Thanks, Shawn, that’s helpful. Sorry for the cross post over on the Ironsworn FB page.
I think this is key, I’ve been viewing it as a mini-background vow rather than simply a starting point. I will re-read Chapter 7 for your thoughts on nested vows. This weekend I’m committed to finallydiving into the deep end!
Can’t wait. Signed up for notifications. The cover art looks great.
We had our first session of Broken Compass Tuesday. It was even better then I had thought it would be. Player Facing rolls freed my brain space to improvise stuff and describe more. Not having to worry about stat blocks is great. It was very exciting for the players too and we got a lot done in a short amount of time. Session summary behind the thingy because its lots of words.
We opened the session with the players in a Jeep racing through the desert being chased by several black Land Rovers, Bullets whizzing through the air, mirrors and glass shattering, etc. At this point, the players had no idea what was going on. They were in media res without any clue. I know my players for a few years now and was sure they would handle it fine. And they did! The driver managed to not get shot but rolled a failure for the danger of crashing the vehicle. We will get to that in a bit.
A passenger tried to throw a gas canister at the pursuers but sadly, the shot hit but was a fraction too early, so the chase cars got through unscathed. Our third Adventurer was just playing it cool and calmed the panicky Priest who was with them in the car. All of a sudden, the ground beneath gave way, and they crashed and tumbled down into SOMETHING until they got stuck. Luckily no one got hurt, but where are they?
FLASHBACK: A short while earlier. Our intrepid Adventurers get hired in the city of Muscat, Oman, by a Jesuit Monk named Sam Armstrong to help them uncover scrolls that would rival the dead sea scrolls allegedly hidden in a secret cave. The Priest and his Assistant joined the Party and handed GPS coordinates to our Adventurers. While on their way to the vehicle, an Adventurer realizes they are being followed by another foreigner. He ducks in a doorway,m attempting to sneak up on the pursuer. The guy is a professional and senses the Adventurer, immediately attacking him with a combat knife. Expertly our Adventurer disarms the threat, and the attacker directly runs and disappears in the crowd. They drive into the desert, and at the coordinates is a Beduin camp. They get a friendly welcome, though the base is well guarded by armed men. The Jesuit and his assistant translator went into the biggest camp while our adventurers were asked to enjoy the hospitality and relax a bit. As should be the case, they do none of that and instead attempt to eavesdrop. Success! Not a perfect one, so they don’t get everything but the snippets they understand are confusing:
“So they did see the Russian Antonov Cargo Plane come down in this area? Did they find any debris? None? Did they find any of the stolen goods?”
Mystified, they decide to question the Jesuit employer once they have left the camp. They get a new set of GPS coordinates while the monk gives no indication that something is off. As soon as they leave the camp behind, they want to question the monk. And of course, that’s when the Black Land Rovers show up!
Fast forward, we are underground in the car that crashed somewhere. They quickly establish they are stuck near the ceiling of a giant underground cave. There is a lake below and just a way across from them: The remains of a crashed Antonov plane! After a short interrogation, the Jesuit admits he is not really a monk and is looking for an important, stolen treasure! As the attack showed his secrecy was well warranted.
They use their vehicle’s winch to climb down to the lake and swim to the shore, where they find another surprise. Carved into the walls of this giant cavern is a vast, ancient city. The Lost City of Ubar! One of the Adventurers had been looking for this place a few years back!
While exploring the area, two Adventurers investigate the plane, while the third is enthralled with the caves and has a look around. The plane’s carcass sits precariously, and while the Adventurer inside isn’t hurt, the plane dislodges and, with a great crash and splash, tumbles into the lake, now swimming on its surface. During the Crash, a few important looking crates fell into the lake.
Meanwhile, our lone Adventurer discovers the corpse of someone in a modern-day suit hidden in one of the houses. The corpse cradles two items, wrapped in cloth, and scratched two sentences into the wall: “The Treasure is a key!” and “Don’t let it fall into the hands of the Eagle!” He decides to not tell their employer about the find and secretly advises his colleagues of the discovery.
