I’ve been thinkering with ICRPG + Foundry for a while now, and well… i’ve started an asynchronous community with 30+ players.
First it started simple: The Simple Joy of Tobacco was an western adventure based in RDR2 with a feud between two houses over their tobacco plantations, where players were mercenaries for the houses.
(obs: alternate universe - there were no slaves and every plantation worker was paid correctly and was free).
For this, I’ve made some changes with the character sheet, and it started off with 11 players for about 3 months.
Then, i’ve started working on Hogwarts: The School of Magic, which is a full blown interactive experience and game.
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The students register at the website, and the forms grant them access to the Discord rooms.
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Each cycle (every 8 weeks / 2 months) there is a gathering in the main hall where the sorting hat sorts new students for each of the houses. This makes the players go up a year.
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Every week, the student can enroll on 3 classes (grant 1 XP each) or on 2 assignments (grant 2 XP each). The classes are asynchronous and the player just enroll on these if he cant do any assignment (meaning he can’t go out on an adventure on this week, but he gets the XP for studying).
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XP works as intended: they level up their characters via Discord and have a list of spells that they can choose. Each level is 25 XP.
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Each assignment is an adventure that is played in Foundry with maps, monsters, items or any kind of challenge that the students will face. As i’m the only GM, this gets pretty heavy on me considering the amount of players, but I use the Discord bots in sync with Foundry to alleviate some of the workflow. Also, one adventure helps me to generate other adventures (at least how the adventure starts, everything else is on them).
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Each house have its common room where players interact with each other (in-character and out of character, in Discord) so they can generate their own stories as the school feels like a living environment.
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Whenever there isn’t an adventure going on, the Hogsmeade map is on by default on our Foundry web link. So players can enter in it and roleplay as their characters (if they aren’t in a ongoing adventure), without me needing to GM anything. It’s only the Hog’s Head Inn and a few streets by now, but I hope to recreate everything (someday) on Hogsmeade so theres enough room for the players to play in it.
I’m not like a great designer or a incredible illustrator so i’ve found a way to immerse my players into my stories using technology. Foundry have been a great tool for storytelling with the sounds and general immersion that I can grant to my players just makes all the work satisfying somehow. The ability to make chairs and stuff to move when a token enters a tile, or the spacial sound that can only be heard if the token gets near the source, or the lightning effects and so on, so on, it’s just amazing.
Here is an image to illustrate this wall text:
Also, sorry for my bad english - it’s not my primary language. If you see anything wrong, please hit me up and i’ll fix it!