Tag Archives: Obsidian Portal
OBSIDIAN PORTAL CAMPAIGN OF THE YEAR 2024- WINNER’S ANNOUNCED!!!!!
A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR WINNERS!
FIRST PRIZE:
KERYTH987 WITH WRATH OF THE HIGHBORNE!!!
RUNNER UP: HUMANNOYD with CYBERPUNK 2077:FATE ACCELERATED!
(winners will be contacted by OP staff to connect you with your prizes)
It’s about that time again- time to celebrate some of the very best of our OP Community! 11 great RPG sites, each awarded the prestigious “OBSIDIAN PORTAL CAMPAIGN OF THE MONTH” award in 2024, stand in line to be considered for the OBSIDIAN PORTAL CAMPAIGN OF THE YEAR 2024! And YOU get to decide!
THE DETAILS:
Voting will open Monday December 2nd, is open to ALL, and will close Monday December 9th. The winner will be announced on Friday December 13th. Check Obsidian Portal, Facebook and Twitter for further details.
THE CONTENDERS:
January 2024: More Things in Heaven and Earth
February 2024: Cyberpunk 2077 Fate Accelerated
March 2024: Wrath of the Highborn
April 2024: Season of Strife
May 2024: The World of Elurah
June 2024: The Planewalker’s Guild
July 2024: Ars Magica, Umbra Quercus Saga
August 2024: Freeing Phandalin
September 2024: Echo of The Mists
October 2024: Aloft!
November 2024: Dark Conflagration
THE PRIZES:
This year we have some AMAZING sponsors including Paizo, Killjester, Crit Academy and Syrinscape!
1st Place
- 1 year subscription to OP
- Paizo: Digital copies of Pathfinder Second Edition and Starfinder First Edition Beginner Box PDFs as well as a PDF of Abomination Vaults (Pathfinder Second Edition or Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, winner’s preference)
- Killjester: A physical Copy of Sanctimonious Slimes vs Expired Epicures
- Crit Academy: Digital Copy of Memorable Monsters
- Syrinscape: A subscription (Supersyrin trial vouchers, each for two months x 2)
Runner Up
- 1 year subscription to OP
- Killjester: A physical Copy of Sanctimonious Slimes vs Expired Epicures
- Syrinscape: Syrinscape: A subscription (Supersyrin trial voucher, for two months)
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month November 2024: Dark Conflagration
“In a system on the Terra side of the Great Rift this group in service to an Inquisitor must prove their worth through grit and valor to hold back the closing despair. Join them as you pour through this restricted Inquisitorial system and read along with their adventures in their own words.” Please join us in this month’s interview for COTM Dark Conflagration with our GM Medacia and Kenkewl00!
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 Warhammer?
We have a group of 3 full time players, one part time player, and the GM. All of the players are lifelong TTRPG players from various professional backgrounds like healthcare, finance, baking, and theater. The GM tailored a short list of concepts for each player and let them choose their favorite. You can see the flavor of the character and the style of the author in each entry into the Inquisitorial Journal System.
The group has been going with varying members for over 8 years, starting with a long-running Vampire the Masquerade game. A few of us got into (or back into) WH40k about a few years ago when they came out with the box sets for pre-built armies, and enjoy the more miniature-focused gameplay.
Warhammer 40K’s atmosphere of hopelessness populated with great acts of heroism is what drew the GM to the system. The grind of ten millennia of slow collapse and bureaucracy combined with the terror of the events surrounding the Great Rift create a need for sacrifice and courage to fight back the encroaching darkness.
How often do you play, and how do you generally do so (online, in-person, hybrid)?
In-Person, once every 2 weeks is the schedule. Occasionally we’ll miss a scheduled session due to real-world obligations or add a session in-between when we can.
For folks that are perhaps less familiar with the world of 40k, where does your game fit into the grim dark?
It’s set after the universe got split by the Great Rift as Cadia fell, in a GM-created star system on the Terra-side of the divide. It’s inspired from various events going on throughout the 40K universe in the early part of M42. The players are part of a small group in the service of an Inquisitor in the Consus System, near the Pariah Nexus.
I love the various art on your site, from Characters to Items, Adventure Logs to Wiki Pages. How do you create/source the artwork, and do you have a secret for keeping the feel so consistent across your whole site?
I chose a stylized realism for the overall theme. I sifted through many AI art sites and styles before settling on one that captured my look. I’ve used a lot of iterations of a single concept before settling on any image that makes its way to the site. As I learned more about how the AI responded to particular prompts I’ve been able to achieve my desired outcomes more efficiently. I’ve also tracked down specific pieces (like the propaganda posters) from existing art and included my favorites in entries or slideshows where appropriate. I’ve created or modified images and run it through a program that creates short videos for the cover page to create a more dynamic feel, hoping to give the viewer a more engaging experience like they’re breaking in to the Inquisitorial Journal System.
As you’ve been on Obsidian Portal for quite some time, what is your favorite campaign wrangling feature?
