adventure log is intentionally subjective, sometimes they might include the direct notes from a campaign but more often than not they’re pieced together from memory and whatever notes survived the session. Often I will forget small details, names or ‘what happened in what order’ but my players are always great at reminding me.

It’s very important to me as a DM as a way to keep track between sessions as sometimes months may pass between games. So it’s been great now that I have it and can start working on the Adventure Log the day after the game while it’s all fresh in my head. This way I can get everything updated, provide the players an update on Inspiration, and get ahead on any changes and planning for the next session.

It’s also has an in-game use as spells like Legend Lore exist so Characters could actually read the Adventure Log if they wanted to. This is because it’s canon in our games that there is a Library that records everything that ever happens – and one of the players is DMing a campaign set in it!

I’m still working on getting my players to use the Portal as it’s still very new – but I love the way they can post their own ‘thoughts’ on events and have the ability to add to it over time.

Your campaign seems to have been running from around the end of 2020 up to the present day. Have there been any modifications you have had to make to the way you play in relation to the worldwide pandemic?

We’ve been playing online via Roll20 since I joined the group in 2017. Playing virtual was really what made it possible to have weekly games because Australia is a really big place! Most of us also have crazy scheduals of work, study and other commitments so each week means looking for a notification to say there’s a game on.

I honestly prefer DMing online because you are not constrained by what you can hide behind the DM screen or fit on the table. So I found it really freeing in that if the characters want to do something crazy I can hide my face, take a breath and quickly look up whatever is needed to keep the game going. It’s created a game where I’m just as excited as my players to know what will happen next, as my version of prep focuses more on the first five minutes at most, then seeing what the players will bring to the table.

By far the hardest thing about running the campaign is that being a backup game that I run when there’s not enough players for the main campaign or the DM needs a break there’s often big gaps between games. Often I don’t know I’m DMing until the night and rarely do I know what will happen next.

This means needing to keep a lot of secrets from players to avoid spoilers for Domains and characters they might come across in future – or return to one day.

How long have you been using Obsidian Portal? What brought you to the site and what keeps bringing you back?

A few months? I found the site when I realised it was going to be impossible to run Ravenloft Castle without a proper system for keeping track of the 88 map markers. When I looked at others they where really locked-in on what kind of ‘style’ of campaign you could run – while they might look more ‘fancy’ I really just wanted something I could use while DMing to quickly get things at a moment’s notice.

I love how the Wiki section is really free to being used to store whatever campaign information you want, rather than being forced to use a format set for a particular game system or campaign style. I like how Items and Characters both have their own ‘section’ as these are things are repeatedly pop up in games, and it’s handy to be able to build up a database that you can quickly go back to when you forget a name or thing that you mentioned in an earlier session.

The GM section and Secrets are very important for my campaign and it’s great that my players can be given their own version of events. Plus, as a visual person, I love that I can share the artwork that inspired parts of the adventure, and give a lot more personality to the world.

If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal helps you with the most?

It really makes it a whole lot easier to run games. Normally finding a specific NPC, picture or location would take combing through folders full of images and random documents on my computer or the internet. These days I keep the Obsidian Portal open behind the Roll20 screen and I can quickly run a search to find what I need.

What would you say is the biggest highlight of your game so far?

So what’s been really fun DMing all of this has been how it really pushes you to ask the big questions like: ‘Would an angry Ultraloth consent to being Polymorphed into a T-Rex?’ “How many hit points does a black hole have?” Or the big one – ‘What happens if a Dreadlord dies outside of their domain?

So I thought I might share the story of how one of these questions lead to a series of events leading to what I like to call ‘Blobfish Strahd’.

This started with a classic question: What happens if a vampire is diseased by an Aboleth to only be able to breath underwater?

By RAW the answer is nothing – because apparently there’s one line in the 5e Monster Manual that says vampires don’t need to breath. But this is Ravenloft a land of poetic justice! Unlucky for Strahd I didn’t have the Monster Manual, I was using the 2nd edition Domains of Dread where there was no such comment. Nor did it make sense that a Aboleth would have a disease that didn’t work on certain types of creatures. So I ruled that was true, he didn’t need to breath BEFORE he was diseased by the Aboleth.

I wouldn’t have done this but being a high level party it shouldn’t have been too hard for them to find a way to cure the disease right? It was then that we learned that this party of Dreadlords had no clerics, no paladins and the only healing spell anyone knew was Wish!

