Have you ever finished a session of your favorite role-playing game and wished it could just keep on going? That you wouldn’t have to wait a week or a month until all the stars of your real-life, complicated schedules aligned to get your party back together again and continue the story?
The story doesn’t have to stop.
We are developing software that will allow your TTRPGs to stay alive and accessible at all times through asynchronous play. Game masters can continue to run the game through ‘downtime’ action trees, players can initiate and continue conversations with other PCs and NPCs, and the story can continue to grow, even meeting and incorporating new players through our global messaging system. Now you can keep engaging and progressing in your game even when you’re away from the table, whether it be virtual or made of wood.
Introducing Powerful New Tools to keep your Tabletop RPG Games going strong even when you’re not at the table
Welcome to campfire,
where the story never Stops.
As lifetime players with decades of experience, we noticed that nearly all of our campaigns would begin to fizzle out after time, especially after taking long breaks. One of our players would go on vacation, get a new job, have a baby, or experience one of a myriad of life situations that would restrict their ability to commit consistently to game time. We’d take a long break and our once wondrous campaign would therefore start to fade from our minds, or we’d splinter off and start other games. Even when we came back to it, memories had to be refreshed, storylines revitalized, characters reintroduced—and often, the magic would be gone.
Does this sound familiar?
We call this phenomenon
Campaign decay,
which eventually leads to
Campaign collapse.
We found a solution to the problem of campaign decay in keeping the Game Master and players alike engaged asynchronously—outside of game time and at their own leisure in real world time—through ‘downtime’ play. Downtime play happens when the player characters take a break around the campfire while traveling through the countryside to their next adventure, or stay a few nights at the local inn of a town that needs saving, or even a few hours of respite deep in a dungeon surrounded by peril.
Downtime play encompasses a wide array of activities, each one furthering character and story development:
interacting between characters
crafting items, potions, or scrolls
learning new skills or practicing old ones
meeting new NPCs
buying and selling loot
planning current or future quests
Integrated into the most popular VTT systems, Campfire will initially offer a plethora of ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style action trees of various possibilities for downtime play, with both pre-made options and fully customizable templates for the GM, as well as a messaging system between individual players, the GM, and/or the entire party. Further development will create a stand-alone app with external messaging capabilities with togglable expirations, campaign setting-specific integration, randomization and dice-rolling abilities, and a global forum where players from different games from all around the real world can get together—either as themselves or as their characters—make new friends, trade items, join other campaigns, and even go to war against each other!
If you are excited to deepen your stories and keep your campaigns healthy and thriving by avoiding campaign decay, then please join our email list so we can send you updates about our developments as they happen.