Home › Discussions › Campaign Submissions › March Featured Campaign: "Forgotten Realms: The Savage North" - Campaign Submissions Discussions on Obsidian Portal Community Forums
March Featured Campaign: "Forgotten Realms: The Savage North"
Although it is interesting to see a D&D game run by employees of WoTC and played in their meeting rooms make the Featured Campaign of the Month, and although I try my absolute hardest to never give negative feedback on anyone's campaign, I have to speak up on this one.
It looks like the Obsidian Portal featured campaign managers were wow'ed by having a WoTC game designer using the site. I can't blame them for turning their heads at that kind of cred, but this campaign has nothing spectacular about any of its facets. There is no innovative or creative use of the site. For example past features had intro movies, used all original art, or had well-designed html and layouts. The feature's wiki is just four bullet-pointed lists, and all of the aids and info links are just pasted text. I only found two npcs out of thirty something that had anything written about them. They were just pics and empty profiles.
Out of five characters, only three bothered to upload a pic, and *zero* wrote a bio or background or description. It's just five character sheets. This is what particularly set me off, because it's exactly what WoTC is delivering right now in 4e: Stats, bonuses, and powers in a setting with monsters to kill and treasure to tally up at the end of each adventure log. Where is there space, time, or effort devoted to roleplay, the story, the richness of the campaign, its ancient history, or its current events?
There are a lot of groups using this site in innovative ways that really showcase what you can do with Obsidian Portal and RPGs. Is The Savage North one of them? I'm hoping the rest of 2010's featured campaigns are ones that really sparkle and stand as examples of how cool you can make your campaign without working for WoTC.
Onsilius
It looks like the Obsidian Portal featured campaign managers were wow'ed by having a WoTC game designer using the site. I can't blame them for turning their heads at that kind of cred, but this campaign has nothing spectacular about any of its facets. There is no innovative or creative use of the site. For example past features had intro movies, used all original art, or had well-designed html and layouts. The feature's wiki is just four bullet-pointed lists, and all of the aids and info links are just pasted text. I only found two npcs out of thirty something that had anything written about them. They were just pics and empty profiles.
Out of five characters, only three bothered to upload a pic, and *zero* wrote a bio or background or description. It's just five character sheets. This is what particularly set me off, because it's exactly what WoTC is delivering right now in 4e: Stats, bonuses, and powers in a setting with monsters to kill and treasure to tally up at the end of each adventure log. Where is there space, time, or effort devoted to roleplay, the story, the richness of the campaign, its ancient history, or its current events?
There are a lot of groups using this site in innovative ways that really showcase what you can do with Obsidian Portal and RPGs. Is The Savage North one of them? I'm hoping the rest of 2010's featured campaigns are ones that really sparkle and stand as examples of how cool you can make your campaign without working for WoTC.
Onsilius
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
The characters section was by far one of the most disappointing in my opinion. If there are character backgrounds to these PCs they need to be posted! Two out of five characters have no pictures and only one has a background (which is all of 4 sentences long). Fourteen out of thirty five NPCs have nothing in their descriptions or backgrounds, just a name with a picture (sometimes not even a picture).
The Savage North is of very poor quality in terms of both role play and site use. The only thing that is well kept up with is inventory.
This makes me sad to be a 4.0 player. I love 4.0 and The Savage North does everything it possibly can at the moment to back up the assumption of many critics, "All about the loots".
I want to know the character's point of views on events, how the characters reacted to things. What their connection is with this world that they live in. I would suggest having more player driven site. I can not see this world, all this world is to me at the moment is a bunch of numbers and quests, reminds me of an MMO. Another tip is attempting to put all the number crunches such as XP rewarded and gold acquired in a separate location in more of a chart format. That way the description of the session is not interrupted by numbers and the players, or viewers, have one place to go to see the advancement of the party's gold, item, and xp collection.
We understand your concerns, and we want to make sure we address them from here on out. We were super excited when we found out that Rodney uses Obsidain Portal, and I had a chance to talk with him and hear all about his campaign. He also does a great write up on his Wizard's Community blog writing all about how he brought this campaign back from the brink.
In the future, please, when you see a campaign that is really tight, that's really got some creativity and posh, please add it to the Featured Campaign Submissions subform! That's the first place we look when looking for new campaigns to feature :)
Good Gaming,
AutumnsChild(dan)