So sadly for Strahd they missed out on curing the disease and the party was forced to seek help. However the player ended up deciding NOT to cure Strahd and instead stay in mist form. So, on entering Vecna’s domain I was given another big question:What happens to a vampire in mist form when subjected to the intense gravity of a nearby black hole? Turns out that under intense pressure a gas doesn’t become a solid – instead it turns into a SuperCritical Fluid forming Plasma!

So over time Strahd’s gaseous form grew smaller and smaller until he became a Plasmoid that could best be described as ‘Blobfish Strahd’. Which the player LOVED so much they set their Discord picture to this little guy:

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

If I have one bit of advice for ForeverDMs it’s that if you want to play, challenge your players to try DMing for a night! This is how I made the jump from player to DM. Our ForeverDM was feeling burnt out after taking us all the way from Level 1 to 17 over a course of 3 years!

So, For New Years 2020 we were given a ‘challenge’ for three of us to run a game. My first game was supposed to be one-shot and had a proper map, detailed NPCs, Monsters traps etc. All the players had to do was escape. I had some ideas of HOW they could do this but apart from the setup the players where free to ‘solve’ the problem however they wanted.
This is how it started:

This is what it looked like by the end:

For this campaign, I got rid of the map and swapped to Theatre of the Mind so that there was really no limits to what could happen. This also had the perk of being able to give the players more power.This happens in a few ways over my campaign. The most obvious is when Dreadlords are in their own Domains they can use Inspiration to shape the Domain to their will. But a more subtle trick is that when dealing with crowds or where there’s a lot of decisions to be made on the fly, I’ll ask the players to help me out. This way if there’s a party split or whatnot you don’t have a character stuck waiting around with nothing to do.

Instead, I give them a job! One Player might be asked to describe the NPC’s appearance, while another might decide what the room looks like, and another gives them a name. Other times I will offer them a NPC’s during a party split or if they arrive without a character.

The first time I tried this was when a friend popped into the game to say Hi. We were in combat so I gave them a NPC Guard who was in the unlucky situation of facing down Strahd, Vecna and a room full of Strahd’s minions at the end of Man vs Machine > https://thedomainofdreadcouncilmeeting.obsidianportal.com/adventure-log/cyrelons.

While in my hands he was just another Guard for the party to kill, making him a Guest NPC changed everything! This guard managed to stab Vecna and hold them off for two full rounds – everyone was excited to see how long he’d last. We learned this nameless guard had taken the shift to avoid being at home with his wife and nine children. He died a hero – turning what might otherwise have been a forgettable encounter into this epic last-stand.

That’s all for this month folks! Don’t forget to head on over the the OP forums to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!

Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month January 2023: Fake News, Real Adventure

Reporters from the Sharn Inquisitive again outfoxed the untalented hacks of the self-proclaimed “premier news source of Khorvaire” to bring our readers exclusive coverage of the biggest story since the end of the Last War. Working tirelessly, our intrepid beat reporters delved deep into the seedy underbelly of the post-war tension to bring you the most shocking and sensational story ever covered in these illustrious pages. Braving the wrath of unethical guards, crooked bureaucrats, and corrupt nobles, our courageous sleuths uncovered a web of deceit and fraud the likes of which has never been seen before. So settle in, renew your subscriptions, and hold on for the ride of your lifetime!” Strap in for Fake News, Real Adventure with DM DSMfive and crew, a wild ride in this D&D game set in the world of Ebberon on the continent of Khorvaire following The Last War.

Thanks for taking the time to answer a couple of questions for us. Tell us a little about the people behind the logs? What’s your group like, how did you all start playing together, and what drew you to Dungeons & Dragons?

We’ve been playing together for a long time now, after getting together in 2003 via an online “looking for game” website (I don’t even remember the name of the site anymore).  There have been a few losses and additions to the group over time, but the same five for many years now. It’s a pretty eclectic group with several IT folks who work in different environments, a health care provider, and an educator.  We wander through different game systems, although most of us started with D&D (some over 35 years ago!) and it always draws us back.  Eberron has been one of my favorite setting, and I’m always pulled back to the wonderful mix of noire intrigue, high fantasy and murkiness of good vs evil that is inherent in the world.

