GoblinKnife › Campaigns

Written like a module. Grown like a story.

Picture a slider. At one end, a published adventure: carefully written, but it ends, and someone has to run it for you. At the other, a story an AI makes up as it goes: it never ends, but it forgets, drifts, and nothing is really at stake. GoblinKnife sits in the middle.

Why every campaign is written first

A story is only as good as its setups and payoffs. A clue in the first hour should matter in the third; a character who lies should have a reason. When the whole campaign exists before you start (its places, people, secrets and encounters, and the clocks that tick while you dawdle), the game master can plant things early and pay them off late.

It’s still your story. Talk your way past a fight, take the long way round, ignore the obvious door. Campaigns are written with many ways through, and the game master improvises the moment: what a guard says, how a plan goes wrong.

Campaigns that continue In development

Finishing a campaign shouldn’t be the end of your character’s story. Today, a campaign ends with an ending of its own, and you can bring a character you’ve played into another campaign. We’re building the next step: when you finish, GoblinKnife writes a new campaign from how yours ended, from the choices you made, who lived and what you became, and you play on.

It writes that next part as a whole campaign before you play it, not one improvised scene at a time. Scoping new story as a full campaign gives it time to be checked and aligned with what came before: that its clues lead somewhere, its fights suit your party, and nothing contradicts what already happened.

The campaigns