Update Post – October 20, 2024
Hail, Portal People!
The season clock has chimed again, so it’s time for another reckoning. See below for all of the new features and bug fixes that were added to OP since the previous Update Post.
If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, feel free to post them in the Community Forums, or email support directly at [email protected].
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month October 2024: Aloft!
Join the ranks of great literary heroes like Francis Grimm, Tristan Thorn and Darian Frey, fly aboard a merchant airship and explore the world from above! In this homebrew world (and system!), the heroes embark on a great journey that takes them high above the clouds. The characters are deeply entrenched in this medium-fantasy world, with their attachments and goals guiding them as they plan and prepare for their future. Detailed, layered maps, deep roleplay and memorable antagonists – all are waiting for you inside GM rus1001‘s adventure, Aloft!
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? Alter Egos? Life partners? Family? Where can we interact with you on the internet?
I’ve travelled the world and done many jobs – some of which most people only see on TV. I try to tell myself that it’s not just about bringing authenticity to my tabletop and live roleplaying games. Sadly, as a saggy 50-ish adult with a kid, I’m not likely to be making it into space anytime soon, but I’m content with what I’ve done and where I’ve been.
I try to match my fantasy life with some real-life adventure; thus wild-camp and Canadian canoe in Scotland – a dawn on a Scottish loch and watching sea-eagles hunt is as close as I’ll get to my game for real. If anyone wants tips on visiting Scotland, feel free to contact myself through Obsidian Portal.
Tell us about “Aloft” in a nutshell. How did you design the world? What was your inspiration?
Aloft is a medium-fantasy game, where the players have decided to take a gift of a ridiculous airship and found a trading company.
In the last ten years, I’ve run some lengthy war-campaigns that stretched between players in two continents. They were exciting but quite serious games. I wanted something more whimsical. And I was inspired by the latest D&D movie – what fun!
Aloft takes me back to delivering great locations, great NPCs, complex and layered plots to the tunes of Led Zeppelin. Just like I did in the ‘good-old-days’. But with more adult themes than the teenage me would ever had dared.
How regularly do you play, and where do you play? Tell us about your current group of players.
I play online every two weeks, using Zoom. And four times a year in person for weekends, or a whole week on a small Scottish-island rocked by the Atlantic rollers.
The core of my players have been in my games for about 30 years. I play with great friends. But there is always opportunity to add new chums. I had a diverse and wonderful group after co-founding the Gulf Roleplaying Community (https://www.facebook.com/groups/gulfroleplayingcommunity/).
I interview rigorously for my games, as I know they are marmite. If you love them you’ll stay for years or decades; if not, you’ll be gone in three sessions. For people who know me they’ll compete to join the campaigns if a space comes up.
What game system are you using? What made you choose that system? How does that system complement your campaign?
I started life with AD&D 2nd ed. Stayed with that for years, and now run my own homebrew system. It has everything I need: narrative based PC build, and no initiative in combat.
The system allows me to run nerve-wracking combat, either at the personal level or to enact huge battles and campaigns at various levels. More importantly, the system allows me to bring the past 6,000 years of history of my campaign to reality through rules.
Your landing page puts a lot of emphasis on the flying ships, including propeller gifs. It gives a sense of exploration and wandering. Can you tell us what role exploration takes in your campaign? How do you handle it?
Exploration of ideas, themes and places is at the heart of any roleplay, and with my shift from a ‘serious’ campaign to something zestier I’ve given myself space to play as a ref. I also got used to travelling PCs with my sc-fi campaign.
With a whole world before them I rely on my players being the veterans they are. They have fully formed PCs with motivations and attachments to the world (baby dragons, family and businesses); therefore, they don’t just ‘fly off’ randomly. They are also adults, and know that I have a life too, and need a bit of planning to map out and deliver regions. Younger-in-service and more impulsive players are kept in check by the oldster’s social-norms.
And I’ve given myself the luxury of a long campaign. Aloft is likely to last for another 4-5 years. My players may think they have settled in the, Kingdom of The White, but they have much, much more exploration to enjoy and be challenged by.
In your maps section, you have several identical maps with different layers on them. Can you please tell us a little about your campaign setting and the use you make of the map section?
I have two brilliant players who manage the uploading and meta-tagging of OP. They also manage the maps. The maps are used extensively by players/PCs during the games. They are used for different levels of planning, understanding the world, and acting as a prompt and a reminder to the politics of the world. My players use them in and out of time frequently.
