Category Archives: RPGs

My players’ characters are visiting a village smithy, so I decided the local bard will sing this poem as they approach (then ask them for money!). Since our homebrew campaign world is set in Stone Age Eurasia, I changed the references to Christ and Sunday worship to more neutral items. My edited words are in italics. (With apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.) The Village Blacksmith UNDER a spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of […]

I ran a Session Zero on Friday for our new homebrew campaign. We had just wrapped up a 41-session, open-table campaign set in Melvaunt in Forgotten Realms, and this time we’re doing a homebrew, closed-table campaign, O5R style (OSR-inspired 5e). Every group’s Session Zero has different things to cover, but here’s what we found useful. The questions I asked to better tailor this campaign: Introduction to any house rules. For instance: Discussion of how the world differs from Forgotten Realms or other player expectations. In my case: After much discussion […]

Obsidian Portal, an online campaign management tool for RPGs, shares stats on the number of campaigns run in its system. I’ve created a Google Sheet with this data. This represents the 129,098 campaigns created over the lifetime of the software (12 years, as it was created in 2007). As a result, you’ll see Pathfinder in second place at 18% of campaigns, due to its historic strength: it is doubtful that 18% of campaigns played today are in Pathfinder, given the loss of players to D&D 5e and the release of […]