As you’ve been on Obsidian Portal for a while, what is your favorite feature for helping to manage your campaign?

As a (very) amateur creative writing enthusiast, I was initially drawn to just having a place to tell stories, keep them organized, and allow the rest of the group to contribute and play off each others’ creations.  More recently, I have been loving the ability to have Secrets linked to specific players, that allows intrigue to be accessed seamlessly.  It fits extremely well with the Noire aspects of Eberron and while outside readers wouldn’t be able to tell, there is a lot of intrigue going on behind the scenes thanks to the Player Secrets feature.  Once the campaign is concluded, the Secrets can merge with the main Adventure Logs to make the story more obvious.

How often do you play and how do you generally do so?

Juggling five busy schedules is often a challenge, although we are mostly successful in gaming every Friday night.  We’re lucky that most of us GM at least occasionally, and we can switch off to lighten the prep load.  FNRA has been on a hiatus for the past while because of new challenges in my work schedule, but we’re hoping to get back to intermittent play soon.  Being picked as CotM has provided significant inspiration for moving the restart forward, so there will likely be new material fairly soon.

Pre-pandemic we were very old-school in our gaming: chairs around a table in the basement with maps, minis and snacks.  That quickly transitioned to Roll20 when the first lockdowns started and we have been gaming remotely since then.  There have been intermittent discussions of returning to in-person gaming, but the convenience of online, combined with complications from small children (read: tiny bags of mostly germs) and having a health care professional who works with seniors, have kept the decision from being finalized easily.

What are the main inspirations for your game? 

Originally, it was the release of the Rising from the Last War sourcebook for 5th Edition that drove my desire to revisit the Eberron setting.  I threw together a number of ideas to pitch to the group and have them decide, because there were too many stories that I was excited to try and couldn’t decide on which to pursue.  Once the consensus pointed to the newspaper reporter theme, RftLW was the base for developing the idea and creating ideas for journalism-related adventures.  Some of the crazier aspects of the real-life political situation south of the border provided the inspiration for the Fake News theme, and changing the Sharn Inquisitive into a tabloid rag fits well into our group’s often irreverent sense of humour.

Can you discuss your approach to worldbuilding in your campaign?

The group is often the starting point for my worldbuilding, and I find it very difficult to plan anything plot-wise until I know what everyone is going to be playing.  When the foppish noble Fulton hit the table, he wasn’t initially related to the Brelish Prime Minister, but he inspired an entire planned plotline of political intrigue, terrorist, and family discord.  Most of my worldbuilding happens after the characters exist, when I spend long drives free associating how their backstories could overlap and mesh in unexpected ways that (I hope) will excite the players.  During play, I usually end up making stuff up on the fly, see what grabs their attention, and then run with it.  The entire relationship between Lester and Lilliana came about because of a throw-away scene that was meant to be focused on the team’s rivalry with another reporter, but when Lester’s player kept returning to his interactions with the gnome, an entire new plotline was born.

Swapping to your beautiful site for a moment, where did you come up with the style design you have?

After we decided on the journalist theme, I really wanted the site to feel like an early 20th century newspaper.  Since cgregory is very active helping people out with CSS on the OB forums, I had a fantastic resource to figure out how to get a layout that felt right without disrupting navigation too much.  The hardest part has been finding headings for the newspaper “Sections” that didn’t feel too forced.  Because I don’t invest as much time planning the campaign plots until I know what characters are going to be present, I ended up having plenty of time early on to invest in the layout, which greatly increased my enthusiasm.  I also had a lot of help from my teenage daughter who has fantastic sense of style and seems drawn to “old stuff” and had some great suggestions for layout.  She also created the “conspiracy board” that the group found, which has proven to also be a font of plot ideas and player inspiration.

I love your adventure logs, do you create them yourself, or do you share the load in recording your narrative?

All of our campaigns end up being a group effort, as we seem to have a lot of aspiring writers.  I write the main plot narrative posts either right after the game, or first thing in the morning to make sure it is fresh.  It is mostly for my own use, because I like to include call-backs or resurrect hanging plot-threads, but struggle to remember details if it isn’t recorded somewhere.  Everyone contributes in-character stories, and often the initial documents end up edited by different players, usually for comical purposes.

Back to your game, can you share an example of a particularly memorable moment from your campaign?

