August’s Featured Campaign: The Melekar Chronicles
Friends, we have done you a disservice. You see, we thought that we had already featured the Melekar Chronicles in the past, because it’s so damn good. Turns out, we were wrong. Horribly wrong… So! Now we correct that mistake, let me present to you: The Melekar Chronicles by DM Gaaran.
Broken Empire from Zachary Dando-Thompson on Vimeo.
Obsidian Portal: How much of the campaign/system is original content developed by you and your players?
Gaaran: The vast majority of the content for my campaign setting has been created by me, with the help of my players. Occasionally we’ll throw in a pre-built dungeon crawl or two, but other than that, it’s all original. I’ve had a lot of help from my players in fleshing out the world over the years, so they deserve this as much as I do.
Obsidian Portal: Your campaign looks great, can you tell me more about it?
Gaaran: When I first started putting my campaign together, I had just intended this to be an organizational tool for all my notes, past campaigns, and information like that. But then I started looking around at some of the other campaigns, and I was really impressed with what I saw. I decided that if I was going to take the time to put all the information on here, I should make it look good too. I took inspiration from some of the other users on here, like gnunn, Arsheesh, JimTriche, and ChainsawXIV for my base line, and worked up from there. I’m also rather proud of my world map, which I couldn’t have done without the help from the “Cartographer’s Guild”:http://forum.cartographersguild.com/
Obsidian Portal: Where do you get your inspiration the story and the world?
Gaaran: I try to be as original as possible, so while I might be inspired by ideas in movies and books, I try to make it something completely different, and make it my own. I also have some pretty awesome players, and in the early days of the campaign setting, they helped me create the world’s history. In the beginning, I created the world map with vague blobs for continents. Every campaign I ran in the world, I would choose a new area, and my players and I would create the map, and the towns, and even the history together. It was a fun process, and a great way to get the players more involved with their characters.
Obsidian Portal: How well do you know your players?
Gaaran: I’ve been blessed with some pretty awesome players. In my current campaign, I’ve known most of my players and gamed with them for several years, under several different DMs, but I have some of my other players that due to time constraints couldn’t join that I’ve been gaming with for 10 years or more. It makes the life of the DM easier when you can at least KIND of predict how your players will react. Doesn’t matter how well you know them though, they always manage to surprise you, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Obsidian Portal: What kinds challenges are you faced with in your campaign?
Gaaran: Well, for this campaign, most of the challenges have come from outside the game. I was originally going to run 4th edition, to try it out, but then realized that we all like 3.5e better, so i had to retool for that. And encounters are totally different, let me tell you. Then, we had some problems with the player base, that were unrelated to the game, and I was down to 2 pcs, so I had to retool for that. THEN we reconciled and things were alright, and we had three again, so I had to retool yet again. So that’s all back end issues on my part. The only other challenging part has always been for me is planning non-combat npc encounters. But that’s mainly because when it comes to role-playing, my players shine, and it’s pretty impossible to tell what they’re going to do in a given situation. Makes it hard to script out what an NPC might say, so I do a LOT of ad-libbing.
Obsidian Portal: What aspects of your campaign are you really proud of?
Gaaran: Without sounding too full of myself, I’m quite proud of three things. The fact that I’ve managed to keep this game world alive and do as much work as I have over the years to have a fairly fleshed out campaign setting, as well as a partially complete story that spans several thousand years (I still have a lot of work to do) is still mind-boggling to me. Second, I’m pretty proud of my world map, it took me probably 20+ hours to make, and I was really pleased with how it came out. I haven’t yet, but I’ve been meaning to have it printed, banner style. And lastly, and probably most importantly, I’m proud of the fact that my players tell me they’re excited for the next session. That’s really all I need to keep going, if they like what I’m putting out, then I’m doing something right :).
Obsidian Portal: According to your players, what have been the highlights of the campaign?
Gaaran: I asked my players this, since I don’t want to put words in their mouths.
“The pure depth of the world in which you created for the campaign. I truly feel immersed.” – Krygon
“For all the slayings and noble deeds, I would have to say that the highlight so far has been making romantically vague and socially awkward situations with the party’s cleric seem more dramatic and perilous than any monster-filled trap-infested dungeon.” – CrankyPelican
Obsidian Portal: What future plans do you have for your campaign?