I have mostly used OP as a way to stay consistent as a GM – once its online, it’s easy to reference and I don’t have to deal with lost papers. I should probably use more of the functions truth be told. I like the session reminders, and the forum to post little things in-between sessions to keep players and fans engaged.
Swapping to your intense site for a moment, where did you come up with the style design you have?
I want to give the OP a more exciting feel than the standard campaign designs that I see. I want it to be an experience, and I want the players to sign in and make updates feeling like their characters journaling their horrifying experiences fighting the Chaos cultists. I also want fans to get excited to see the next update, to present a taste of how things would look in the collapsing world of 40K. I want them to feel like they’ve snuck into this secret archive and they’re watching the story evolve from afar. To inspire them to create their own star system, their own Inquisitorial warband and fight off the wickedness of a violent, indifferent universe.
I love your adventure logs, I see that one of your players is involved with them as well. How do you split that load?
Mendacia handles most of the details of the Logs – the game notes, the notable events/locations/people, that sort of thing. kenkewl00 gets involved by occasionally putting a placeholder Log in there for Mendacia to edit later, since one way to encourage player involvement we are utilizing is to give out in-game goodies (extra wrath tokens, given our system) for players to put notes from their characters perspective. kenkewl00, as a normally-GM type, tend to put more detailed notes than others, but the Ogryn puts a lot of time in to write the log in a low-int style since they are “in character journals”.
Back to your game, can you share an example of a particularly memorable moment from your campaign?
Lots of epic moments for a campaign that’s only six months old, plenty of acts of heroism and bloody conflict that I could reference here. However, I think the bright spots in this violent, grim saga are the personal exchanges between the Inquisition Pact members. The intro session for Roland (The Navis Imperialis Pilot) and Smasha (Militarum Ogryn) cemented their dynamic and it led to some great roleplaying. In the Calamitous Intent session this plays out with the Ogryn’s massive bulk and clumsiness enraging an entire bar full of patrons, effectively chasing him with torch and pitchfork. A few blocks of pursuit later the noble-born Pilot puts himself between the Ogryn and the crowd and has to use every trick up his sleeve (charm, bribery, his Navis uniform) to calm them. There’s a sense of obligation between Roland and Smasha, just the prior session Smasha had put himself between Roland and the blades and lasers of cultists.
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?
1. Don’t over-prepare. Set up the big detail points, but let the players choose how they get there. They’ll almost always surprise you.
2. When you’re getting started, don’t fall in love with your NPCs. Put out a large amount of them initially, and see which ones that players gravitate towards. I’ve had so many throwaway NPCs that wound up being central to the story because they meshed so well with the troupe.
3. Critical successes can lead to epic moments. So can critical failures. On both sides of the table! Make the most of these opportunities to engage the table and make memories.
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!
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month June 2024: The Planewalker’s Guild
After escaping the shattering sky, why not travel the multiverse with a group of Planewalkers as they move from Sigil to the Plane of Air in search of a notorious serial killer. Join up with previous “Campaign of the Year” winner, Dungeon_Master_Loki, and let him guide you through transitive planes, observing the “Rule of Three” and the “Unity of Rings, as part of The Planewalker’s Guild, in a pay-to-play campaign that has been in existence for a year and still has spaces for intrepid adventurers, as they travel to discover the Riven City of Bleurophil.
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?
Well, I’m an 8th generation French Creole from New Orleans and I’ve been gaming since the late 1970s. When Hurricane Ida hit I was an idiot and rode it out (NEVER try to ride out a Cat 4. Period). I relocated to Cincinnati, a city I had lived in for a few years about a decade ago when my ex wife was in school.
Professionally I work as a freelance game designer and copywriter, I run paid games online and at conventions, and I teach Introduction to Game Design at the University of Cincinnati. I also spent many years prior to that working in music and in online PR. I even worked through the pipe bombing at the Centennial Olympics in Atlanta.
When not gaming I am a huge media buff – music, books, film, etc – with a long standing love of science fiction, satire, and what my friends refer to as “the weird shit”. I have a huge love of alternate histories and time travel stories (I have every surviving episode of Doctor Who for instance). This obviously shines through in my game design work as well, much of it being planar strangeness. I also love to cook, although I must admit I rarely do so when it is just me.
Alter egos? Well, I got the nickname Loki about 25 years ago while working at the House of Blues and have used it as my byline since if that counts. I do have a long suffering girlfriend, who plays Lenata the cleric in The Spelljoined campaign. The vast majority of my family is in the New Orleans area back home, except for Puck and Gremlin, my atrocious felines and editorial assistants.
Find me online? While often in need of updates, Planejammer.com is my main home on the web. My most used channel is Discord (DungeonMasterLoki). If you want me to run a game for you or join one of my paid games / campaigns you can find me through my profile on Start Playing Games and on GRIPNR. I’m on Facebook, but don’t often friend people I have not met in person or had extensive interactions with. (This is especially true with the combination of election season and use of AI rising as the year progresses.) 36 of my titles, books I’ve authored or contributed to, are here on DriveThruRPG and I am deeply thankful for every sale and review!