The opening session of our game managed to both set a fantastic tone for the campaign and keep us in stitches throughout.  One of our group was unable to attend and while I wanted to get things started, I also didn’t want to have a meaningful start to the story while missing a key character.  Thus, we ended up completely ad-libbing the story of Fulton being asked to come to the Tain Gala, shopping for appropriate clothing and finally tormenting multiple co-workers and Sharn nobility at the biggest social event in the city.  It was all unscripted, involved very little die-rolling, and generated a great deal of laughter.  My particular favorite was Lester’s use of the Artificer’s Magical Tinkering ability to embarrass their rival Carric by making him smell like a full baby’s diaper.

Let’s round this out with one of our favorite questions for our featured GMs! If you had a secret sauce for running a great game, what would be the most important ingredients?

My best games have always come about when I structure stories and plots around elements that the players have already shown interest.  Focusing the plots on the elements they put in their backstories, allowing them to surprise me with their choices, and rolling their ideas into the narrative keeps it fresh and fun, making it easier to expend the huge effort it can take to run a game.

That’s all for this month folks! Don’t forget to head on over the the OP forums to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!

Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month November 2022: The Curse of the Crimson Throne

“Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten.” Thus, will you read as you enter the kingdom of this Pathfinder campaign set in the frontier land of Varisia. The inns are plentiful, the adventurers bold. GM Mogo‘s frontier city of Korvosa is both resplendent and magnificent, but a dark secret hovers over its royal bloodline, with many of the citizens whispering in hushed tones of what they have come to call The Curse of the Crimson Throne.

First off, feel free to tell us about the person behind the GM screen. Where are you from? What do you do aside from gaming?

Mogo: Well I’m Mogo and I’m from Indianapolis, IN I’ve been GMing for 16 years now, outside of gaming I do IT work for clinical research. I’ve been playing tabletop rpgs since I was 12 and in college I slowly became the forever GM for my friends. I don’t mind the title or role, I love weaving stories together and ensuring everyone is having fun.

Tell us about your version of “Curse of the Crimson Throne”. The Campaign is a well-known Pathfinder Adventure Path, but how much does your campaign stick to the structure of the book and how much is your own home brew? Also, what made you choose a Pathfinder campaign in the first place?

Mogo: That’s the great thing about Pathfinder 1e’s campaigns, there’s a lot of space to expand and fill in with your own content. For the overall plot/story I’m probably around 70/30 on keeping to the books and my own material with where we are now (Book 2). That’s going to be subject to change depending on the decisions and actions of my players. I figure that by the end it’ll be around 50/50 – a lot of being additions to the story but I do have a few BIG changes planned for the plot.

I’ve been running Pathfinder 1e since its beta days and my friends I are all still in love with the system. I’ve run and am running several other campaigns but Crimson Throne has always been on my list to run. It’s definitely one of the best ever published by Paizo, it gives you such a rich setting that can be made to feel so alive.

How regularly do you play, and where do you play? Tell us about your current group of players.

Mogo: We play once a month in person at my place. I’ve basically turned it into a nerd’s dream space for gaming within my size and budget limits. Our sessions are usually around 7 to 8 hours with a break for dinner – often times we pitch in and/or get some sort of meal that fits the theme setting of the current session. Recently they were at a cattle ranch and one my amazing players fixed a giant barbecue feast!

Speaking of my players I have four regular members and two who drop in when they can:

Sarcy plays Dagi and Taice – they’re our group’s resident artist. All of the original art on our site is their work; they’ve also helped me with making props, maps, and painted miniatures. This is their first ttrpg and they’ve really gone all out using it as a creative outlet, even as far as making amazing themed meals for several sessions.

Konquerer plays Estha and Jaier – he’s probably our most experienced player and has been my best friend since grade school, he’s been one of most prodigious writers and has been creating an amazing amount of short story content to fill in the background of our world.

Rob plays Aventus “Pip” Thorne, and Darby Goodbrew – Rob is the king of puns and bad jokes. His writings and roleplay are often a trap for me as at times they’re powerful and compelling then suddenly blindside with a joke that can leave the whole table laughing.

Jake plays Volturio Sura and Floriano Bellucci – I sometimes suspect he thinks he’s the hero of the story. (I’m kidding! …mostly) He’s also contributed write ups for the story and his penchant for accents (good and bad) crack us up and keep us immersed in the story.

