Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month September 2016 – Age of Serpents
An era of exploration! A place of adventure! Follow along as a troupe of intrepid survivors muster their courage for the dangers ahead! Dangers from the… Age of Serpents – September’s Campaign of the Month! Join me as I trek through the “Tropes of the Jungle” with Jim_Mount, the GameMaster of this Jungle Opera!
Thursday Feature – Baggins? Sure I know a Baggins
When running a campaign for my players, one of the things that I always aspire to achieve is honest to goodness character progression on the part of the PCs – not the levels, feats or experience points, but the fundamental shift in who the characters are at the conclusion of the adventure. As a GameMaster, it’s one of the things I use to decide if the campaign was a success or a failure. Did it change how the players viewed the characters they created at the outset? or did it merely scroll by sideways while they beat down enemies and grabbed power ups like in Super Mario Bros.?
It can be a difficult thing to pull off, because you aren’t simply telling the players a story like with a book or a movie. Your tale is a collaborative one, shaped as much by the players as by you. Sure, the core events remain intact: they save the princess, they drop the One Ring into the fire, whatever the case may be; But how profoundly the story impacts the characters (and by extension the players) ultimately comes down to two things:
- How invested the players are in portraying their characters.
- How invested you are in making your PCs into Bagginses
Thursday Feature – You Oughta Know, You Married Her
Once upon a time, a GameMaster was running a campaign for a group of players. He had worked very hard each week, spending considerable amounts of time preparing so that every single session was as immersive an experience as he could manage. All of his NPCs had descriptions, with performed voices and mannerisms to match. Every location was unique, well described and distinguishable. Some might even say he had gone too far, as the campaign he had originally said should last around four months was already in its eighth session and had barely scratched the surface of his plot.
Despite this unintentionally protracted time table, all was well and the players were enjoying the fruits of his work. He knew this to be true because he had solicited their feedback at the end of each of the previous seven game sessions. On this night, the PCs would be investigating an inn that was rumored to be haunted after murders had taken place within. As the troupe moved through the city, he turned to one player in particular and said “As the party moves through the city streets toward the inn, you see a face pass by in the crowd that you immediately recognize… it’s Alison.”
The player cocked his head to one side and responded, clearly confused “Who?”
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month August 2016 – Oath of Crows
Seven times she will call our line. Seven times we will answer. So you’d best remain true and faithful young one, for your bloodline is pledged to the Stone. Before he died… again, your late father swore the Oath of Crows – August’s Campaign of the Month! In the name of the Lady and all her Crows, I bid you journey with me to Logres, where we’ll speak with ikabodo, the GameMaster of this monumental campaign.
Thursday Feature – The Thing About Duds
NOT JAR JAR!
Whenever I run a campaign for my troupe, I like to sprinkle in companions from time to time – NPCs who will help the players during their mission, or journey with them for a while. Some GameMasters do this because they want to also be a player in the story they’ve envisioned, others do it because they want to put some sort of safety valve into their game to keep things from going too far off track. I do it because I believe it feels cinematic and helps bring the setting to life.
So of course, my players give me as much grief as they can whenever one of these companions fails to live up to their potential. Maybe the dice were against them and they couldn’t land a single attack. Maybe in my focus to keep the game moving, I forgot about them for a scene or two, or a few rounds of combat and they effectively stood there and did nothing when the party needed them. Maybe their name just sounded funny to the players and became a source of ridicule… Whatever the issue, these dud characters are always the ones the group seems to remember forever.
Sneak Peek – Main Site Editor
Hello everyone, and welcome to another Sneak Peek blog post, where I give you a quick preview of what’s coming our way in the near future here at Obsidian Portal. By now, you’ve no doubt had a chance to see and get a bit of experience with the CKEditor that came as part of the community forum update.
As you might have heard over on the boards, the new editor is coming to the main site as well – part of the overall plan to move towards HTML 5/6 as the primary markup language used for OP campaigns.