While this is happening, the other two get one of the metal crates back to the surface. They manage to open the lock and inside, save and dry: Stacks upon stacks of bearer bonds! Issued by the Russian Imperial Bank by the Czars! Millions worth!
This is a fantastic find, but Sam gets more and more agitated. He insists they look further. There must be more treasure to be found! More important treasure! Triggered by a careless comment from one of our adventurers Sam and his assistant begin searching the surrounding cave city. Alarmed, the adventurers feel they have no choice and draw their weapons to stop them. They know the assistant Zaki is armed and focus on him. To everyone’s surprise, he pulls his gun, but not to shoot them, to shoot Sam, the fraudulent monk!
A crazy firefight ensues where they quickly discover that Zaki is not a translator. He is an exceptionally well-trained combatant. With some luck, they manage to wound him bad. Zaki has to retreat and disappears in the cave somewhere. Sadly he managed to kill Sam during the fight, so our adventurers are none the wiser about what the hell is going on.
When they look at the hidden artefacts, they discover an old Eagle Finial, once belonging to one of Napoleon’s armies, as well as a painting: Landscape with an Obelisk. Quickly they realise that these items were stolen during the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum Robbery!
They drag the treasure out of there, with the bearer bonds, back to the Beduin camp. On their way back, they pass one of the crashed black rovers. It features the emblem of an eagle on its doors!
Next session we will pick up one year later.
This all took 2.5 hours. It was loads of fun, and I can’t wait to see where this journey goes next.
The Lazy DM Method worked wonderfully for me and I highly recommend it if you do not have lot’s of time to prepare stuff and don’t want to plan out a full campaign form the get go while still being prepared from session to session.
Awesome write up. Thanks!
Sounds like the system worked well to assist the storytelling too. I’m even more intrigued now.
Designer Francesco Nepitello is teaming up with Free League Publishing to Kickstart a 2nd edition of The One Ring RPG.
KS pre-launch page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/the-one-ring-roleplaying-game-second-edition?mc_cid=2c3586154e&mc_eid=3ae8bbbe3e
Is anyone out there:
1.) Running a tabletop campaign virtually in these interesting times? Any advice?
2.) Any specific opinions on d20 or Fantasy Grounds as a platform for doing so from anyone?
Thanks in advance.
Hi, I am running an online campaign, and have since april last year.
We staretd out in Roll20 which is fine, but is also built upon some very old foundations by now. That means, it has a lot of issues with disconnet, lag, strange interfaces. If you are playing DnD though, it has an excellent tool for levelling up characters, the charactermancer.
Personally, we have moved over to Foundry VTT instead, which I REALLY like. Its a purchased software license, a one time fee of 50 dollars I think it was.
Its extremely well done, by a single person doing this full time. Its main strength, besides being much never with all that this entails, is its modular scene, where a LOT of people keep expanding what it can do, through modules at no cost (mostly).
Its a system agnostic platform though, so it can accomodate most, but it has nothing official. this means, if you are playing Dnd for instance, you are releying on those who have made the DnD system as a module (And it works beautifully). It has some limitations though (No online character builder for one).
You can host the server the players play on yourself, if you know what you are doing (opening ports and so forth), or use a service to host a server for you, for 5 dollars a month. This is what I do, at Forge.
Short of it - Roll20 is somewhat easier to get into - Foundry is way better in the long run, but is demanding of your time in the beginning. Fantasy Grounds I have very little experience with, but its somewhat archaic as well, and has a LOT of systems that are difficult to pick up right at the start. Supposdely, its fine though.
oh - Roll20 has the advantage of official DnD modules, and other official ruleset and modules added to it. Foundry only has the SRD (Basic, free stuff) rules and monsters .
It really depends on what you want.
