Working With Rails

Obsidian Portal

Obsidian Portal is an interactive portal site for Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games. Rather than trying to automate the playing of the game, Obsidian Portal provides tools to help automate the storytelling. After all, these games are about telling a story, not crunching a bunch of numbers.

Every campaign has its own shared space to collaborate and push the story forward. A blog provides a historical view of all the adventures the party has experienced. A campaign wiki allows the party and GM to collectively build a web of information representing their knowledge of the campaign world. Further, the Game Master has their own private wiki for notes, adventure hooks, devious traps, and all the other tiny details necessary to keep a game running.

Beyond individual campaigns, Obsidian Portal provides a way to post your characters, items, spells, and other creations to the Web. Finally, there is an easy, intuitive way to share your ideas with the rest of the gaming community. Rather than relying on clunky forums or wikis, the Obsidian Portal system was designed with tabletop RPG content in mind. Post your characters, comment on someone else’s spells, vote for your favorite new monster, or search for the perfect BBEG for tonight’s game. It’s all possible. Even better, all content is easily wiki-linkable, so your wiki pages and blog entries can link to your content, making it easy for readers to get the whole story.

For the future, the development team is planning all sorts of tabletop-specific tools to help enhance your game. A treasure tracker will allow you to easily track what treasure has been given out, what has been identified, and what is still a mystery. An NPC tracker will help track the identities of all the NPCs in the campaign world and provide quick lookup when players start asking pesky questions like, “What was the name of the village healer who cured my mummy rot three (real-time) months ago? I want to send her a thank-you note.” These are just a few of the planned enhancements.

Homepage: http://www.obsidianportal.com