Please explain the basic concept of your game plan for The Planewalker’s Guild. The game seems to have been running for a year. Give us a few hints about the Planescape scenario.
Most of the games I run take place in a shared multiverse, usually centered around Spelljammer and Planescape. The Guild game is one of those. Massive changes are afoot across the planes, extremely destructive (one might even say apocalyptic) changes.
The past year of play started our heroes out as new initiates of the Guild in the wake of Planescape’s Faction War. One of their early missions had them become eyewitnesses to an interplanar incursions that “shattered the sky”. They are currently in the city of Bluerophil on the Plane of Air tracking down a serial killer during the equivalent of Maridi Gras. They have to stop him from completing a cycle of ritualistic murders that will call down the Planebreaker. Future adventures will vary thematically as the [lot of this game and the overall metaplot evolve. I predict between two and four more years for the campaign if we maintain a twice a month schedule bringing any PCs that make it to a solid 20th level.
While there are missions for the Guild I essentially run sandbox style player driven games. RPGs are collaborative storytelling when at their best, so the contributions of my players not only determine the overall direction but also create lasting effects on the in-game universe.
The opening page of your campaign says “Contact Dungeon Master Loki to book your game today,” with the link leading to a professional Game Master page under the “StartPlaying” banner. Please share with us how all of this works.
Well, like many freelancers, income is sparse and times are more often tight than not. Running paid games for companies at Cons and online games through Start Playing Games and GRIPNR helps keep the list on in the design mines. Since the game takes place in my ongoing shared multiverse that means I have hundreds of pages of background info, NPCs, etc available instantly on Obsidian Portal when I need them. All my players share the trait of zigging when I expect them to zag, so being able to pull up everything when they do is invaluable.
As to how it works, I post games online as I create them and those people looking for DMs contact me directly through the site. Cost per session is up front as are reviews of the DM by former players and a capsule review of what the game or campaign is. I run a safe table – LGBTQIA friendly and accepting of all and I require my players to abide by that. Both of the online platforms mentioned above also take care of billing and payment, allowing me to focus on creating something worthy of said payment.
When a new player joins the game I start with the player’s concept, and I encourage people to go big with ideas, which I then help them translate into an effective build. I then get them to write of a background which I then tweak in order to root them more firmly in my setting and provide hooks for personalized subplots down the line. Using Obsidian Portal we have a central place for character sheets and a wiki for the “in use” house rules.
I know there are some that find the idea of paying for a DM to be anathema, but there are a LOT of folks out there who cannot find one, have no one nearby, or other valid reasons. Besides when paying they can demand a certain level of expertise on the DM side of the screen.
Presumably, your games are all run ONLINE. You mention that you primarily use a “Theatre of the Mind” approach, but that you also use battle maps and tokens. You have listed platforms like Discord, Skype and Zoom. You also have “Owlbear Rodeo” listed. How much do you use a platform like Owlbear Rodeo, and how useful is it to your team?
I started playing in the late 70s and Theater of the Mind is the old school way. If you do it right it makes for fantastic immersion. I usually only pull out battle maps on Owlbear Radio when it is an extremely complex combat or a massive narrative moment. I personally find it to be my favorite of the online table top options due to its simplicity. While it has none of the bells and whistles of things like Roll20 it also does not require extensive learning to use. Players can log into your map from a link that you generate and immediately have control of their token. I find that with online games it is especially important to minimize dead time, even more so when being paid for the session. What you lose in bells and whistles you get back in the speed of play that you gain.
Your current player list comprises 6 players. Did they all start at the same time? I note on your StartPlaying page, you still have space for 2 players. Would 2 new players just slot in to the current game, or how would you go about that sort of integration?
Most started at the same time, two started later, and one left due to health issues and has just returned to the table. At the time I’m writing this I do still have two slots open.
When a prospective player contacts me I help them to develop their character concept and bring them in at an equivalent level. (That is why the guild membership is the baseline, it makes it more logical as faces come and go.) I use a good bit of third party material so I can usually find acceptable rules for implementing most ideas.
Your campaign “Planejammer: The Spelljoined” won Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Year in 2011, and it is still running. How busy are you with your various campaigns? Do you have any player crossover between the campaigns? In what ways does the new campaign differ from the old one?
The Spelljoined is my main personal game and the baseline of the shared multiverse all my games inhabit.. It’s on its 8th generation of players and has been running almost non stop since 1979 (there was a gap of about three years in the early 90s). That is the umbrella setting I mentioned before. While the Planewalker’s Guild are facing one aspect of the great multiversal disasters, the Spelljoined are currently in an alternate universe (Gamma World) trying to stop a massive mind flayer plot. Characters cross over between games fairly frequently, and events in one game do influence the others. I’ve also had the distinct pleasure of having a number of guests from the industry sit in on sessions. For instance in one game I not only had X-Crawl creator Brendan LaSalle join us for a session set in X-Crawl, but also M. Nystul joined us playing his Nystul the wizard character (which he played at Gary Gygax’s table) for an epic evening on Greyhawk.