In theory, you can run a tabletop rpg over discord just fine - hell, there are even discord bots to help out with rolling and such. But if you are interested in THE WORKS, but automated battles, awesome battlemaps, nice automated character sheets, then one of the Virtual Tabletop systems are great!.
edit: Encounter Library has an excellent, updated series of videos about Foundry and how it works.
When I started Roll20 , the official wiki was out of date and the online tutorial didn’t work half-way through.
Thanks for all this!
Yeah, I was looking at it and since it is a Traveller Campaign, the D&D built-ins it has really don’t seem to make it that attractive, given that we could use Discord with Die-rolling bots, as you point out. Just being able to upload character sheets doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.
Regarding PC creation - well, I want that done in a one on one online session. That doesn’t need to be done via a service. I’m more interested in a service that allows materials (maps, handouts, etc., etc.) to be well-displayed in-session.
So Foundry doesn’t have server hosting for the Players? Maybe I’m just misunderstanding something.
Foundry will let you host yourself for free - its just your machine that you use when starting the program. Your playes then connect online to your machine.
You can also set up a hosting if you have your own server, or a machine that is online. Its just not EASY for me at least, but then again, I’ve never setup a server before on my own. There are plenty of resources on it so that should be fine, if you want to. I just like a “no-hassle” setup, so I choose the service called Forge to do it for me.
As for traveller specifically,I am unsure whether there is a module that supports it. You should try asking in the Foundry VTT discord. Its a really nice place with excellent support by everyone.
That is most certainly does - and does well. But then again, so does Roll20, even if it has some issues at times with lightning. It has a ton of features in that regard, and with Tokens as well(Player and npc representations on the maps).
I have been playing exclusively online for the last 7 years. I play or run a weekly session of constantly changing systems. We do use Roll20 but lately move away to Role or Let’s Role, or even more minimalistic solutions like Togetherness Table sometimes even just Discord with a dice bot and Miro.
It depends on the system a lot. I like Foundry when you play a system that’s well supported like DnD. If you want to run a new indie game rarely anyone has heard about its way to complicated and time consuming to get running. Role is masterful at that, though it doesn’t automate a lot.
Fantasy Grounds is similar to foundry in that it’s very good when someone who knows what they are doing has build a module, not so great otherwise.
Been stuck running/playing virtually since the Season Finale of last year’s Mouse Guard season for Raleigh Tabletop RPGs’ Semi-Organized Play campaign series, since that final session came right after statewide lockdowns shut all the game stores and RTR itself had decided to suspend running in-person games for safety’s sake. In the intervening time, I’ve run a couple of short campaigns and a handful of one-shots. It’s not been my first experience with online gaming, but it’s definitely my longest.
Biggest thing I’ve found is accounting for the differences in interpersonal interaction with online play. All the tech tools and plugins and gizmos in the world don’t take away a few basic facts, and the things the cause you to have to deal with:
On the other hand, online can be great. The plugin to be able to click on a power in D&D Beyond’s digital character sheet and have it roll all the rice dice and modifiers, add 'em up, apply disadvantage for me, and display the results within half a second in Roll20 is just fucking amazing. I’ll never have to hand-draw another map again when I can just upload a high-quality PNG to Roll20 and lay a grid over it. No worries about losing your tokens, just add that Goblin back to the game from your NPC Library tab. And hey, you can play with people from all over the globe without leaving your house or even putting on pants :)
I use Roll20 pretty heavily right now; we were running Mutants & Masterminds late last year and needed something really robust for it, but we also needed to run 3 tables at once, so Foundry was getting a little expensive-looking.
Like @Razgon said, the tech infrastructure is old (in web-tech terms), and you can tell. The interface/UI are just laggy, buggy, and awkward a lot of the time. You go to drag an image onto the upload area and it just exits the game instead. You click a button on the character sheet and nothing happens. You hit play for background music and one guy gets kicked off the server and finds himself alone in the Roll20 room with no music, to boot.
