Dice Deliberations

Before I started writing this, I'd have said it was an easy question. The obvious answer is my 7-year campaign, called the Guardians of Ridlen . However, my two "honorable mention" callouts ended up being almost full writeups of their own, so I'm going to just go with it and include all three. The Guardians of Ridlen  The concept of this campaign was that in the prosperous country of Thorin, there were seven duchies and the characters were special problem solvers assigned to and reporting directly to a duke. I'd run one campaign earlier, when I lived in New York, called "Guardians of Greenlen." I liked the concept and decided to change the location for the next game, when D&D 3e came out. The campaign started with just two players, but quickly expanded to include numerous players over several years, but ultimately ending up with six core players. The growth was friends, friends-of-friends, and one person I met at a game store who seemed nice, so got

In the 20+ years my gaming group has been together, I've run about 14 years of games spread across three campaigns. In those 14 years, we've had some incredible multi-session adventures and story arcs. Today, I'll describe one of the most memorable of those. The Moon Realm of Drendir In my first campaign, the characters (mid-to-high level) had to acquire artifacts and information that didn't exist anymore, so they entered the dream realm of an ancient elf by the name of Drendir who was also the Old God of Artem, one of the two lunar objects.  At the time of the campaign, Drendir was long dead and had been replaced by one of the new gods, but the old gods of my world are strong dreamers; the death of an elf-god didn't necessarily mean the death of his memories of his life. In Sherlock terms, the realm was literally his "mind palace", and was somewhere that could be found if you knew where to look. The realm was multi-phased and each phase was defined as a

  I'm not even going to try to limit my answer to one example. There are just too many things that make a session great, and so at least a few examples deserve to be called out: Dungeon Crawls I have to start with a special callout to dungeon crawls in general. Each one, if designed well, sticks with the group in the mental archives of what you did. They are filled with challenges and loot at much higher rates than you get through exploration and RP, they involve epic wins and failures, and some of the funniest stories come out of them. There was a dungeon I had only half-finished when the session started. It was okay, they always started by going left, so I was prepped enough. They went right, so I turned the map over, and proceeded as if I'd meant to have them to right the whole time. There was a dungeon that was only there because the party chose to explore something I hadn't prepped. I basically ad-libbed the dungeon, and it included one party member exploring ahead, an

  The next four days of RPGaDay questions are a progression of RPG memories, which cover a larger scope of time with each day: Memorable Moments of Play Sensational Session Amazing Adventure Classic Campaign As always, I don't look or think ahead, but in this case, I had to put at least a *little* thought into what each represented relative to the others. (It's obvious when you write them down, but not when you just grab the next prompt off the list, and see something similar for the next day.) Matrix Games I think the most memorable moment, or at least one of my favorites to share, was in a game of Cthulhu on Campus  using  Hamster Press Matrix system , by Chris Engle. To clarify the story, I'll give a bit of background on how that system works. Matrix games are designed to be very narrative and cinematic: Each stand-alone module sets out a scenario in a given genre, and players take roles within the story. A twist is that while the storytelling may be collaborative, the r

  This one is a no-brainer, for me personally. The most engaging RPG community I personally interact with is the Cypher System community, and the heroes of this are the Cypher Unlimited team. For this article, I'm going to share what makes it an engaging community, as well as a valuable one. Welcoming The group at its core is welcoming. On the one hand, people who like the Cypher System are a bit fanatic about it (in the best possible way) so are very accepting of anybody new who wants to be part of that community. When people show up on Facebook or the Cypher Unlimited Discord, they are welcomed to the community. People often reach out to them and offer help--and that help is delivered at a level where people are, not where the community "wants" them to be. New players, new Gamemasters, OG players who are just new to Cypher system, people who don't get it or people who have legitimate issues are all welcomed. Diverse This touches a bit on what I said above. And by &