The Spelljoined are 16th level characters with Mythic Ranks doing the crazy, gonzo, multiverse hopping stuff. Bouncing through the alternate realities when not in Sigil or the Rock of Bral. The Planewalker’s Guild is 6th level and operating in the Planescape/Spelljammer setting where evidence of the big battles of the Spelljoined are starting to manifest. The Dept 7 game is set in a variant of Dark Matter where the effects of these conflicts are bleeding through the multiversal barrier, etc. Each group is seeing and fighting different aspects of the Really Big Picture(™).
One of your Player Reviews in “StartPlaying” says that you often reward players for work “outside of the game”. Is this reward given in Experience Points, or do you have other rewards? How much “outside of the game” stuff does the current group engage in?
Work outside of the game includes things like journals and art, in character stuff that contributes to the world. These rewards are usually in the form of bonus Mythic Points or story driven rewards. It is NOT required. If I used XP that would also be on the table as reward, but I use milestone levelling. I find that removing combat xp from the equation encourages non-combat solutions. I don’t get much in the way of submissions from the paid gamers, but in my home game there are a number of players who keep journals and contribute art. We even have a full tarot deck that uses PCs and NPCs from throughout the years that one player made over Covid lockdown.
You have been with Obsidian Portal for some time now, so how would you say it has changed over the years, and why is it still a useful site for someone like yourself?
Over the past decade plus I have seen it evolve a good bit. The Reforge was an exciting time that ended with dashed hopes as things deteriorated for quite some time. When the current team took over and things became more responsive to the community and its needs I was thrilled. I had stopped using it and when I checked back looking at an old wiki I discovered my favorite organizational tool had been resurrected. The current team has my thanks for making my favorite organizational tool viable once more!
Most mission critical parts of Op? The wiki, the ability to keep secrets between players and DM, and the Adventure Logs are all endlessly useful to me as a DM. Especially juggling notes and details, not to mention conversions, that have accumulated over the decades of play.
After all these years of being a member, If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal currently helps you with the most?
The Wiki and privacy controls, hands down.
I note from your Adventure Logs, that your group has currently entered “The Riven City of Bleurophil”. Tell us something about that. How did they get there, and what do you think lies in store for them.
This adventure is a follow up to one I ran for a prior group. It came from Tales from the Infinite Staircase and presented the Riven City and the original serial killer. The Guild players are operating 25 years later when a new killer is trying to complete the ritual slayings, and the history of the prior crimes was established by the prior group’s actions. It is my own follow up and recontextualizing of the original adventure.
The players were sent there by the Master of the Docks in the City of 7 Seraphs (one of my creations in that book) and their Planewalker’s Guild superiors to do recon. As some of the only eyewitnesses to the Planebreaker’s transition through Elysium they are considered the closest thing to experts available. Now they’re discovering some of the bigger picture. As for what awaits them? That depends on their actions. Will they stop the Gasping Strangler’s successor from completing the dark ritual? Will they see the Planebreaker shatter the sky again? Will Geeta ever stop complaining? A lot can happen, and the stakes are rising rapidly. Let’s just say that there is potential to gain Mythic Ranks in their not too distant future.
The whole “Planescape” scenario was created in Dungeons and Dragons, and yet you are using Pathfinder for your campaign. What were your motivations for this, and did that mean you had to do a whole lot of stat converting?
I’m used to it. I’ve written professionally doing work in Pathfinder 1e, Starfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Cypher System. I also grew up hacking my RPGs in order to do crossovers back in the 80s. The meta campaign began in the late 70s and has evolved with the times. It started in White Box D&D, quickly shifted to AD&D as the hardcovers were published. The 3.x era was the sweet spot for us in many ways. When 4e hit it did not fit our playstyle so we bounced over to Pathfinder 1e which is what I run them under currently. I’m seriously considering using Rob Schwalb’s fantastic Shadow of the Demon Lord rules for the next generation.
I have an entire wiki of conversions I keep private since it is a lot of IP from various source materials that I do not own (i.e. Greyhawk, Spelljammer, etc.)
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?
Don’t be afraid to improvise, just take notes as you do because you’ll probably need them later. Yes, even the throwaway NPCs. Don’t say no, say “you may try”. Give everybody spotlight time. Be kind to your players and an evil bastard to their PCs. Most importantly: KEEP IT FUN!
May your 20s be both frequent and natural. Loki out.
Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure July 1st, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!
Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month April 2024: Season of Strife
Twenty years after the fall of Utugash’s kingdom, a group of adventurers sail into Celestine and into their new destiny. Villains and allies of every faction eagerly await to use the newcomers for their own purposes, while even more sinister forces lurk in the shadows… Join us in talking with GM EdgarS as we explore the Season of Strife!
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?
Heya, I’m Edgar, I’m from the Netherlands, and I’ve been playing D&D for about 15 years now since I was invited to join a campaign for the first time. I really got into Critical Role around 2018 and watching it helped elevate my gaming and give me a way bigger sense of the possibilities the medium held to tell a story beyond ‘there’s a monster in the next room of the dungeon, go hit it.’ I also started DMing in 2018 and have or are running a couple of campaigns at the same time.
