Story HourPost your ongoing tales from your campaigns, and read those from others for inspiration. Lots of other RPG boards post "Story Hours", but this is where it started!
Which Story Hours are still being updated regularly?
I'll be nice and generous with my definition of "regularly" and say at least 4 times a year (every 3 months).
I just have the feeling that the story hour forum has quieted down some and there are not as many regular on-going story hour threads as there once were, and while we can never really tell for sure what the largest number of active threads at any given time, I thought it might be cool to just gather some data about what is going on now.
So if you update one or mores story hours at least four times a year, leave a word and a link to it (why not?) and let us know how long you've been keeping it up and if you have had any significant breaks in your updates. If you've done more than one story hour, tell us about each of them.
I wonder if there is a lifecycle to a story hour thread. It might be fun to try to figure one out.
I just posted today about my story site at D&D 4e The Order of the Vanguard | A Tale of Mythgara It's fairly new, so it should be quite active. I'm working on the Prelude/Overview section. I hope to finish it soon. Take a visit and leave some comments via the Blog or my e-mail dcpev@shaw.ca I need as much input as possible. hint, hint!
__________________ DM of Adventure Path Story Hour (now in Thunderspire Labyrinth!): Ryam Plays Dice - updated 8th June 09 (campaign on indefinite hiatus).
Player in Swordlands Story Hour: Interview with a Fey - updated 15th June 09. News just in - this campaign may be restarting in the near future! Watch this space!
I also have the singular honour of being Rouseketeer #20.
Wow. So far the only story hours posted are all less than a month old. . .
For my own part, I am still updating "The Second Son of a Second Son", which I began in February 2007, about a month after the campaign started. There have been breaks as long as 5 or 6 weeks between installments, but mostly I update every week or two (usually I will update every week for three or four weeks, take two weeks off and so on. . .)
Before that I posted (and completed) the "Out of the Frying Pan" story hour, set in the same homebrew setting (see sig), which I completed in December 2006, after starting back in February of 2001 when these were still Eric Noah's boards, and covering 5 threads and over a thousand typed pages in Word. There were times in those nearly 5 years that I posted every 5 days or a week, but by the end I was only posting about twice a month to every three weeks.
I had several cases of story hour fatigue while writing the first one and had some breaks of weeks and even months when I grew tired of writing it, or simply could not get in the mood. However, I think in the long run the experience of the first one has taught me how to pace myself for this second one and I have not had to deal with that inertia of not writing (yet).
Anyway, I see Sagiro updated late last night/early this morning, and he has updated fairly regularly all these years (with a few breaks), but his is the only story hour I still follow - the others were either completed or abandoned (or I lost interest).
Who else has been updating regularly for a significant chunk of time?
I have two story hours running. I update them daily. They're all pre-written.
The Arcanis story hour is thirty chapters behind, which means it will finally conclude some time in 2009, I'm guessing. At this point the story hour has been around a long time, but not nearly as long of the staples here.
The d20 Modern story hour is ongoing, but because I write scenes (vs. summaries) the story hour is still several chapters behind. Unlike the Arcanis story hour, where we knew we were moving towards a conclusion, I'm not entirely sure how much staying power this d20 Modern game has. We only play once a month for an eight hour block, when I try to cram in three different scenarios. I'm planning to run the campaign books At Your Door, Goatswood, and Nocturnum. We'll see how it goes.
About the only breaks in my updates is when life interferes, I get sent on a business trip, I get really sick, or there's a power outage.
I keep my current story hours linked in my sig; all of them are updated quite regularly, which is to say, generally about 2-5 times per month. (Although I just posted my first update after a couple month hiatus, and finished the halfling story hour off- it's now complete.)
Also, I anticipate starting my 4e story hour before too long.
I have two story hours running. I update them daily. They're all pre-written.
The Arcanis story hour is thirty chapters behind, which means it will finally conclude some time in 2009, I'm guessing. At this point the story hour has been around a long time, but not nearly as long of the staples here.
Daily since 2004? Is that just weekdays? What do you mean by "pre-written"?
Wow, the one you just completed started in 2003! That's five years. . . That is dedication!
How old are the other ones?
Well, the epic SH is on about thread 4 or 5... it has been running since prolly 2000 or 2001.
Three Kingdoms and Empire is prolly only about 2 years old? Maybe 3? That's my 'beta' group, so it gets a lot less play- we've haven't had a session since late August, and it's looking like a disintegrating group, unfortunately.