Gaaran: Well, for my current story arc, I don’t want to give anything away to my players, so I’ll be vague. Let’s just say that ain’t seen nothing yet! As for my campaign setting, and the OP site, I’m still working, little by little, on getting all of my history and geography, and all that information written and added to the site, but I still have a ways to go. With the current campaign running, I’ve been more focused on keeping up with adventure logs and the dossiers for people and places the players have visited. Eventually I hope to have a fully fleshed out campaign world that someone could use for their own game, but THAT is quite a ways down the road.
Gaaran: I just want to say thanks again! To my fellow OPers, gnunn, JimTriche, Arsheesh, ChainsawXIV, and all the others who helped show me what you can do with this site, and inspired me to try and make something of my campaign site. I want to thank my players over the years too, without them, I wouldn’t have had such a rich campaign world to put together. And lastly, thanks to OP for being exactly what I was looking for.
Textile Parser Follow-up
In the previous post, I asked people to give examples of highly detailed campaigns that were pushing Textile to the limits. The goal was to see if it was a good idea to upgrade our parser. Well, I’ve made a decision.
Curent Plan: Do Nothing
Essentially, I think it would be a mistake to upgrade to the newer parser as-is. There are too many places where it will break peoples’ existing work. And, as I feared, the more work you put into making things look nice, the more in danger you are of having the new parser break things for you.
Future Plan: Do Something
However, I’m beginning to believe that perhaps we should be offering more choice on how to handle your input. Many of you are quite comfortable dealing directly with HTML, and Textile just gets in your way, adding paragraphs and such where you don’t want them. Likewise, many of you come from the BBCode forum world and would prefer to work with that. It’s not like we believe that Textile is the be-all-end-all markup language and you should all be forced to learn it. To be perfectly honest, the main reason we went with Textile was that the parser was easy to integrate and allowed us to quickly move forward with other parts of the site.
I’m considering making the input parsing a campaign-wide setting, starting with Textile and raw HTML. Then, as we get more comfortable, we may add more parsers, like Markdown and BBCode. This will allow you to choose the markup language that makes the most sense for your group.
Any thoughts on that?
As always, I’d like to know what you think. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts.
Individual Findings
For those that are interested, these are the individual findings that I discovered while playing around with the new Textile parser.
Most pages render exactly the same
I’ve re-rendered probably a dozen pages and all except one looks exactly the same. The only one that looks different has a bunch of Textile examples on it, as in “Here is how you use Textile for this campaign…” The main takeaway was that for the majority of people, they won’t see a huge change. That’s a good thing, I think.
<br/> tags inserted automatically
This is the main complaint we get, that it’s difficult to insert line-breaks, as Textile ignores a single newline, and converts a double newline into a new paragraph. The newer version of Textile adds line-breaks for single newlines, which should make a lot of you much happier. No more adding <br/> at the end of every line.
And, as a bonus, it won’t double-up the <br> tags. If you already have them there, it won’t add another on top of it. Very nice.
<pre> no longer ignores Textile
If you’re putting Textile inside a <pre> tag in order to give an example of how to use it, it will now be evaluated. This will only affect a very small portion of you, but for those it may be very irritating. The trick to bypassing this is to use the notextile block modifier. Here’s an example:
notextile. p. This won't make a new paragraph, and will show the p. instead of evaluating it
p. Same here...still no new paragraph
Put in br tags manually if you want spacing<br/><br/><br/>
p. Still no new paragraph, but it will have 3 newlines above it.
p. This will be evaluated by Textile and the p. will make it a paragraph (because of the double newline above...)
HTML (mostly) unaffected
If you do all your formatting in HTML, then you’re pretty much safe. The new parser still ignores HTML and passes it straight through. I looked at a handful of pages that were mostly composed in HTML and they looked identical to me.
The more complicated it is, the more it gets mangled
Take a look at ChainsawXIV’s templates and tools page. Pretty sweet, huh? Well it gets mangled pretty badly by the new parser. For some reason, the parser doesn’t even generate valid HTML. It can be somewhat alleviated by putting a notextile modifier right at the start of the page, but that’s definitely not the best way to handle it.
Upgrading Textile – Easier post formatting
I checked recently and found that we haven’t updated our Textile parser in several months. The Textile parser is the piece of code that takes the text you type in and displays it on the webpage. Making tables, bolding text, adding headlines, adding linebreaks, all that stuff.