Before D&D I came from the world of tabletop gaming: building, painting and playing Warhammer Fantasy and 40K mostly, which really helped me get out of my shell as a teen (you gotta play with/against other people physically present on the other side of the table after all). From there it was a hop and a skip to D&D. I’ve been lucky to have had a pretty stable and dull life. The most I have in terms of baggage is experiencing bullying in high school because, well, huge giant nerd, but it’s precisely due to things like tabletop gaming and DMing I’ve gotten over that and grew to be a version of myself I enjoy, and being way more extrovert and bringing the sorely needed levity at office meetings. But yeah aside from that, I grew up in a fairly affluent household with loving parents, went to college (studied history and international relations), and after maybe a couple of years in the wilderness got a proper job recently working for the government. I even bought my first apartment a few months ago, which gave me the opportunity to set up a purposely-built storage room for all of my D&D terrain!
As for online, I used to be more active in various places such as tabletop gaming forums, but now I mostly lurk in peace and quiet, stay in my lane, and occasionally tweet out some art or dnd pics on my twitter (no I’m not calling it X) at @DCabbagefarm. That refers to Emperor Diocletian’s cabbages by the way. I’m a historian. Hi.
Tell us about “Season of Strife” in a nutshell. How did you design the world? What was your inspiration?
So the Season of Strife was born when one of the players put out a ‘looking for group’ call on Tumblr for an online d&d campaign, and I decided to take the plunge and offered to DM, back in late 2020. Not quite knowing whether this’d end up being a massive campaign or would bleed out early I decided to use the same homebrew setting I was using for my weekly campaign, the Twilight of the Spheres (and by the way, that one’s got its own Obsidian wiki too, probably even more expansive than the Strife one), but simply designing a new area for the world like it was some kind of Warcraft expansion. Exactly how many hidden continents are there?!
After this I expanded the map further, filling it out as I went until it reached its current state of completion, with enough space for a few more fresh campaigns. Here’s the full map, and be warned it’s a big boy
The first Twilight of the Spheres campaign (2019-2022) took place in the north-eastern region of the world, Eos, dominated by the Coalition (a pretty standard late-medieval European fantasy society consisting of a union of city states) and the Kyshtar Dominion (a majority dragonborn proto-industrial semi-Babylonian hodgepodge). That quarter of the map was all that existed of the setting, with no more than vague allusions to other stuff being beyond the boundaries. The new area I added specially for the Season of Strife was far to the south of it, an island chain called the Teylu Archipelago, inhabited by the Teylu eladrin & water genasi people who mix inspiration from both Polynesian culture and aesthetic, and Scandinavian and celtic. Two of the players are Scandinavian so that’s how that got included into the mix, plus the traditional celtic influences of the Feywild re: the eladrin. As a historian I like to draw heavily on history as inspiration for my worldbuilding, and regions in my setting often have some kind of ethnic or socio-political conflict. In this case it’s the colonial settlers who arrived from the Coalition and Kyshtar Dominion (collectively called ‘the Elyzians’) in the wake of a devastating flood that hit the Archipelago, and whose presence is pushing the Teylu to the margins. This conflict operates as a backdrop to everything going on in the campaign and it’s been very fortuitous that the players themselves chose to have a party consisting of two Elyzian characters and one from the Teylu, so that they could RP through these clashing perspectives and get a multifaceted view of the situation. Settler politics. Fun!
As for the outline of the campaign’s plot, in ancient times the Spring Court of the Feywild was cursed by the other season courts to slumber, and left behind buried in the material plane. However now a radical Teylu cult, the Teyhua, are seeking to awaken Spring and use its power to expel the settlers from the Archipelago. To do this a number of seals first need to be removed, which can each only be done by the Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring knight (mortals in the employ of the courts as their champion, because they’re able to break Fey rules such as crossing running water and being able to lie), and the player characters find themselves entangled within this storied web and – mostly by accident – becoming knights for the fey courts.
I’m an avid worldbuilder, drawing heavily on historical minutiae, so in order to scratch that itch and build up a corpus of material I also write a “worldbuilder gazette” article every few months, dealing with info about the world that might not naturally pop up during sessions, such as how the different regional calendars work, lunar orbits, holidays, the economy, and nations the players haven’t visited yet. For every other worldbuilding-obsessed DM out there: I see you, I hear you.
How regularly do you play, and where do you play? Tell us about your current group of players.
The campaign is played online, using roll20 and Zoom, and we play about once every two to three weeks. With me included we’re a group of four from across the UK and west-central Europe. I’m gonna refrain from telling you too many personal details, but I’ll just say they’re some of the goshdarndamndest best RP’ers – nay, actors! – I’ve ever seen at any D&D table. They’re so insanely good. Sometimes I just shut up and listen for 30 minutes while they RP amongst themselves.
You put a lot of emphasis on the factions in your game, enough to place them on the front page. Can you tell us how important they are in your game?