There is a lot of great artwork in your campaign. Although some of it seems to be drawn from lore on the internet, much of it seems to be original. Who is responsible for this and how integral is this original artwork to your campaign?

Mogo: There is a lot of internet inspired lore but all of the original art is from our resident artist Sarcy. Their art draws us all deeper into the game and gives it a feeling of being alive/real that’s hard to fully put into words. Any art you see in the adventure logs from them and are considered part of the official canon for how our world looks. Their comics are drawn straight from the shenanigans of our group (often using the actual facial expressions of the players as guides for how to draw their characters.) In addition to the “canon art” they also make a lot of funny/meme humor art for us – I think at this point there’s over a hundred pieces. We’re lucky to have them in our group. (They’re open for commission as well if people are interested: [email protected])

Your campaign seems very much focused on the trading city of Korvosa and the wiki shows great detail of this. There is a particularly wide range of Inns, Taverns and Shops described. How important are these in your roleplaying? Do you have any great “tavern tales” or “role play moments” to share with us?

Mogo: Oh lord, where to start? The Inns and Taverns and Shopping in Korvosa come up quite a bit. I’ve tried to make Korvosa as “alive” as possible instead of just a flat background. The players are all currently residents of Tenna’s though one of the best tavern tales happened at a place called Bard’s End. There is an adventure log of it on our portal but to tell it in short I had let them all know at the start of the game that they should probably think up a name for there group as word is going to get around the city about their exploits.

If they didn’t want a name to be given to them by one of the newpapers they best think of it themselves. They had been debating for over a year with no clear decision when one of them took it into his own hands. Rob/Pip took advantage of an award ceremony following a jousting contest he had won to announce to the world that that they are the Wyldcats. We’re three or four games down the road from it and I don’t think anyone has forgiven him for it though the laughs and jokes about it are flying back and forth – no hard feelings in the real world but in game I think he’s lucky they didn’t lock him in a trunk for it.

Sarcy: Probably Dagi’s best tavern tale was winning a city wide drinking contest against a duergar black smith at Bard’s End during the end of our infamous “festival episode”.

Jake: One that really stands out to me is at the start of book 2 when the party escorted Trinia out of town to safety – something about a group of friends on a long roadtrip together in the form of a wagon ride, lots of idle time spent chatting, playing cards games in the back, trading off between driving the cart, hanging out in back and bonding really paints a vivid picture. The fact that to some (Volturio in particular!) it’s a super fun roadtrip vacation and to others (Pip especially!) it’s a cloak-and-dagger smuggling of Korvosa’s Most Wanted in direct defiance of the law of the city really adds depth and dimension to the experience. Sarcy’s comic really sums it up well!

Who is responsible for your campaign WIKI design? Can you share any useful “design tips” with other OP members?

Mogo: I build and maintain the wiki; I spent about two months before our game started building the obsidian portal website. The forums and various guides were a huge help, the community overall was fantastic in providing support and advice on building everything – I’m still learning new tricks all the time. Tags and hyperlinks are super useful. The biggest help for a GM has been the ability to have a GM secret for each entry as well as whispers for when I want to secretly share something out to a specific player or if they want to give me a little bit of secret intel.

Some of the other great tricks for me have been the ability to embed images, pdf’s, and expanding drop downs of information. Check out my front page and house rules sections for some of my favorite organizations:

Main Page
House Rules

Something else we really like even if the edges are rough is the items tab, it’s been super useful!

The Adventure Logs in your campaign are very rich and very varied, and all seem to have good involvement from your players. How important are the Adventure Logs to your campaign?

Mogo: The Adventure Logs were actually the entire reason we started using Obsidian Portal. We wanted a shared space where I could prep everything and to which everyone could add their own notes/content. They’re absolutely vital, I use the GM sections to write out my notes pre and post-game, we go back to check on previous events and I love that I can set them to GM only and use them to plan ahead. They’re a life saver for a GM with a knack for frying hard drives and/or losing his notes.

There is also some great Art and Cartoon work in the Adventure Logs? Who does this? How much time is spent on it? Both the art and the writing seem like great fun, do you discuss it in during your gaming sessions?

Mogo: Like I said all the original art is from Sarcy – have I mentioned lately how amazing they are? The art comes up all the time in games as reference, commentary or sometimes all of us just fanboying over it. We’ve been known to group text each other when Sarcy posts something new.

