I noticed a lot of people seem to be using Obsidian Portal for their pendragon campaigns. (90+)

I'm just about to reboot my campaign and have decided to use obsidian portal. It's looking good so far.

Here it is, if any of you want to take a look and give some feedback.

https://a-tale-of-blood-and-honour.obsidianportal.com/

Do you find this sort of online tool usefull? Or do you stick to paper?

Do you find this sort of online tool usefull? Or do you stick to paper?


When I started my last and now defunct campaign (not the one you were in!), I did look at obsidial portal but I let i go. Due to time constraints I had to run a "mid ambition" game, and I felt that I did not have the time and energy for this kind of tool. I also tried to keep the bookeeping to a minumum, had fewer NPCs than I usually do and so forth. But I am curious. Given us an evaluation when you have used it for a while!

Do you find this sort of online tool usefull? Or do you stick to paper?


When I started my last and now defunct campaign (not the one you were in!), I did look at obsidial portal but I let i go. Due to time constraints I had to run a "mid ambition" game, and I felt that I did not have the time and energy for this kind of tool. I also tried to keep the bookeeping to a minumum, had fewer NPCs than I usually do and so forth. But I am curious. Given us an evaluation when you have used it for a while!


I've actually used it for a few other campaigns, but nothing like this scale as of yet. And I'll definately get back to you about how it works out. But for now, I think it's fleshing out great.

From earlier experiences with other campaigns on obsidian: I like to have a place to keep things together, and a place to let players be creative. A game like pendragon, which has hundreds of npcs, locations and historic events it gets hard to track as a player. "Who the hell were that Egan-guy again?, oh, lets check obsidian." An online place like this let players add their own stories, npcs or notes that keep track of events.

I also use the page as my own notebook, where I keep notes on npcs and places in the special GM-notes.

Not everything can be kept there though.. I still keep a lot of documents and folders for my regular story-stuff. But mostly, I keep the page as a "front-page" for my story.

Just a bit of advertising. :)
If you are looking at a place to keep track of all info. Look at Realmworks.
Its learning curve is steep, but it has a lot of power.

I use it to keep track of my 500+ NPCs.
Check out www.wolflair.com/realmworks/ for more info.

I have not used an obsidian portal, but an unexpected bonus of doing online GMing (Skype / Teamspeak) is that it is much easier to both write and keep notes on the computer. It is much easier for me to open my 'GM notes' file and do a quick search on a name to find out who guy X is and when and where he was met. Alas, I didn't start doing this until relatively late, in 540s for our older campaign. Before that, I am trusting in the very detailed notes made by one of the players. After he quit (lots of reasons, including his first baby), another player has taken a habit of writing email summaries of what happened during the session, and those are very useful as well.

I very much recommend all GMs and players to keep notes. I'd be very tempted to institute a glory reward for 'storytelling', emailed summaries of the year's adventures and events from the point of view of the characters. You know, adding a bit of game mechanism carrot for something that I feel enhances the gaming experience. Also, I tend to find that as a player, if I am keeping a character diary/log, especially in first person, I get much better into the character's head-space.