As mentioned previously, I draw a great deal from history when worldbuilding, and if anything history is a revolving door of peoples, polities and cultures clashing with each other. The factions on the wiki’s home page are for the most part the main cultural groupings; what background an npc is from can inform a massive amount about their character, customs and perspective on things, especially how they relate to the local background conflict and what that means for their relationship with the player characters. I don’t want to have my game world populated by unattached caricatures, I want the npcs to have allegiances of their own – be they culture, country, ethnicity, etcetera. In my opinion they make characters richer and more vibrant, and give the players an additional set of approaches to relate to them (are they from a rival faction? Are they both foreigners away from home? Do they have certain proclivities or interests relating to their culture that might be used to sway them?)
I don’t want every country to be contained in its own cordoned-off little box either, like they’re in their own stasis bubble: People move! Countries do war, trade, diplomacy, propaganda, cultural exchanges, religious exchanges, espionage, migration and more! Interactions between the different factions are the building blocks of my world, and the quest design flows organically from that. Part of having a reusable setting is having background conflicts that continue to passively generate animosity that can be leveraged into new quests. In the season of strife campaign the main plot is almost entirely motivated and impacted by the background conflict of the indigenous Teylu being squeezed by the Elyzian settlers, and most quests and npcs are at the very least tangentially related to that. Most recently the players were sent on a little sidequest to solve a dispute on some Teylu islands where wealthy Elyzian settlers had built… well… the Hamptons, basically, and their mayor was secretly throwing meat into the bay to lure sharkfolk to the local Teylu water genasi village’s spiritual site to disrupt their traditional links to the land.
I’ve also been working with a couple of artists whom I have commissioned many times. One of them is designing the factions icons for me. Those icons are all unique and purpose-made for my setting, not just plucked from the web! The faction icons there are the ones that are currently done, but in the end there will be two to three times as many! I’ve currently got a plan in the works to start a project with these artists, in order to make an illustration of one or two “average joe”’s from each main culture, to create a kind of setting sourcebook and give an idea of what the regular person in the street of each nation would look like.
Your WIKI section is very detailed and quite comprehensive. Who is responsible for adding the information and organizing it? How much time do you spend updating it as the campaign progresses?
Your WIKI section is very detailed and quite comprehensive. Who is responsible for adding the information and organizing it? How much time do you spend updating it as the campaign progresses?
L’wiki, c’est moi. It’s all done by me and I’ll conservatively estimate “a metric ton of time”. It’s a good thing I enjoy wiki-building (I read aloud from my hostage note) and I’m a glutton for punishment if nothing else. My players do help me out every so often with writing sections of the summaries if I don’t have enough time to finish them, and one of my players performs vitally important recording wizardry, making video recordings of the session and uploading them to a private youtube playlist so we can watch them back and use them to make summaries. And she also makes thumbnails for each session! Recently we also redistributed some tasks so that another player would help me out with writing the short synopses.
Your campaign has many items and makes great use of Obsidian Portal’s Items section. How do you feel the extra work it takes to implement this benefits you and/or your players?
It’s always good to have a central place to store data as a master reference. Handing out item cards or putting them into word documents or reading out the item descriptions is all well and good but you can almost guarantee that stuff’s gonna get lost or misplaced at some point. Much better to have somewhere you can always refer back to. We also have a few items that have become real staples of the characters’ iconic look, such as the sword Spring’s Edge, one of the first items the group acquired in the first ten sessions, and it’s nice to be able to give these items an image to represent them.
What made you choose D&D 5e as your gaming system? Have you played other gaming systems, or earlier editions? How do you feel it compares?
I played 3.5th edition in the first campaign I joined (playing for a good 13-14 years) and DM’ed it for a while, and gods above and below in hindsight I found it so cumbersome and bloated, with hundreds of sourcebooks and a level of stat block number crunching I was simply never going to be able to get a proper grip on; After a while you get monsters on the field with modifiers of +20 to hit, and if you overshot the challenge rating you were supposed to give the players by a bit you could quickly end up with foes the characters could literally do barely more than single digit damage to. And worse, I disliked how lower level spells became exponentially useless as time wore on, because both the DCs and effects of those spells remained as low as a low level character casting them, encouraging you to only throw your highest level stuff. I could probably go on for a while but I’ll save the internet the byte space.
In comparison the 5th edition rules are easy enough to follow that I learned them simply through watching/listening to Critical Role, picking up most of the game (and learning answers to some of the baked-in rules conflicts or less commonly understood features) before ever even opening the Player’s Handbook. The familiarity I now have with the system appeals to me, the basics are pretty easy to follow, flexible enough to homebrew off of, and combat can be balanced quite decently on sheer ‘vibes’ alone, while fixing a lot of the annoyances I had with 3.5 (I don’t think any annoyed me more than being unable to move more than 5ft and make more than one melee attack, turning most battles into stationary ones because it was actively detrimental to move). The system is also robust enough that you can overshoot and make monsters too strong, without instantly signing the players’ death warrant.
How much time is usually spent preparing your game sessions? Describe a typical session.
