Process Video: Shattered Obelisk

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In the early days of D&D, when players met for the first time—whether at a local club or a convention or the start of a new game group—they would very often swap stories about how their characters had fared in the Keep on the Borderlands or the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief or the Tomb of Horrors. There were only a handful of printed adventures, and most D&D groups (in fact, most TTRPG players) had gone through most of them. They represented a shared experience, a common language that bound gamers together.

As time passed, and the number of published adventures exploded, that “common ground” began to disappear. By the turn of millennium, there were so many adventures and so many campaign settings that it was entirely possible—even likely—that when you made a new gamer friend you’d have ZERO shared gaming experiences.

With the launch of 3rd Edition D&D, there was an effort to return some of that with the “adventure path” modules, and it worked to an extent. A pretty large percentage of players cut played through The Sunless Citadel and many continued into Forge of Fury. But the speed of publication couldn’t keep up with the relentless need for more material that the thousands of home campaigns meeting weeking (or more frequently) needed, and so fewer groups had the shared experience of The Speaker in Dreams or The Standing Stone … and only a relatively small percentage of the starting groups ever got around to the Bastion of Broken Souls (published three years later).

At the launch of 5th Edition D&D, Wizards of the Coast changed their publishing model, greatly reducing the number of individual products they published while at the same time releasing adventures in the form of ten-or-more-level campaigns in hardcover books, rather than the individual pamphlet-sized adventures that added up to campaigns. Each one designed to take the better part of a year to play through … when a new campaign-in-a-book would be released. As a result, there’s been a return to a “common ground” among many modern D&D players.

All that leads me to The Shattered Obelisk. This campaign (which covers 1st to 12th levels) grew out of The Lost Mines of Phandelver, an adventure from the 5E Basic Game, and quite probably represents the most frequent common ground for the latest generation of D&D gamers.

Subscribers to this newsletter got to see this drawing early, whereas the general public are only just getting their first glimpses of it today. But there’s still something left that’s JUST for the paid subscribers—a process video showing the step-by-step creation of this cartoon homage. (If you’re currently a free subscriber, now would be a great time to upgrade.)