How much time is usually spent preparing your game sessions? Describe a typical session.
I must balance my sessions between those who want to swing a sword and roll dice, and those that want political and adult-themed intrigue.
With my DMing experience the more romantic, sexy, political, moving, and personal angles I usually sketch out when doing sport, and they will end up as three bullet points, written in twenty minutes and will last for about 12 hours playing.
Sadly, online roleplaying is much more demanding of a ref’s time. As soon as you want combat or dungeons, you cannot just draw them on a white board. It’s much easier to write for a week of face-to-face than it is for two months of online sessions.
And a lot of that is my fault. I want to make the world engaging and real for the players. I want them dreaming of it and lying awake after sessions obsessing about what has just happened. Therefore, I will construct my own maps in Fractal Worlds, Campaign Cartographer and Photoshop.
I do a lot of 3-d modelling as well. Most of my PCs I will render out in Daz3d, which despite its appalling misogyny, is still a great resource.
On the more creative side I will build very simple models and animations to illustrate a session, such as in Sketchup with a castle. If I have time I will render in Unreal Engine 5, which allows me to prepare videos such as ‘sneaking’ around Sturmburg or even to quickly render out on the fly when players choose a different route with the balloon. You’ll note I don’t do NPCs – UE5 is awesome, but I don’t have the time to master that – yet. I have managed to make one with a moving dinosaur, I’ll post the link here, but I cringe a bit as it’s only my third animation in UE5 and clunks – but it mesmerized my players.
What I do is to show my players my dungeons. These are quite rough and ready, I’ve often only a few evenings, say four, to build or buy models, learn how to use lighting, animation and texturing in Unreal and then pose and photograph them. The players love it and said ‘dungeons’ and the like utterly grip and involve them. My favorite is probably this, with this being a close second (for scale.)
With many of the zeppelins I will sometimes create ‘playable’ UE5 levels that my players can download and run around the interiors – as I said I want my players as immersed (and obsessed) as me.
In your wiki section, you link to several other campaigns. Can you please explain what these campaigns are and how they are connected to Aloft?
Aloft sits as one of my current campaigns in a world I have been reffing and creating since I was 12. I got ‘serious’ about the internal logic of my world at about the age of 21. Since then, no matter where I have lived, or whom I have reffed, I have played in that world. My campaigns tend to last for 4-12 years in real life, with PCs retiring into my stable of NPCs. My world has been shaped by my players and me for about 30 years.
It has great mapping and moons and its technology has evolved over the decades (out of game) and centuries and millennia (in game – I’m not that old).
I am currently running another campaign that is running concurrently with Aloft, which is set in a major city of the world.
How long have you been using Obsidian Portal? What brought you to the site and what keeps bringing you back?
I have been using OP for over 11 years, and I love it. It was the most prominent site like it at the time of joining, and it has weathered well.
If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal helps you with the most?
Helping old and new players explore, in their own time, or during time-ins the rich and decades old world we have been building.
What would you say is the biggest highlight of your game so far (please also provide images and links if possible)?
The biggest highlight of my game has been having the PCs have their own baby dragons for the first time in any of my campaigns. Watching my players get competitive and protective of them has been a joy to watch.
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?
Use great music. I have over 70GB of music that I use in my games. Get to know your music, make up playlists for general types of play (sneaking, battle, the tavern), and then run special sessions to the second using a soundtrack of your own making.
Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure November 1st, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month September 2024: Echo of The Mists
Travel into this dark fantasy world – tune into the dedication of carefully crafted set up designs and story telling, by joining us in talking with shawnrstaub, the GM behind Echo of The Mists, the winner of our Campaign of the Month for September 2024!
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? Alter Egos? Life partners? Family?
Answer: Where can we interact with you on the internet? I am originally from West Virginia until my wife and I moved to Maryland for work and to start our family. My wife teaches 2nd grade and I work as a branch manager at a bank. Before COVID, I played bass in a heavy metal band themed around the “Legend of Zelda” game series called “Master Sword,” touring around the country playing the nerdy convention circuits. I retired from that life after my oldest daughter was diagnosed with cancer, which I’m happy to report, she has made a full recovery and started 2nd grade today at the school my wife teaches. Now, I spend my free time with my family and building terrain for my D&D games as well as 3D resin printing.
How regularly do you play, and where do you play? Tell us about your current group of players.
