We've got two weeks and $2k to go! Let's do this!

Backers, we cannot express enough how your support means the world to us. Awareness about Campfire is spreading and that's the key element to making it a reality.

Keep it up! Tell your friends! Tell your FLG! Tell the world!

We are beating the mid-campaign slump all because of you. If we keep getting the word out at the rate we have this past week, we're sure to make the Any Story, Anywhere intro RPG come to life, giving thousands of new gamers an easy introduction into our favorite hobby and learning tool.

To help make the case to new backers and future players, we present another Dev Log from Campfire author, Wojtek Borowicz, on the importance of Campfire and the process of its creation. Have a look, share it around, and above all, enjoy our thanks for backing this important project.

Devlog #2: Why is Campfire a good first-time RPG?

After 20 years of running sessions and writing adventures, my tabletop RPG hot take is that it’s too hard to get into the hobby. A new person shouldn’t have to read a thick book or rely on an experienced friend to hold their hand through the first session or two. That’s why I’m making Campfire.

The most common gateway into TTRPGs is Dungeons & Dragons. The Core Rulebook to D&D is actually a set of three separate books that, combined, are 762 pages long. If you look around for alternative recommendations for newbies, you’ll hear about Monster of the Week, maybe Call of Cthulhu. Both terrific RPGs but we’re still talking hundreds of pages in rulebooks. Much smaller games exist, too - there’s Honey Heist, Lasers & Feelings, or my personal favourite bite-sized system, Risus - but they only give the game master a set of rules. All the work of coming up with a story rests on their shoulders.

Doesn’t exactly say beginner-friendly, does it?

With that in mind, I set out to make a TTRPG that a GM who has never GM’d can take and, in 15 minutes, start running for players who have never played. Dozens of hours of playtesting with various groups later, I think I’m onto something.

So, what makes Campfire suitable for beginners?

One-shot adventures. The whole game is based on self-contained stories playable within three hours. They’re laid out in Story Sheets that the Narrator (what I call a GM) follows along to advance the plot. They’re ready to play with no prep but still leave space for exploration, improvisation, and player agency.

Character outlines instead of character sheets. There’s no character creation - each adventure comes with several PCs to choose from. They have names, a couple of sentences of a description, and hints regarding their relationships with the others. I call them outlines, because they give players enough of a shape to know what they’re working with, but it’s fully up to them to colour inside the lines.

Contemporary settings. Campfire stories are set in modern times. That doesn’t mean they can’t venture into the supernatural. There are werewolves and zombies and occult rituals - but they rely on well-known cultural touchstones. The Narrator doesn’t have to study the lore and its internal logic before being able to run a game and players are grounded in the fantasy from the get go.

Single-rule system with Gimmicks. Every situation that requires an element of chance can be resolved with a single D10 roll. Originally it was D6 but feedback from early playtesting suggested D10 makes it easy to visualize roll difficulty as a percentage. Each adventure also has its own Gimmick: one additional mechanism specific to the particular setting, be it investigating a murder or executing a heist. With rules so simple, the game keeps moving forward and the players can focus on the story and characters.

Writing a good story is one thing. A good story, however, won’t necessarily play good at the table. It’s like that famous military adage: no plan survives contact with the enemy. Twenty years of GM-ing taught me that stories often don’t survive contact with the players, either.

So, what do I do about it?

When I write RPG adventures I often start with the framework known as the story stack. It’s a popular tool for video game writers and narrative designers - I learned it from Susan O’Connor (Bioshock, Tomb Raider) and as far as I know it originated from Jason VandenBerghe (Red Steel 2). I haven’t seen it discussed as much in the tabletop space but it’s a tremendously useful tool for writing fun adventures.

It divides a game’s story into five layers:

They go in order from the least flexible to the most flexible. If your first reaction is wait, how is plot the most flexible part of the story? Surely it’s the other way around - that’s fine. Many game writers find this counterintuitive at first but it becomes natural as soon as you start working with the stack.

Player fantasy is the most powerful and foundational element of any narrative experience in games, video or tabletop. We fantasize about being heroes, villains, wizards, scoundrels, and countless other things. What we seek in games is the expressions of those fantasies. Say, your players want to be a pirate crew stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. There are dozens and dozens of plots to fulfill this with. Multiple worlds even: they could be sailing the seven seas or be space pirates in a faraway galaxy. But they do need to be pirates, doing pirate things: looting, exploring, looking for treasure. No matter how meticulously written the story and how deep the NPCs, it won’t work if the fantasy is unfulfilled.

How to translate this into practice? Let’s look at Midnight Heist, one of the adventures in Campfire. It’s an adventure for players looking for a sleek caper story. Ocean’s Eleven, Italian Job, and the like.

Here’s my story stack:

I’m sure you can see how the world and plot could be different: we could be robbing a casino in Vegas or a billionaire’s penthouse in Dubai. But whatever the choice, it has to support the fantasy. As long as you stick with that rules, your adventures will be heaps of fun to play.