Update: I’ve made a decision on how to proceed.
We’ve been receiving more and more complaints lately about the inflexibility of Textile and how difficult it can be to get things to look how you want. Looking over the change notes of the new parser, a lot of those concerns have been addressed. However, I’m worried that putting a new parser in place might break a lot of the formatting that many of you have painstakingly created.
If you take great pains to get your campaign to display correctly, please leave a comment here with a link to your campaign. I’m going to test out the new parser in development, and I’d like to see how it works with some well crafted campaigns. If nothing breaks, then it’s a no-brainer to add the new parser. Otherwise, if it seriously destroys existing campaigns, then I’ll have to seriously think about the consequences. Fingers crossed that it’s a no-brainer.
Note: Comments like “Drop Textile and go with XYZ” will get you promptly ignored. We have thousands of people and campaigns all using it, and we can’t just drop it. We may add more parsers and allow you to choose, but that’s a future task.
First Emissary Report – Play On Con
Our first Emissary has come back from Play On Con in Irondale, Alabama. Revtobiaz has the full write-up on his blog, The Yoko Critic (Warning: header image is SFW, but you may get some raised eyebrows…)
Favorite Quote
As the panel winded down, I took the opportunity to complete my required task and handed out the material for OP. I was shocked to hear that only one or two people had heard about the site. The rest were quite interested in looking into it.
This is exactly why we started the Emissary program. Once you start using Obsidian Portal, it’s easy to forget that it’s fairly new there was a time that you didn’t know about it. It seems so obvious. But, the real truth is that most gamers still have never heard of us.
If any of you are interested in helping us illuminate the rest of the world about Obsidian Portal, we’re always accepting more people into the Emissary program. Just send an email to [email protected] with your username and the cons you attend, and we’ll get you set up!
Updated Feature: Image Uploader
We’ve made some awesome improvements to our Image Uploader feature. Care to see?
At 50% of Actual Size!
First, we made it so that you can upload multiple images at once. We also fixed a few nagging problems, so that now it really works with Internet Explorer. Was that 1 GB of storage space getting you down? We increased it to 5 GB for Ascendant Members. Play around with it. There are many interface improvements, and we’d love to hear what you have to say about them. Tell us if they’re too much, not enough, or just right. That’s it for now, but look forward to future improvements where we’ll add additional file types!
Remember, to pull up the Image Uploader, all you have to do is click on the picture icon at the end of the toolbar above the textbox your typing into.
Contest: Be an RPG Designer
How would you like to be an Game Designer working on a project with Lead Designer Logan Bonner? With your name in the credits and everything? Well here’s your chance. We’re buying one lucky Adventurer a Senior Patronage for Logan’s Open Design Project, the 4th Edition D&D Adventure, The Lost City.
The Lost City is an anthology-style adventure set in the classic ruins of a once-great city: treasure and glory await!
Leading the project is former Wizards of the Coast designer Logan Bonner, lead designer on Arcane Power and author of the fan-favorite adventures The Slaying Stone and P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens.
Design in the WotC Style
With Bonner’s guidance, patrons of the Lost City project will be invited to write major sections of the anthology, and will decide details about the city such as its locale, history, and the adversaries player characters face.
As a patron of the project, you have much more influence over the final result than someone who buys an adventure off the shelf. This includes:
- Access to private design discussion and review of playtest materials,
- a complete PDF of the final playtest manuscript,
- a complete PDF of the official 80-page adventure,
- opportunity to contribute design ideas and elements, and
- acknowledgement for your contribution in the credits.
As a senior patron, you gain access to the senior patron discussion and review of materials. You will have complete access to the playtest draft, art, maps, and you have the option of pitching entire sections of the anthology (to design and be credited and paid for your work) — or submit smaller designs such as monsters or item stats. It’s up to you!
So, what do you think? You can work as hard as you want, or do as little as you please, and your names will still show up in the book’s credits! Are you interested? Great! All you have to do to enter our contest is the following:
- Set up a Twitter Account.
- Follow @ObsidianPortal.
- Re-tweet the following message:
RT & enter @ObsidianPortal’s contest! Be a Game Designer for @KoboldQuarterly’s ‘The Lost City’ Open Design Project! http://bit.ly/bwA4Ur
That’s all there is to it. We’ll pick a winner at random next Wednesday at 10pm PST.
Good Luck, and Good Gaming!