How long have you been using Obsidian Portal? What brought you to the site and what keeps bringing you back?

Mogo: I’ve been using Obsidian Portal for about 5 years now. I first learned of the site through a couple friends after a fiasco with One Drive and a dead laptop lead to a massive loss in content I’d been writing for multiple campaigns. This site is such a fantastic mashup of a blog and wiki data base for games which can be used as heavily or lightly as you like. It’s been a life saver for me in helping me keep track of logs for games and keeping all my notes together and linked to each other with tags and hyperlinks. As the world’s unluckiest gm when it comes to hard drives you’ve no idea how grateful I am for it. I have four campaigns on here as well as a space I’ve made just for one-shot modules.

If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal helps you with the most?

Mogo: For me, the biggest thing is keeping my notes in organized and in one place. As a forever gm who’s always running at least three campaigns at once it’s been a life saver.

Sarcy: As a player my favorite part about having OP is having a place to put my Character information, we can do Adventure logs, secrets, planning of our own, and having reference to SO MANY things in the campaign for whenever the creative mood strikes is amazing, all in one well organized place.

Jake: My favorite feature of the OP site is with the adventure logs – there each of the players and DM can add the vignettes, background stories, details of things we don’t necessarily see during the sessions and so on. When the game only takes place once per month, having someone in the group post something every week or so really helps keep the game fresh and interesting to where everybody’s super excited once it’s time to get back to the table.

What would you say is the biggest highlight of your game so far?

Mogo: Do I have to pick just one? I think the thing I’m proudest of is my in world newsletters that I write up, post, and print out for my players. They always insist on starting the game by having Jake read them aloud in character. But the biggest highlight for me has got to be Sarcy’s poster they made to commemorate our 1 year of gaming together. It’s not often the GM gets to be in the artwork and depicted how he sees himself.

Newsletter Link!

Sarcy: There has been so many! I absolutely have a couple favorite sessions but what I really enjoy are moments when I get sucked into the story and forget I’m just rolling dice at the table. There was a session where Dagi’s love interest was threatened and the panic and blind rage I felt was really a testament to Mogo’s story telling. The second time was the panic and fear when the big bad from Dagi’s past came back as a ghoul and nearly did her in. I visibly paled when I saw the pawn go out on the table.

Jake: The daily ritual where the group settles around the breakfast table and Volturio reads out the two newspapers while they all hold their breath with dread or excitement to see what kind of shenanigans ended up with good exposure, bad exposure or if they managed to skirt beneath the radar. One thing particularly strong about this campaign taking place mostly in the same city is that we get to see direct consequences of the things the party does – relationships with NPCs build and grow out into depth and nuance you don’t normally get with adventures that just go from set point to set point and just return to a home base briefly between books.

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

Mogo: I’ll pass on the best lesson I ever learned from the GM’s who taught me:

“Make the players feel like they’re the heroes of the story.”

It’s such a simple thing but it can often be overlooked.

Remember as the GM your biggest responsibility is to ensure everyone at your table (including you) is having fun. We’re playing that’s the whole point. Sure you can write up gut wrenching emotional scenes, create horrible, enraging villains but at the end of all of it the point of this whole hobby is to have fun. Check in with your players and with yourself now and then to make sure it is, you’ll thank yourselves later.

That’s all for this month folks! Don’t forget to head on over the the OP forums to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!

Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month October 2022: Wildside

It’s time to clean up that chrome and run the Seattle shadows with “Wildside” — October’s Campaign of the Month, by two-time winner, Dropbeartots. If you’re looking for some paydata on slick site design and some advanced advice on running Shadowrun 6th World, this is the plex for you. No SIN required…

Hail, Dropbeartots! Congratulations on winning Campaign of the Month for a second time — a rare achievement! “Wildside” is a Shadowrun campaign exploring the dark future of Seattle’s urban sprawl. Can you give a quick recap of the campaign story and what it’s about?

Thanks! Can’t tell you how proud this makes me 🙂 Of the campaign, our group, and all that we’ve been building with Wildside!

The campaign started with the idea of remaking some old SR3 characters a few members of the group had a looong time ago back before OP was even a thing – Gex the Snake street shaman, Malvain the elf street samurai, and Abraham the elf adept. The act of rebuilding these characters from SR3 to SR6W was interesting to say the least. Then they were joined by Dot the troll decker and Bobcat the techno-rigger to form a group.