Answer: My D&D group is actually a really great story. I only started playing D&D around 2021/2022 when I was invited as a player to a game hosted by my former band mate and her husband and two other couples (sadly, my wife has no interest in TTRPGs). I’ve always enjoyed building and creating cool nerdy things (in my Zelda band, I learned how do leather working so we could wear custom armor on stage). So for that group, I built a custom gaming table with a 55′ TV screen in the center so we could use digital maps – this was before I started building 3D terrain.
After posting pictures of my gaming table, I was messaged by two separate Fraternity Brothers that I’ve not spoken with in nearly a decade telling me how much they liked my table. They shared with me that they had never played D&D, but never had a group or the confidence to try it out. So I reached out to 2 other Fraternity brothers who I knew played, and the five of us started a game with myself in the position of DM! What started out as a Ravenloft one shot turned into an full-blown campaign that continues to this day. Life is busy, however, so we only get to play once or twice a month, alternating between in person and digital games depending on everyone’s availability.
Tell us about “Echo of the Mists” in a nutshell. How did you design the campaign? What was your inspiration?
Answer: Echo of the Mists is a homebrew campaign based in the Ravenloft setting combining classic Ravenloft lore, 5e lore, or homebrew content (whatever speaks to me or works in the moment). Although it has yet to be revealed to my players, they will eventually learn that an “echo” refers to the manifestations of specific, powerful entities that exist throughout the multiverse of D&D as “variants” of those entities. One such entity has unwillingly trapped itself within the cage of Ravenloft and is using its power to draw in (and devour) its own echoes in an effort to gain more power and escape.
Why did you choose Ravenloft as the setting for your campaign? How does the setting complement your plot?
Answer: I love vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and all things spooky, so Ravenloft was a natural choice. Admittedly, our game is more “dark fantasy” than “horror,” but it still allows for me to explore dark themes and spooky stories.
Your wiki section details a lot of domains, but some don’t have a wiki page. Do you add the details of these domains as the players move from one domain to another?
Answer: There are A LOT of Domains in Ravenloft – too many for me to possibly develop between my family life, work, and creating terrain, painting minis, and creating content. So I develop the world as the players move through it and help guide what needs to be developed and what doesn’t. I also love having my players contribute to the world, so whenever I can, I have them make decisions about the world and characters within it. For example, there are times I’ll ask my players to create features in the world like a family estate or a describe the people from their past. I’ll take their ideas and integrate them into the stories, scenes, and settings that they will explore.
Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition has relatively few Ravenloft books. Are you using any materials from previous editions for your domains?
Answer: Oh yes, the older lore has lots of great content. I routinely incorporate “canon” material into my game, but love to fill in the gaps with my own homebrew. I’ll even try and marry the old and new lore on occasion. For example, in 5e they gender bend the ruler of Falkovnia – Vlad Drakov – into Vladeska Drakov. In my game, Valdeska is the daughter of the original Dark Lord who has systematically butchered her many, many siblings to take the reigns of power as the undisputed ruler of the land.
How much time is usually spent preparing your game sessions? Describe a typical session.
Answer: Its hard to say how long I prepare because I do it in bite sized chunks after my kids go to bed while I’m watching Netflix with the wife! I’ll write it little notes and ideas to myself and come back to it later. As any DM knows, some content you make gets completely bypassed by players, but I’ll often “recycle” that content. The old catacombs that the players never explored becomes and underground fortress of a necromancer of laboratory to a mad scientist. I’ve learned that if you “save it for later,” later never comes!
How long have you been using Obsidian Portal? What brought you to the site and what keeps bringing you back?
Answer: I think I started in 2022 as a way to store my ideas and content. I would never be able to remember everything, so having a man repository that is organized the way I like it is super helpful. I’m 99% sure my players don’t even use this wiki, but it sure is helpful for me to keep my world straight and organized.
If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal helps you with the most?
Answer: Organization for sure. Visuals help me remember things far better than names and texts, so having things arranged exactly the way that makes sense to me is very helpful.
What would you say is the biggest highlight of your game so far (please also provide images and links if possible)?
Answer: Anytime I can get the reaction of “I REALLY hate that guy” from my players regarding an antagonist feels like an absolute victory to me. Also, when my players geek-out over my table setups, it makes all the work I put into them worth it.
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?
