Campaign Banners and Briefs

I'm going to write up some new campaign briefs, even though I don't yet have a solid idea on what exactly each of the potential Old Night campaigns will look like yet. But first, I want to have some solid banners for them, because I like having them. I'm going to go a little more with my current banner style, so let's see how these work. I may have more than one option for each.

Cult of Undeath A uses the Necrofonticon runes on the top, JungleSlang runes on the bottom, and the Kothika font for the main title. Add some drop and inner shadow and extra outline on the main title, and it looks pretty good. I made it transparent so I can use it over background images, but that might make it hard to read on a black background.

This next one simply swaps the Kothika for LLPaladin. I also noticed that I accidentally outlined the drop shadow, so I didn't do it this time. Let me try the Kothika one more time with the outline and drop shadow applications reversed.

Huh. That doesn't look quite as different as I'd thought. Rather subtle. Of course, I also increased the opacity of the drop shadow a bit. I'm not sure that I have a favorite between them, or care even about the difference. Let's try one more Cult of Undeath main font, and then I'll switch to another campaign.

This one uses Season of the Witch Black, which is a relatively chunky looking font. I think that's enough for this one. I might need alternative color schemes too, depending on where I want to use it. But I like this one for now, and it looks good with the blog, at least.

This Curse of the Corsair Coast banner uses CybertronianFinal for the runes and Treasure Map Deadhand for the text. For the one below, I swapped the main text to Treasure Hunt PERSONAL USE, which is just slightly more ragged looking than the very similar Treasure Hunt. I'm obviously going for a bit of a Pirates of the Caribbean look on this one. Let me try a couple more options. I have a lot of piratey fonts, although many of them are actually quite similar to each other.

This one is called The Rum is Gone. I like how the lower case Os are skulls. Given that it's an all caps style font, I probably should have had some upper case Os to mix it up. Let's try one more that's a bit of a different style...

This one is Sovereign, and it's surprisingly not quite as legible.

This is a lot of banners, even though I've got several more campaigns to do. I'm only a third of the way done! I'll continue to think about it, #3 for Cult of Undeath and #1 for Curse of the Corsair Coast, at least right now. Let's see if I decide late to change my mind. 

5x5 Listing

Because I just got a few new fonts, and am having fun creating new banners, here's a complete listing of my 5x5s that I've either partly (or completely, in one case) planned, or am thinking about doing in the next... I dunno, months or couple of years tops or so. I want to have more options than just the three I started with, especially as I've had more regions added to the orbit of The Three Realms since I came up with my original list. A few of them have slight renaming issues, or other things; Shadow Over Garenport sounds too much like The Shadow of Old Night, and it isn't really accurate that it's super focused on Garenport anyway. 

Cult of Undeath is literally the original campaign that I've worked on. It started as my attempt to adapt the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into something that I could use; taking some of the better elements from it and putting them into a different framework that didn't focus on so many fetchit macguffin quests, railroads, dungeon-crawls and other D&D nonsense. By the time I finished it (for generous definitions of finished) it resembled Carrion Crown very little, and only one or two story beats are even passingly familiar. Although of course all Old Night campaigns are going to be horror-like, this one is based on really classic Gothic horror, with vampires, ghosts, and stuff like that featuring prominently.

Curse of the Corsair Coast is what I'm going to call my Freeport-inspired adaptation. I don't know how much of Freeport modules that I intend to liberally raid for fun elements and ideas will still be left over when I'm done, but it should at least have a similar feel, and that's my starting point.

Originally developed under the title Chaos in Waychester, and later renamed Shadows Over Garenport, Darkness in the Hill Country is the final name of this campaign, and the first that was finished under the new 5x5 Front methodology. It's a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, lacking perhaps the super-strong theming of most of the others, and just being focused on the relatively familiar Hill Country area of the setting. I consider this the most iconic campaign of Old Night.

I haven't yet given a lot of thought to this, but as I added more references to Hyperborea to the setting as I worked on it, I developed a strong desire to have a 5x5 Front (or maybe a smaller 3x5 or something; we'll see) set there, with a focus on Lovecraftian horrors and icy wilderness. A kind of fantasy At the Mountains of Madness if you will. I presume that it may well start in Lower Kurushat, and involve some stuff there too before taking off across the Wolfwood to reach Hyperborea.

My main inspiration for this is, believe it or not, The Hangover. The idea is that the PCs start this campaign by waking up in the desert a day or two journey from Simashki, surrounded by dead bodies and charred and broken wagons; what looks like the remains of a massacred caravan. But, they have no idea who any of these bodies are, why they themselves are here, or—and they notice this soon enough—how and why at least two weeks have passed since the last thing that any of them can remember.  Trying to unravel the mystery will have them galivant across the blasted, daemon-haunted deserts of the Daemon Wastes, naturally. Slightly more light-hearted than the other ones, as I intend to put as many awkward moments in based on stuff that happened that the PCs can't remember as I can. But it's still an Old Night campaign; it'll be dark and horror-themed, of course.

As Cult of Undeath started to migrate a little bit to the east, and now straddles the Hill Country and Timischburg, I thought I needed another campaign in the West. This started out as my first stab at a Corsair Coast 5x5, but it ends up spending time on the Timischburg coastline a lot, and even makes a stop at exotic Nizrekh. Just a high level outline for now, but what I have, I'll want to focus a little less on the Corsair Coast (since I now have a whole new campaign for that) and more on the Timischburg coastline.