Most sessions take me a couple hours of prep, often about equal or slightly less than total playtime… except when I need to build a battlemap in Roll20, which can eat up hours of my time while I finetune tiny details. Regardless, my prep can often be described as “leapfrogging.” Whenever I prep a session I will inevitably have enough material that we end up covering (nearly) two sessions with it. Plus if I need to buy time, I’ll just let the player characters talk to one another. Bam, there’s half an hour filled, easy peasy. In our very latest session the players started right after having been portalled to the gates of a Feywild city. They were right in front of the gates! It took 30 minutes before they even walked up to the guards! It’s a miracle we get anywhere at all.
Can you please explain the difference between your session summaries and your miniature session summaries? What is the difference between the two types of sessions?
Those both relate to the same sessions. The ‘session summaries’ are the long versions – which are probably a little too long at times, sometimes reaching more than 10 pages and rarely less than 4 – and the ‘miniature session summaries’ are brief synopses about one paragraph long. It’s a practice I picked up in the first campaign that I ran, where I noticed players had difficulty recalling the basic outline of the few sessions before it (especially because that campaign only played once every 6-7 weeks or so), so the mini summary contains a very basic outline of the main events/facts of the session, just so you can more easily search back for when something happened and so you can recall the basics at a single glance, rather than walls and walls of text. The mini summary section on our wiki then links to the long-form summary of that particular session.
I’m a bit of a fanatic about chronicling everything in massive detail because:
A) I’m a historian and work with archival departments at a government ministry. It’s kinda in my blood at this point.
B) The first campaign I ever joined as a player ran for like 12-13 years and we had basically zero documentation, so halfway through there were just complete year-long arcs of the campaign I had no recollection of or where I didn’t know the order of events anymore, so a lot of plot stuff inadvertently flew over our heads half the time because we didn’t remember anything.
C) I just can’t stop myself. Help.
How long have you been using Obsidian Portal? What brought you to the site and what keeps bringing you back?
I had an account before then but I’ve actively used Obsidian Portal since about 2018, when I first started DM’ing my own campaigns. There might be shinier things out there, with widgets and gadgets and holograms, but I like the easy legibility Obsidian Portal’s format provides if you wanna put up big blocks of text. With some pretty basic coding you can do a fair amount to make it look nice, formatting it like it’s a Wikipedia article. And of course being able to hyperlink back and forth between different pages makes navigating through the wiki a breeze.
If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal helps you with the most?
I put up stupid amounts of text, and like I said above I like the legibility Obsidian provides. As a history enthusiast my favored terrain is wikipedia pages (I get a +2 to hit modifier against other historians), so that’s the model I like to copy. I’m also happy with the pre-defined sections for characters, game logs and items, rather than needing to build custom wiki pages for each of them and it becoming a right old mess. If there’s anything else I might want to see from Obsidian Portal it’s one or two more sections like that, such as a bestiary section for common creatures/creature types found in your setting.
What would you say is the biggest highlight of your game so far?
Oh gosh, oh golly, oh jeepers, I had such a tough time answering this question!! We’ve played 74 sessions up to this point, and so many exciting things have happened! Should I pick the time the cleric held an impassioned speech before the church to denounce the bigoted high priestess? Or the victory in the Autumn Tournament when the rogue defeated the other candidates to become the new Autumn Knight? Perhaps I ought to pick that time the party were surrounded by enemies on all sides and opened up the Iron Flask they’d carried with them for nearly 30 sessions without knowing what was inside, summoning a succubus to their aid? That time the ranger/druid had a romantic ride across the meadows of the Feywild on the back of a stag with one of the main villains (he’s hot so it’s okay), or simply when two players were wasted drunk and trying to escape across the rooftops from some bandits, with the air genasi rogue floating away from danger like a balloon?
This artist has done a huge series of illustrations for our campaign, all of which can be found here
I guess if there is one moment I had to pick it would be in the earlier stages of the campaign when the players were at a fancy gala, and the rogue suddenly ran into the crime boss (and secret weretiger) on the dancefloor whom she’d been romancing at the start of the campaign before getting cold feet and breaking it off. I cannot describe the utter mic drop moment when that French accent suddenly returned and I showed off the art I had commissioned for the occasion:
As an aside I also want to add that for me the personal highlight of any game is when the ranger/druid communicates with any flora or fauna. I never know what voice will come out of my mouth but let’s just say the interactions don’t really live up to the wise, sage druid image. Pigeons hate her, seagulls have died for her, trees want to practice their stand-up comedy routines on her.
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?
I mean you’re gonna hear this one repeated ad nauseam, but communication really is key in playing a game like this. You gotta have some people at your table you can trust you can talk with like adults, make sure you’re on the same wavelength as to what kind of game you’d like to play, and make the players feel you’re playing with them not against them. Though as a DM I feel you should always reserve the right to not acquiesce to every single thing the players might ask for; sometimes mother knows best.