The game and story are better if you don’t stubbornly cling to what you think SHOULD happen, but instead let the story naturally progress. The classic saying is that no story survives the encounter with the players, so let that inspire you. I often will come at a setting with the mentality of “what would happen if the players did NOT intervene?” Then, I use the choices the players make inform what DOES happen, and more often than not, its unexpected and better than what I would have planned. I love not knowing what will happen, so every session is exciting and rewarding for everyone at the table.
Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure September 1st, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month August 2024: Freeing Phandalin
Greetings, brave souls and seekers of tales untold! Today, we embark on a journey into the heart of a fantastical realm where dragons soar and heroes rise. Join us in talking with Bortas, the GM behind Freeing Phandalin, the winner of our Campaign of the Month for August 2024!
I want to jump straight into your setting. Phandalin is a location I am sure many folks are at least passingly familiar with, given that, what drew you to run your game here?
I’ve ran LMoP and really had a great time, and in reviewing the newer starter box, DoIP, I noted the questing system is more “West Marches” style, putting a lot of agency on the players to pick the sort of adventure they want, with far less railroading involved. The plot sort of develops out of ‘order,’ but it develops in a way the players pick.
Next, tell us a bit about yourself as a GM. How long have you been running games? I notice you have a few other games, some in the same system, some in Pathfinder, do you have a favorite system? Lastly on this topic, do you get a chance to play much or do you prefer to live behind the screen?
I started playing in 2011, and almost immediately started writing for my own campaign. I’ve done homebrew campaigns, and I’ve run prebuilts, both have differing appeals. I don’t get to be a player as much as I like (no one can relate, I’m sure!); every couple of years I get into a campaign, but I’ve never been in one that last longer than 6 or so sessions. I like systems that are sort of vanilla fantasy, they are flexible enough that we can add our own weirdness on top of, but universal enough that no one has to be a rules expert.
Switching gears for a moment here. Tell us a little about why you chose 5e for this game (as well as some of your others)? Do you have any homebrew you typically include in 5e games or anything special just for this one?
I’m fond of 5e, as it feels like you can ramp up or down the ‘crunchiness’ of it depending on player ability, even in the same game. My buddy can get really into utilizing complex mechanics for the fun/silly, but his daughter is likely to just move and blast 🙂 As for home brewing, I’m not great at developing a game world that comes out at the table, so I do less of that these days, and let basic settings handle the heavy lifting, let me focus on engaging encounters.
I love the mix of character art in this game, there is a very consistent feel to it yet the individual characters are quite distinct. How do you come by it? Made by yourself or a player, AI tools, borrowed from the internet?
Artwork most of the basic graphics for the site I built with the community experts, but if it looks like a graphic, I probably just used google image search. I do tend to run it through the same filter and crop them similarly for consistency. The character artwork is using the HeroForge system to make minis, then just a screenshot :-). I find that you can take pretty different image art styles, but if they both have a sepia filter and similar contrast, it’ll work out.
What’s your group like and how do you play? In person, remote, a mixture? How did you assemble your party?
I’m fortunate enough to play in person. I’m even more fortunate, in that I only have to schedule with one other family. Our gaming group started as my partner inviting another couple, but almost immediately our oldest kids wanted in, and after a couple of months, the two younger kids wanted in. So….. I have too many players, 3 adults and 4 kids…. But they get along, and less adult scheduling disasters. As for summoning the crew, the adults get together and cry over our calendars for a while, before agreeing on a date way too far in the future. Adulting sucks.
The look and feel of your site is fantastic, seeing as you’ve been on Obsidian Portal for a while, I’d love to know how long it took you to nail this one down, also if you have any tips or tricks that might be useful to others when it comes to planning and execution of such a stellar site we’d love to hear them!
Re site design: I spent a lot of 2016-2018 in the community section of this site. My goal when I first started learning was simple: to resent a medieval feeling, while on a website – replace the feeling of ‘tech’ with ‘magic’. This sort of informed every design decision: the right is on parchment, character images expand when focused on, etc. OP really helped me discover CSS and what it could do. I worked really hard on my first OP site. But after that campaign concluded, I realized a bunch of my design work had been too specific for that campaign. I took that campaign’s CSS and whittled a bunch out, my goal updated to being able to take just the CSS and drop it into any campaign and have that campaign be transformed, without customization needed. My only advice to people learning: look at other people’s code. Look at your site at different browsers. Look at it with different browser widths. You can do it, AND we want to see it!