Daily since 2004? Is that just weekdays? What do you mean by "pre-written"?
When ENWorld went down (was that early 2007 maybe?) and we lost threads, I switched to daily.
Yes, that includes weekends.
By pre-written I mean I've written them all. It's done. 60+ chapters of MS Word docs for Arcanis. Modern is currently up to date (but ongoing).
Here's how I do it: right after the game, I spend the week writing the story hours. Sometimes this takes a couple of weeks -- especially with the Modern story hours, which is usually two or three smaller stories. Then I send them to my players.
The players in turn correct them for errors. I forget things sometimes (easy to do when my son isn't sleeping, I'm sick, my job is stressful, or I was caught up with one part of GMing while the players were talking). Sometimes I edit the events in such a way to make them cooler or fill in the blanks, and the players don't agree with the change so I have to change it back. There was recently a huge blow up over the depiction of a character using charm person (I showed it as street hypnosis, he wanted it as a more FX effect) -- so there IS a review process of sorts to ensure accuracy.
Then I edit the whole thing one more time and post it once the story hour gets to that point.
Because I write each story hour as a chapter, broken into smaller scenes, the two story hours take a very long time to play out. I don't mind this. I also post a summary of it to my blog. This has skyrocketed my Google rankings, as Google loves active blogs. As an experiment, if you type in "Arcanis" and another word, like "lizard" or "legionnaire," the thread shows up in the top 10, and sometimes even #2. Heck, "Modern" and "Delta Green" causes the other story hour thread to show up in 4th place.
What probably helps is that I advertise new installments everywhere. Gonnes, Sons, and Treasure Runs was regularly advertised on the Living Arcanis Yahoo group, Yog-Sothoth, and the Green Ronin forums, depending on which adventure we were playing. The Beginning of the End is advertised on the Spycraft, Monte Cook (d20 Cthulhu), Yog-Sothoth forums, and the Delta Green Yahoo mailing list.
And then there's my new column on RPG.net about my gaming group,
which is a behind the scenes look at the Beginning of the End story hour.
So in other words, I actively cultivate links to the story hour beyond ENWorld.
Mine's still kicking, despite some downtime here and there that mostly killed my 4-year long once-a-day updates.
But that's what happens when you're an art major, apparently...I'm currently swamped with work and get in updates as I can. Not daily anymore, and not even under a schedule really, but I still manage to get in somewhere between 2-4 updates a week.
While my erratic posting schedule has probably cost me a large number of readers, I see I've posted about 17 times in 2008, so I guess I meet el-remmen's criteria. Family and work obligations prevent me churning out updates the way I used to.
The game itself is still going strong, though the Story Hour is currently lagging about 20 game sessions behind. I tape all of my sessions and play them back to help write the story.
I expect to continue posting at a rate of approximately once every 3-4 weeks, with occasional longer gaps.
The frequency gets more erratic when Shilsen is back in India for the summer, but he still generally manages to get out an update roughly every 2wks to a month. So his story hour in my sig definitely fulfills the requirements.
The Chronicles of Burne, alas doesn't. Having a second kid has seriously cramped his time and inspiration.
__________________ "We are all Individuals! They chanted in unison...
This is literally how the campaign action is recorded since, in the absence of time and players, this is a solo D&D campaign. The concept is best explained by the OP in this thread on the WotC boards:
Lazybones' current storyhour is updated thrice a week, and is relatively recent.
Quick question: how can I access storyhours that are not listed in the current 2 pages? I need to find one that was started and interrupted almost an year ago, as it had some hilarious pieces.
Quick question: how can I access storyhours that are not listed in the current 2 pages? I need to find one that was started and interrupted almost an year ago, as it had some hilarious pieces.
Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the story hour forum and on the left can be found "Display Options" - Change the dropdown for how long it should look back from 100 days to "Beginning". That should do it!
The story hour in my sig is updated every Wednesday. We finished the game about three months ago and I'm about 1/3 through converting my session notes into narrative and posting them. I originally thought I'd post more than once a week initially, but life conspires to keep me busy.
__________________ Robots, assassins, hobgoblins, the Ashen Tower, polite beholders, land pirates, gnome genocide, the Corpse Ramp, artifacts, exploding zombie dragons, flying islands, dying heroes, blood feuds, vanished races, the Black City: Rise of Felskein.
Family and work obligations prevent me churning out updates the way I used to.
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