Here’s one in the “Charlie’s been running RPGs for twenty-six years but is still learning” category of entries.

I love a good online tool for managing a campaign and have mainly used Obsidian Portal for these past few years. My groups have rarely engaged with them to a level I’d like, but then I also forget about them. I think my high point was in a game of Amnesiac City, an RPG world I’d created and ran using the New World of Darkness system. In that one I had entries for different things including faceclaim photos of the cast, updated with a black and white version with “DEAD” in big red letters. I started the page in season two with one cast and as the final season brought new and old characters together, it was incredible seeing the group being whittled away.

Anyway, banners. One thing I’ve never quite managed to get right is the banner, the first thing you see when you enter one of these pages. My last big campaign recorded on Obsidian Portal was Dungeon World Exodus, set in a gigantic city made of cities. There’s not really been a great way to show that other than to take more photos of Mark Oakley’s Thieves & Kings as I love the sweeping city of Oceansend but that doesn’t quite feel right. Being a comic, the panels didn’t really fit a banner. In the end I looked for old city walls and found this:

It’s uh… not great. I’m pretty sure I did it in a rush. It’s worse given that the second campaign was in a pastoral setting in one of the central cities inside Exodus, so this was an entirely unnecessary image.

I think my best work was on a sadly now deleted Dr Who RPG where I put an ice cream van against a weird landscape because that was the group’s TARDIS. I’ve not been able to find a copy so I can’t show it to you, but I assure you it looked pretty good.

I’ve been a little less customised with my approaches to banners lately. Masks and Band of Blades ended up being art from their main books, looking like these:

Next time I make a campaign with a good amount of lore I’ll try to make another custom banner and hope that adds to the buy-in from the group. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up commissioning something from Fiverr or somewhere similar.