Shifting back to the game itself, do you or your players have any great, or terrible, moments you’d like to highlight?
The party had come upon an orc-infested shrine. At the start of the round, they rolled an escalating doom die (each round, add +1, bad things happen at high numbers), more orcs would spawn, a mini boss, an environmental disaster (collapse of some kind). Anyway, the orcs just keep coming and coming, and after a few rounds, they started trying new things. From my perspective, there was no exit condition. They tried new things and they worked. When they elevated above move smash move, the orcs spit out some bosses and that was the end.
Looking through the reports (Adventure Logs) for this game, I adore the use of elements like “(text missing)” as well as the odd image. Is that a collaborative effort or do you manage the chronicling all by yourself?
I’m glad you picked up on the “text missing” – i utilize that to cover a section where I could write a lengthy description… that doesn’t necessarily serve to advance the story, even if it would recap highlight. I do all of the cataloging, so partly it is about saving me effort. But I also review the last log with the crew before we play, and this is better done in a short, punchy way, so I try to write my logs as very dense highlights. The parts that were in our imagination when we did it, I try to leave in our imagination and instead remind us, rather than tell us.
Famous last question. What’s a bit of your GM secret sauce you think others should know about?
Secret GM Sauce: TTRPGs are not players vs DM. You celebrate their wins, feel mourn their defeats. Your job is to present tough problems, not solutions – present them a problem you don’t know how to solve and then lean into their creative genius. Remember your job in response Is very very simple: “that just works” “that could never work” “hmmm, I’m not sure, and if you failed, that could be bad – let the dice decide!” Don’t jump to the last option “roll dice” first – your world makes far more sense to people if the obvious failure points obviously fail. Or the trivial tasks don’t warrant dice. When we operate inside of set of rules (more so if we aren’t super familiar with the rules), it’s easy to say no: but your job is “yes, and!” And…. If you’re behind the screen, you’re a servant and hero to me <3
Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure September 1st, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!
Update Post – July 20, 2024
Hail, Portal People!
The season clock has chimed again, so it’s time for another reckoning. See below for all of the new features and bug fixes that were added to OP since the previous Update Post.
If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, feel free to post them in the Community Forums, or email support directly at [email protected].
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month July 2024: Ars Magica, Umbra Quercus Saga
“Gather your grogs and call upon the covenant of Umbra Quercus, our new Campaign of the Month winner! At the helm, the madirishman and his mystical magi, who have collaborated for several years to produce a fascinating fable steeped in deep lore, strange sorceries, and a setting and story that reads like a great adventure novel. Wander onward to gain a glimpse of this admirable Ars Magica campaign.”
You’ve worked professionally with Atlas Games so you probably have a better understanding of Ars Magica than most. For those who don’t know the game, can you briefly describe the system and setting?
Hoo boy, you’re really in danger of putting me in full proselytize mode when asking about Ars (ArM is the semi-official shorthand I guess, but we always just call it “Ars”). I discovered the game in the mid-90s or so when it was Third Edition and immediately fell in love. It’s my favorite setting/system and our current saga is the sixth I’ve played in.
My initial draw was undoubtedly the magic system, which has rightfully been much acclaimed. It’s incredibly flexible and after five editions, remarkably internally consistent. Spells are generally in the form of “verb + direct object”: a Technique and a Form, and your magus character will have varying scores in the Techniques and Forms depending on what you choose to specialize in. Because of the setting, these are in Latin, but once you get past that, it’s remarkably easy to design spells that are consistent in power relative to one another. Your standard Fireball (more prosaically named Ball of Abysmal Flame in Ars) would be a type of Creo Ignem (‘I create fire’) spell, but if your score is high in Creo you might also use it to effectively Creo Corpus (‘I create body’) to heal someone. (Note there is no resurrection in this game, but magi typically live many years beyond those of normal men through longevity rituals.) Likewise, laboratory activities are well defined and tell you how to make new spells, magic items, etc. While you gain experience points like in other games to advance your skills, it is generally these lab activities that increase your power. Over years of game time you pursue these to achieve truly epic magical abilities.
Secondly I am a bit of a Medieval history buff and while you could use the rules to play in, say, Middle Earth, the default setting is “Mythic Europe” of 1220 AD: basically our historical Europe, but the things people believed then are literally true. Magic exists, demons corrupt the unwary, faeries perplex travelers, you encounter angels and dragons, etc. I particularly love trying to reinterpret actual history through the lens of this setting. Sure, the Mongols sacked all of Medieval Rus but spared the great city of Novgorod. Was it because the Russian ground became too swampy for them to attack the city? Did Novgorod avoid destruction by paying tribute to the invaders? Or maybe magic was used to influence the general’s mind and convinced him to spare it?