However, apart from slam-dunking that low-hanging fruit into Tantalus’ head, there’s a couple more things I’d like to add: First off, the success or failure of your campaign can lean very heavily on what the players are like, irrespective of your quality as a DM. There’s something Brennan Lee Mulligan said at a DM roundtable a couple years back that’s always stuck with me, namely “there’s nothing you can do if the players don’t care.” You can be the best DM in the world with the coolest party tricks and goblin voices but if there are sacks of potatoes sitting opposite your screen it’s gonna be a bad time (and I don’t mean people who are simply shy or withdrawn, I mean people actively unwilling to engage or care). And conversely if you’ve got some people who come to the table with a good attitude, are willing to engage and have a good time, you can elevate any game to beyond what it is on paper. I’ve had about half a dozen campaigns in my DMing career and I’ll earnestly admit some are running better than others (but on the whole I’m very happy with them all), but there’s one that thankfully bled to death where I was straight-up not having a fun time, because of a complete unwillingness from half of the table to engage, like they were forced to participate against their wishes. I didn’t DM that game any differently from my other campaigns, but it was a rotten experience while my other campaigns give me a surge of energy at the end of the night. You’re playing a collaborative game and that collaboration is what makes or breaks a campaign.
Secondly, being behind the DM screen gives you certain insights into how the game functions, and you can try to transfer some of that wisdom to your players to help them get better/get more out of the game. If you have players at your table who are DMs themselves you’ll often quickly notice they play a little bit differently that other players, and in my experience they tend to be a bit better with spotting plot hooks, unearthing crucial info buried in a piece of dialogue, and jumping on opportunities to give the scenario a different twist. With a little encouragement and advice I’ve seen the folks in one long-running campaign in particular transform from ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ into model players. If you wanna give your players any insights to help their play, I’ll offer you this one: “If you don’t do anything, nothing happens.” This applies to every aspect of the game. If you don’t respond (promptly) when the DM asks you about scheduling, the game doesn’t happen. If you don’t go talk to that npc who seems to hold a potential plot hook, then that quest doesn’t occur and you don’t do anything during the session. If the rest of the party is chasing the undead who just attacked the village and kidnapped someone but your character doesn’t want to leave their bed (this happened once), you won’t be able to do anything in the game for the next hour or more. If your character is getting distorted visions about their personal quest but is informed they first need to consume the waters of life to see them more clearly but you make no move to acquire said waters of life, nothing happens. If you never take the initiative to turn to your fellow players and go “hey I think we should plan a heist to steal the plot item”, then no fun shenanigans-filled heist happens. If you play the game super safely and cautiously, none of the fun stuff happens. D&D is an immensely malleable game, where your efforts as a player can and will shape the contours of what the session is gonna be like: Make your players aware they have that power and co-opt them into making the game more fun and to try and get them to engage with what you’re putting out for them.
Thirdly, based on my own campaigns so far and the ones I’ve participated in as a player I’ve picked up a way to structure my campaigns that I’m quite happy with, and that I’m using for the second Twilight campaign. If I could do Strife again from the start I’d have liked to use this approach there too. I like to start by taking my time with the lower levels – giving players enough time to fully explore all their spells and class features and ways to use them creatively, and making them appreciate their new abilities more when they finally get to level 5 and beyond – and giving them a pure sandbox game. They’re set loose in the world and allowed to do generic low-level quests: Root out the goblins blocking the local road, escort the archeologists to the nearby excavation site, find out who’s stealing from the warehouse, etcetera. They get the sense of fulfillment of completing quests (rather than just subsections of a long-running main plot), get to explore your world and setting, get to build a network of NPC contacts, and have complete freedom to pick and choose for themselves what to do. This also puts them at liberty to fail or abandon quests without the stakes being too high and introduces the players to the idea that “if you mess up, you make a mess”, because at a certain point in a high-level plot the party can’t really be allowed to fail that much anymore without endangering the entire setting… and DMs put a lot of work in their settings! They don’t wanna toss it out on a whim! So this early sandbox stage both gives the party freedom and gives the DM freedom not to have to plot-armor the party. In the Season of Strife the party spent their first ten sessions in the starter-town, Celestine, engaging with a local crime boss (slash love interest), and then hitching a ride on an archeological expedition to another part of the island for a while and doing a bit of dungeon delving, before they got involved in the bigger plotlines. You can also start throwing in subtle foreshadowing to the campaign’s eventual BBEG… A namedrop here and there, a whispered rumor, mysterious graffiti appearing in the cities, and so forth. After the sandbox stage you’ll start reaching levels 6, 7, 8 or so, which in my opinion is the game’s sweetspot. This is the part where the format becomes more plot-driven, your players may encounter recurring villains (possibly lieutenants to the campaign’s BBEG), and the stakes start increasing. Perhaps this stage results in a kind of mid-campaign climax. A big victory for the players to revel in at the end of the second act. Maybe you’ll even return them to the sandbox stage for a while to do sidequests or loose ends, before the plot and stakes start dramatically ramping up again as the BBEG starts coming to the fore and you get to the big, epic, dramatic battles as you work your way to the final confrontation. Players generally don’t like losing more than once (in a row), so my recommendation is to always split up your plot into separate portions which can be won piecemeal.Also, get theater kids to join your game. They are good at roleplay and drama. It’s… it’s in the name.
Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure May 1st, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!