The campaign has largely followed the PCs’ (mis)adventures starting with the job that cemented them as a group that I called Sweet Tooth, in which they liberated ten tons of rare real cacao from an agricorp and delivered it to an unknown Johnson. They later learned that Seattle-Carnation developed a particularly delicious new chocolate milk after this job.

They have also dealt with having a hand in Seattle gaining its independence from the UCAS (and all of the good and bad that entailed), stealing a dragon’s egg (Urubia), rescuing an ingénue from her abductors in Chicago to deliver her to a dragon (Urubia), meeting up with an independent underground trog rock band (Hez Nation), dealing with bug spirits in Detroit, messing with Humanis Policlub, exploring Toronto during a power outage while it was infested with dark spirits, rescuing one of the two lead singers of Hez Nation from a corporate kidnapping, stealing an ancient treasure from the Fourth World for Harlequin from right under the nose of Arleesh, and stealing a dragon’s egg again (recovering the egg they had stolen from Urubia back from the Sea Dragon)!

We started Wildside up in early 2020, took a short break for Hazard Pay to try something different in 2021, and then started up again at the beginning of this year. So it has been ongoing for close to two years now. Along the way, the PCs have gained and lost contacts, friends, enemies, lovers, Heat, and street rep.

The Shadowrun setting is rich enough that almost any modern-day issues can be explored, with some tech-fantasy twists. With “Wildside”, what kinds of themes or plot ideas have you enjoyed creating the most?

Mainly the dragon stuff 😀 The players and their characters had been walking on eggshells, guarding their thoughts, and trying not to let Urubia realize that one of their first few jobs was stealing her egg while at the same time later working for her. I think it got pretty tense more than a few times. But I really enjoy setting up the group to expand their horizons by personally meeting and interacting with creatures that are above and beyond the normal human power struggles of corp and government that you find in a lot of campaigns – dragons, immortal elves, free spirits, and the like.

I also enjoy exploring the interactions between different variations of metahumanity. In particular, I am fond of Orks and their struggles. Hez Nation was one of the most amusing creations to come out of this game for me.

If I ever get to sit down and play in a game, I have a Cascade Ork I’m ready to jump into some vehicles with to run a wheelman!

If you could bring one element from Shadowrun into the real world — either magical or technological — what would you choose?

It’s my favorite game world of all time, and I’ve been heavily invested in SR since 1E. I can’t name any one specific thing above all others tbh, I love all of the aspects of the game world and love bringing them all to life. While in reality I’d be a wage slave in the SR world I’m sure, I’d like to think I would immerse myself in VR hacking and cyberdecks or rigging if they were real activities.

We already know a little about you from your previous interview. Any news to share since the win for “Hazard Pay” in 2020 or has time just kind of flown by (like it has for many of us)?

Not much is new besides my employment status changing rapidly numerous times. Bobcat’s player, my fiancé, has taken up travel nursing so we’ve recently traveled to New Mexico. This has put our in-person gaming on hiatus, but we expect to get back to it soon.

Shadowrun sometimes requires a little bit of extra record-keeping, and we’ve noticed that you built special sections just for Karma, Reputation, and Heat — an excellent idea for GM’s and Players to keep a running tally for just about anything. Can you talk us through briefly how you made those customizations?

I had to do a lot of experimenting with inspecting and figuring out how to best use the Custom Navigation options. I created a separate wiki page for each of those sections you mention and more, and then added them to the front page navigation so that the players and viewers could see and interact with them. I used the OP page detailing available icons to grab those icons for use. I’d like to experiment with some custom icons as well.

Many of your Obsidian Portal campaigns including “Wildside” have a lot of style. Everything from the font choices to the artwork to the layout seems to “fit” the campaign in question. Do you have any tips you can share about how you make it all work together? Or are there any go-to online resources that you rely on for cool imagery?

I am pretty finicky about finding fonts to use that are thematic to the game, setting, and campaign that I run – Google Fonts is an invaluable tool for that. There are some that get repeated, but I generally try to use something at least a little different for each site. As far as the artwork goes, I just do a LOT of Google Image searches until I find something that feels right – sometimes the stuff that pops up happens to actually be for the setting or game I’m building the site for! I do like deviantArt a bit, and Artstation as well. I try to be very deliberate with the art choices based upon the mood and feel of the site I am building that I want to convey.