Yet slapped onto this quasi-historical Europe is a completely ahistorical political entity. All the magi are members of the secretive Order of Hermes, which governs how magi may interact with not only each other but the “Mundanes,” as people without the Gift are known. (Beats “Muggles,” IMO.) So you can also milk a lot of great stories out of these interactions, even though in our current game we decided to set our saga in the Hermetic boonies specifically to tone down this particular dimension of the game.
What is the main story, so far?
Our characters are magi fresh out of apprenticeship who have stepped into a mystery. Instead of founding their own covenant, they were invited to join an existing one founded by a trio of powerful magi. Yet not only have these founders disappeared, the wizard who recruited them was likewise nowhere to be found when they arrived at their new home.
Their covenant home is a small island on a remote lake with impressive fortifications in Livonia (modern-day Latvia), where German crusaders are fighting against native tribes to Christianize the last pagan part of Europe. The players have learned that the covenant has some connection to a prophecy about the destruction of the Order of Hermes, and the founding magi apparently were there to investigate. So finding their predecessors has taken on a new urgency.
Just recently they have unearthed the remains of one of the founding magus’ apprentices. Speaking to her shade, they have gained new insight into the last known appearance of two of the three founders. She was seemingly sacrificed by their as yet unknown enemies; what is less clear is the nature of the involvement of one of those founding wizards.
Along the way, the young magi have encountered menacing packs of wolves, a mysterious bird woman, and a faerie living in their bathhouse. They have chased an escaped pig, parlayed with mudmen, and encountered a mystical site that seems to produce doppelgängers of people under certain circumstances…
Umbra Quercus involves a good deal of collaboration, shared tasks, and organization with your gaming group, where Obsidian Portal is only one tool among many. Could you explain how your group typically uses OP, the campaign forums, Discord, Dropbox, email, and any other tools and tricks to help you play the game and coordinate all those wonderful tales that we get to read in your adventure logs?
OP has been critical for our many and varied campaigns. We’re big on Troupe play and there’s a lot of collaborative world-building. We also seem to favor somewhat Byzantine plots. :^) OP gives us a centralized place to store character stats, discuss rules or logistics by thread, keep track of when our next game session is, and more. Considering those Byzantine plots, I think the Adventure Log is among the most useful for keeping track of just what the heck happened last week or three months ago,
We started as a face-to-face group but like many others, COVID-19 forced us to move to Discord for actual game play; we’ve only met a few times in person since. Discord, however, has its advantages: it’s easy to share maps, links to web pages, and other resources in the middle of a game session. Like OP, there’s a paper trail as well; you can look back at the chat log and remind yourself of important details. I won’t dwell on my failed attempt to use voice modification software to simulate speaking to the dead…
Ars can get kind of complicated and so we have used numerous aids like Excel spreadsheets and files for (the now-defunct) Metacreator. Dropbox and Google Drive are great ways to let us share those files as well as PDFs for rules or character sheets.
Google Maps has also been huge in allowing us to share a map with all of the important sites of the campaign: other covenants of the Order, towns and fortresses, mystical sites, and so forth. Useful for translating those real-world sites into saga locations, and even ballparking travel distances. Take a look at our Map of Fortifications and Mystical Sites of the Region.
What moments during the campaign stand out to you and your group as real highlights?
In “The Crossroads,” the magi and their grogs avenge a young boy and rescue a local girl from the clutches of a corrupt Sword Brother by slaying him, only to encounter him limping down the road towards them only a few hours later.
In “The Evil Medieval Weevil Upheaval” (Beta Storyguide Ted has all the best names), the magi encounter a demonic centipede with a human face that casts a dire influence upon the innocent men and women of the local village with its ugly glare.
In “Puerulus Amissa,” the magi and their grogs, using earth, fire, mental manipulation, and induced hallucinations, protect a young Russian boy with the Gift from a group of soldiers determined to take him back to his harsh uncle.
In “This Little Piggy Went to Market,” a covenant guard is suddenly and mysteriously overcome with admiration for a piglet belonging to some German soldiers, and runs away with it, to the chagrin of his companions and causing all sorts of legal problems. If your game doesn’t feature a pig chase, you’re doing something wrong!