All that said, it’s also the de-facto standard. There’s built-in character sheets with useful macros for most major systems. There’s official content for sale in the marketplace to get monster stats and maps from your favorite adventures loaded straight into your campaigns. And there’s millions of other nerds who’ve already figured out how to do Whatever Crazy Ass Thing You Wanna Try Next in Roll20 and wrote up a six-page wiki article on how to make it happen, complete with pictures.
If you wanna have a map, automated character sheet features, background music, an easy handout distribution system, a really well-developed dice-roller, and/or the “official” tool for D&D, Roll20 is a great option, and most VTTs will suit most of those things well enough in general, with different levels of jankiness.
All that said, last year’s Chronicles of Darkness GMs ran their campaigns in a mixture of Discord (for dice rolls, using a bot, and sharing images/links via chat), JIt.si (a free online video call service that is a little more respectful of privacy than Google or Zoom), and Google Sheets for the character sheets/“play sheets” (place where they could show all the foes in the scene, clues we’d collected, XP we’d earned, etc.). I’ll grab a picture of that CoD play sheet my friends made, it’s cool:
Note sure where best to fit this. But Critical Role had a really fun one shot in the Diablo universe during BlizzCon.
Here is the video if you’d like to watch it (just over 2 hours, so not terribly long):
In typical CR fashion, it was a good laugh.
Thanks everyone for your responses.
I think we’re resolved to using Discord for Vox (also other one on one rooms besides the main room for Role-playing side bars as well as text rooms for sidebars too and OOC stuff) with a dice bot and Roll20 for “Show and Tell”.
But the point above nailed it for me especially this:
After Session 0 and PC Creation, we’ll probably have one or two “pre-season game sessions” to work out technical kinks and issues to streamline what works for us. And probably a pre-Session 0 dry run with a small Gideon force group (3 people) just doing a simple scene resolution (a bar scene with role playing that escalates to a bar fight and then a shoot out with cops) using pregens just to see what works and what doesn’t tech wise.
Thanks, everyone!
Bundle of Holding currently has Champions 6E and Hero System 6E.
I think they’ve done those before. I’ve gotta say, as much as I loved Champions back in High School, there is probably no system further from what I want to play at this stage in my life. Then again, I’ll probably never get to play much of what I want to play, so the point is pretty moot.
I do keep thinking about trying to drag some friends into an online Blades in the Dark-type game, but that probably won’t happen, either.
Can I ask what is stopping you? You seem to really want to! Do it! I realize my situation is probably vastly different from so many others, but due to being sent home from work due to the whole Corona situation, with full pay, I have all the time in the world to indulge in this crazy hobby :-)
edit: Sorry, its really none of my business, and I only meant the above as a sort of “go for it” support type of cheering. Apologies if it came off as prying!
No problem at all. Mostly just the usual reasons- time/scheduling with friends/interest from said friends. My tastes for RPGs are fairly different from most- I have zero interest in any variety of DnD/Pathfinder/etc, for example, so even the friends who are into this stuff, it’s not really what they’d be into.
Yeah, getting people to play non D20 games is a often unclearable hurdle.
Oh - As for Foundry…well, it seems they have an official partnership now with Free League games, and have JUST announced that the ruleset for the Alien RPG and Forbidden Lands are there now, with accompanying rulebooks and adventures. The system itself is free, but the rulebooks and adventures aren’t, obviously.
That is pretty great news - I’ve been hesitant about suggesting foundry to people, since it lacked official partnerships with creators, but this is pretty great, and an awesome start.
I REALLY dig Free League and the reprentation of their games, so this is pretty cool news to me.
Ah, that makes sense.
I am currently very curious about the Blade in the Dark rpg ruleset - I am kinda curious on all those that differ from how DnD makes use of Gamemasters and how the adventures are created and Blade in the Dark seems to be doing something rather unique here.