What highlights of the campaign have you and your players enjoyed, so far?

I have enjoyed the interactions, the double- and triple-deals, the intrigues, and the combats. SR6W provides, to me, a very interesting addition to character capabilities with the new Edge actions. It’s quite a task to remember them all, but boy it’s fun to see them in use!

Dot reports: “The chocolate heist was a funny shadowrun, just so unreal to think of such a thing in real life that it feels like a highlight to me.

Gex reports: “For me it was running around a powerless Toronto. It was a change from the norm, no power no vehicles possible zombie like outbreak with a mystery of why everything was offline. We didn’t do it for the money either.”

Malvain reports: “My personal favorite moment? When that one dragon (Arleesh) came after us after the river man sold us out and I just nonchalantly walked right up to her and said, “Look if you are gonna kill us and take it hurry up, I don’t have all day.” And walking away unharmed. It was kinda just a full circle moment for me, we were out matched and still felt like just going out like a badass and somehow it went the other way.”

Bobcat reports: “Stealing a dragon’s egg.Twice.”

Abraham reports: “I like that we basically ignored all of Robert Charette’s original truism. Especially dealing with dragons.”

Anyone who looks at your profile page on OP can tell you’re one of us — a hyper-creative individual with a lot of work already on display. Are there any ideas floating around in your head for future games that you just haven’t gotten to yet? Or are there any old campaigns that you’d like to revisit and re-work at some point in the future?

As one can see from all the games I’m working up on my profile (and those in Support know from the number of games I have requested to be added 😉 ), I have a ton of stuff running around in my head that I will probably never really get around to running or playing. But I have loads of fun building the portals themselves, and every one of them is a learning experience.

I have something brewing for an old game nobody I play with currently has even heard of… oh, they have heard of D&D 3.5, but not Iron Heroes. I feel the need to run a swords & sorcery low magic fantasy game after all of the high magic 5E, SR6W, and SB&CS that I’ve run lately. So building The Ashlands will be my next big project (expect to see a request to add Iron Heroes soon 😉 ).

My next Shadowrun game is already up and in planning – California Dreaming, a different sort of SR game and a revisitation of one that started at some point in the past but never really floated anywhere. Instead of ‘runners shooting people in the face for money, the characters will be vault divers in Los Angeles, fighting with critters, corpus, and fellow vault divers to uncover the treasures of deluged LA in the aftermath of The Twins, a pair of big earthquakes that buried half of LA underwater. I’m looking forward to getting that one off the ground!

If you like Shadowrun, feel free to check out the game I’m running for my Shadowrun newbies called More Things in Heaven and Earth! As I noted previously, our in-person gaming is at a standstill for at least three months, but we will be back to it soon.

And I’ll probably be reworking a lot of the portals I already have set up over time, trying to improve on them before I start approaching running the games. The Cyberpunk RED and Fading Suns sites especially!

Lastly, Obsidian Portal is always looking for tips and tricks from the best game-makers and site-designers. Do you have any pieces of advice you’d like to share that you’ve learned in the last couple of years?

Steal everything you can that looks cool!

Inspect, inspect, inspect!

Get on the forums and ask questions. Get on the Discord and ask questions. There are so many helpful creators on OP, they are super helpful and willing to answer questions, and portal building can be really fun!

Keep learning and practicing CSS and textile for your portals. The more I practice and learn, the better I feel about the things I am creating with them. I feel like I’m still a beginner compared to some of the folks here, with a lot more to learn. I have honestly been really surprised and humbled both times that I’ve unexpectedly learned that my portal was selected to be Campaign of the Month. But it does make me proud of what I’ve managed to grasp and accomplish.

And my utmost respect and love goes out to my friends, my players, for helping create these amazing adventure with me.

We’ve pulled too much heat on this run, chummer — it’s time to bail. Many thanks to Dropbeartots and his players for giving us a T-bird tour of the Seattle shadows and SR6W. We’re looking forward to seeing more of your games in the gritty future. If you have a campaign that the 6th World needs to see (including your own), be sure to nominate it on the OP forums and keep a cybereye out for updates on our Campaign of the Year vote. Until the next run — stay meshed!