What are the advantages and disadvantages (if any) to having more than one Storyguide in an Ars Magica campaign?
The Troupe style of play was baked into Ars from its early days, and this was something of a revelation for me. Due to time constraints imposed by schoolwork, I was used to the idea of rotating DMs all the way back to playing AD&D 2e in college, but Ars was the first game I encountered that was really pretty much designed to have people play different characters depending on the needs of the story. In fact, the characters’ covenant (where they live together and practice their magical arts, be it a castle, sailing ship, or traveling caravan) is really the central character of any saga. Instead of having to have everyone meet in a tavern and then get hired to rescue the princess, the covenant concept is a natural impetus for driving all manner of stories, and the covenant itself evolves just like the player characters do.
Each player has a Magus—the most powerful characters in the game—and a Companion: a character of note who has some reason for affiliation with the magi. (These you might think of as the other “character classes”: a knight errant, a traveling troubadour, a curious monk, etc.) If it makes more sense for your companion to participate in a story, you might play them instead of your magus. Then there are the Grogs: background characters that may be swapped between players when they’re not playing either of the above. Think foot soldiers, the blacksmith, or that book merchant who occasionally visits.
This means even the GM gets to play every once in a while, and while there’s always the dangers inherent in design by committee, I’ve found that if you have multiple creative and knowledgeable people working to build the game world, it’s often more detailed and interesting than anything one could come up with on one’s own. It’s certainly more satisfying for the players to have a voice in the bigger story. It also helps when you have a group of busy professionals that no one person is on the hook all the time for creating stories! To avoid any problems, the Storyguides typically have ownership of their own story arcs, and any story abutting one of these arcs is talked through in advance. This also keeps spoilers to a minimum.
Ars Magica has what some players consider the best (or at least the most interesting) magic system in table-top roleplaying. Would you agree with that idea and why?
It’s definitely the most flexible simulationist system I’ve run across, as I think becomes clear when you think about my description above. In fact, it gets kind of hard to give it up if you go back to another system (A brief primer worth mentioning). We played a group of wizards in our last (non-Ars) game and while it was a lot of fun, we kept saying in many situations, “well, if this were Ars, we could…” While your characters will have a set list of spells they can cast relatively effortlessly, the system allows you to spontaneously “invent” spells at a cost of Fatigue. Ars Magica Fifth Edition has a robust set of guidelines that allow you to be creative with magic in any situation, yet also tell you what your limits are. Want to dig a hole magically? You look at your Perdo (I destroy) Terram (earth) scores. Want to dig it in stone? Well, the rules tell you that’s harder. Similarly for parameters like how big the hole is or how long an illusion spell lasts. It allows players to be very imaginative in coming up with magical solutions. (“Well, I don’t think I have the scores to fling my jailer across the room, but I might be able to levitate those keys off the hook on the wall…”)
Sounds like magi can do anything, right? Well, with the right scores, they can. But they bleed just like everyone else.
Also, Ars Magica’s best days may yet be ahead: Atlas has announced the Ars Magica Definitive Edition for this fall, which will revise and consolidate the current Fifth Edition rules, but perhaps most importantly, inaugurate an open license which will allow for a host of new materials.
By way of your Obsidian Portal profile page, we discovered that you’ve done a great deal of wonderful character sheet design work over the last quarter-century or so (http://www.mad-irishman.net) and generously shared them with the gaming world. What elements make up a very good character sheet, in your opinion? Or, to put it another way, what common problems do you find on some standard character sheets that often need to be fixed?
It’s gratifying that people have found my stuff useful…and my site afforded me an appearance in Dragon magazine with a picture of me dressed as an Andorian, so there’s that.
Designing character sheets is a bit like designing user interfaces for web pages. You want to have the information you need at your fingertips. Typically, sheets focus on information that is unique to your character, but sometimes there are frequently-accessed rules that everyone needs to hand.
Character sheets for RPGs used to be almost an afterthought. Typically I could open an RPG book, flip to the last page, and see something that was like the last thing anyone worked on and seemingly created by someone who hadn’t actually played the game. Having desktop publishing software at hand, at first I was just using it to create copies of existing sheets that I could print rather than photocopy, but it was only natural I started making sheets for how I played the game and what information I thought I needed to record.
