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I personally enjoy mining other gamemasters' home pages, notes, and campaign chronicles for ideas. I often discover neat ideas and plot inspirations, not to mention some of it can be pleasurable to read. One example is "The Chamber of Mazarbul" blog that I strongly suspect is maintained by a regular poster to these forums; I recommend checking it out if you are even remotely interested in being an RPG voyeur (not to mention, I find some of the blogger's observations regarding gaming mechanics and philosophy extremely insightful).

On the off-chance that others might have the same reaction to my work, I thought I would invite folks to follow the evolution of my own campaign. The campaign revolves around the activities of a small group of Rangers of the North. Because all the heroes are from the same heroic culture and the campaign has thus far taken place outside Wilderland, I made several changes to character creation (with some interesting ramifications for game balance).

A few caveats:
* I do not pretend to have the answers for the "right" way to play TOR. I am obsessive-compulsive regarding the setting material (I freely use details from Silmarillion, UT, and HOME and generally despise Peter Jackson's portrayal of Middle-earth) but I am not obsessive-compulsive about playing TOR using the rules-as-written.
* My players are a bit more bloody-minded than TOR assumes and, rather than try to fit a square peg into a round hole, I have adjusted how I construct adventures accordingly. All but one of my players readily accept the consequences in terms of Shadow.
* You will not find an "actual play" presentation of the campaign as some of you might be familiar with from other forums. A hero gets one Hope point if his player posts a journal entry; there is no journal format, each player can post something, and no hero can get more than one Hope point per session in this fashion. So, as you will discover, the entries vary quite a bit in content and presentation.

https://rangers-of-the-north.obsidianportal.com/

Hope for journal entries is freaking brilliant.

I must say your campaign page looks very good and it is brilliant idea, especially with the encyclopedia of characters (now the players hopefully won't forget that important lord you planted a few sessions ago) and the encouragement for the players to write journal posts (that other people will actually read so they have to put some effort into them).

Do you use some kind of preconstructed format for the website (thinking of doing something similar myself)?

Great site. Thanks for sharing. My group also writes journals and the LM gives out 1 Advancement Point per session for journal writing.

Elfcrusher wrote:Hope for journal entries is freaking brilliant.

The idea is not original to me; I saw something similar used for a Star Wars campaign. With busy schedules all around, some sort of incentive seems appropriate. When lots of players post, everyone gets more from the campaign, I think.

Dunkelbrink wrote: I must say your campaign page looks very good and it is brilliant idea, especially with the encyclopedia of characters (now the players hopefully won't forget that important lord you planted a few sessions ago) and the encouragement for the players to write journal posts (that other people will actually read so they have to put some effort into them).

Do you use some kind of preconstructed format for the website (thinking of doing something similar myself)?

Thanks for the praise. I am hopeful that the wiki and encyclopedia of characters will eventually reach a level of completeness that encourages players to peruse it regularly prior to gaming sessions. The idea of multiple plot lines advancing simultaneously appeals to me but I do not think it is possible with my group unless I meet them halfway in terms of providing a place where relevant campaign information is stored.

As for the overall format of the homepage, I must give all credit to Obsidian Portal. I highly recommend glancing over the many campaigns hosted there: https://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns. At least a thousand are just empty shells, but several -- from a multitude of systems -- have enough to make the exercise worthwhile. There are over thirty TOR public campaigns at the moment though very few are developed.

Nice format.

I thought that when you were talking about round pegs in square holes you were about to say that they would trim the peg to fit by hacking at it

Brilliant idea about the Hope points recovery!

Excellant thanks for sharing. You are providing my Ranger of the North fix. Does your group play in person, video, or play by post?

Southron Loremaster wrote:Excellant thanks for sharing. You are providing my Ranger of the North fix. Does your group play in person, video, or play by post?

Voice chat. At the moment, we are using Roll20. It has become much more stable in the last few months. I like it because it's free, is browser-based, and includes the things we most want: voice chat (it also has video, though we don't use it), dice, and a virtual table top for sharing images, moving around tokens (miniatures), and whatnot.

Mordagnir wrote:I personally enjoy mining other gamemasters' home pages, notes, and campaign chronicles for ideas. I often discover neat ideas and plot inspirations, not to mention some of it can be pleasurable to read. One example is "The Chamber of Mazarbul" blog that I strongly suspect is maintained by a regular poster to these forums; I recommend checking it out if you are even remotely interested in being an RPG voyeur (not to mention, I find some of the blogger's observations regarding gaming mechanics and philosophy extremely insightful).

That would be alien270.

http://thechamberofmazarbuldnd.blogspot.com/

Unfortunatly my group Homepage is on Facebook and in Italian, I'll provide some of the material here as soon as I start traslating it.