But people have different needs, one size does not fit all, and games have certain options players may choose to adopt or ignore. This is why some of my later sheets utilize PDF layers: by toggling these layers on or off, the same space on the page can be used for different blocks of information, or at least different styles.
As someone with gaming industry experience in writing, layout, font design, and even a bit of cartography — what do you love most about the creative process with regard to games?
I guess the problem with answering that is I love all of it. There are many games and gaming products I adore, and some of them may have had, say, a great story, but looked like they were produced on a 1940s typewriter and then Xeroxed. But when I think of some of my favorite products, many of them feature multiple impressive design dimensions.
AD&D’s Desert of Desolation series? An evocative setting replete with Jim Holloway artwork. Woodcuts by Eric Hotz define Ars Magica and Hârn. Similarly, where would the World of Greyhawk be without Darlene’s cartography? And nothing says “Gamma World” to me like that Shatter font, or anything Middle Earth and an uncial font (thanks, MERP and Ralph Bakshi).
When Victory Games’ James Bond 007 RPG came out, I was struck by the loving *design* of the products: prop handouts replete with the “For Your Eyes Only” folders, eye-catching layout, and a splash of color in the text itself…which in the mid-80s, was quite the change. This was all *on top of* innovative rules like ease factor bidding and chase scenes.
All of these areas of design are great fun as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps a more extreme example of me having that kind of fun (also outing my compulsion to compile information I guess) is my Ars Magica “Master Grimoire” that I have been compiling for the last 20 years. It contains all of the spells and spell guidelines from the official Ars Fifth Edition products, but also those from earlier editions, fanzines, web sites, and so on. Invaluable for our game play. But of course I also had to lay it out exactly like an official Atlas Games product and mimic their trade dress. It currently weighs in at 455 pages! It’s pretty awesome, if I do say so myself…I just wish I could share it with everyone, but unfortunately it uses like a million different people’s intellectual property.
Anyway, I guess this is why I’m master of none of these areas but have dabbled in them all. :^)
This question is for those among us looking for new RPGs to play and hidden gems outside of the mainstream. Out of all the RPGs that you have played or own (and I know there’s a lot), what are some of the lesser-known game systems or supplements that you might recommend and why?
Man, another toughie, where I’ll want to go on and on. You can look at my other OP campaigns or the list of games I own (over at my Mad Irishman page) and get some feel for a few of them. I do have a ridiculously large RPG collection that includes many unplayed games to go with all those unpainted miniatures. <eyeroll>
Another setting I love—maybe my second favorite—is that of Space: 1889. Victorian adventure with scientific romance elements. Like Ars, it’s great for taking real-world history and giving it a twist, just sci-fi this time. The Great Game played out on the surface of Mars, with native cloudships dueling with Earth flying gunboats. You can also probably find it in a rule system you like: it’s been through its own GDW system, Savage Worlds, Ubiquity, and most recently, the Empyrean system.
While we’ve played that, one that’s still on my bucket list is Lace & Steel by Kitsune Press. Swashbuckling fantasy a la The Three Musketeers, but in a more fantastic world with centaurs (sorry, half-horses), ogres, and pixies. I love the mechanic for conflict: there are card decks to simulate fencing, sorcery, and that most dangerous of duels, verbal repartee!
If you like the idea of playing wizards in a quasi-historical setting, but like your rules lite, take a look at Magonomia: Renaissance wizards using the FATE system.
2300AD. Pendragon. Iron Heroes. I still want to play a straight Western game that doesn’t have steampunk, magic, or zombies. Many great games out there to try. The World of Synnibar is not on this list.
As is tradition, Obsidian Portal always loves to ask if you have any tips or sage advice to share for those of us who want to create and run games like this one?
There’s already tons of great gaming advice out there, so I’ll start with a focus on Ars and other “quasi-historical” games.
Real world history is your friend. You don’t have to be beholden to it, but it’s great to mine for ideas, since you don’t have to go to the library anymore to find out everything about Hungarian mythology or Venetian history. You can pluck many great story ideas straight from Internet resources on these topics and others. Then just think about how things might play out a little differently if magic or sci-if tech were involved…
I’d also put in a pitch for collaborative world building. If your players are game, you’ll get more buy-in from them if they’re all involved to some extent in setting the story. Lean on each player’s strengths and interests, and outsource some of that design and bookkeeping.
Pax, and may your Stress dice roll lots of ones!
Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure August 1st, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!
