Why Memory of Ord exists

I have more campaign ideas than I can hope to run. I have more than twice as many campaigns excluded from my campaign pitch doc than I have included. It is safe to say I accrue campaigns (or at least the driving ideas behind them) like players without a table accrue unused character sheets. The MCDM community, with all its Directors that grew out of Running the Game, suggests I'm not alone.

There are entire communities centered around character builds, that can get specific and analytical, while I've yet to see a tool to help Directors craft enitre campaigns, whether composing published adventures, homebrew, or anything in between. The complexity of campaign design leaves us lacking an artifact akin to the character sheet for players, that we can iterate on, plan for the future, and share for feedback.

Memory of Ord lets you craft such artifacts. You can build, share, and remodel your adventures. You can work as far ahead as you want, or dive into the details for your upcoming session.

Beyond just planning campaigns and sharing content, true success would be seeing the community leverage this tool for deeper discussions. To talk about campaign structure, the effects each Draw Steel system has on pacing, or to visualize how much is being added or removed when changing how many victories it will take to level up.

Support the project

Memory of Ord is a free community tool; crafting, remixing, and sharing your designs will not be paywalled. It doesn't rely on ads nor sell your data. There are operational costs though, so any support is appreciated and helps keep the lights on.

If you have the means and the inclination for it, you can support development here.

Recurring support, or join the community for free. Includes posts on feature development and design lessons.

A simple, tip what you like means of support.

Acknowledgements

Memory of Ord stands on the shoulders of the MCDM and other TTRPG communities.

Running the Game - Matt Colville’s YouTube series on how to run a game for your friends
Node-Based Scenario Design - The Alexandrian’s blog series on crafting structured campaigns
Steel Compendium - Empowering many of the Draw Steel community tools.
Draw Steel - The TTRPG system that got me thinking about campaigns cinematically.
Ratcatchers - Matt Colville’s hard-boiled fantasy series

Where did the name come from?

Just as development was getting started, my time was swallowed by a family event that sprung up. So lying awake at a hotel, thoughts of classic dwarven forge masters crossed my mind.

But in Orden, dwarven lore goes deeper. Where humans have saints, the dwarves have heroes, and they earn that honor by acting upon the world. The dwarven heroes are immortalized for making a difference, proving themselves worthy of Ord's attention, living forever in Ord's memories.

That was it! Ord, "created the land, mountains, and stone." Ord placed the elementals (dwarves) into Orden, and with them the Law of Time, which required action. Dwarves (culturally) strive to act, as it is the will of their god.

Isn't that what Directors want to do? Craft a world for their players to enjoy? Where the characters actions shape the story, and both the good and the bad are remembered for decades? This is the whole reason I want this community tool to exist! Now, I'm not calling your players a table of dwarves… but if we aren't crafting stories for players to act in, to act with the same level of expectation that Ord has of dwarven heroes, then what are we doing?

So lying in the hotel bed, I settled on the name, and decided to re-read the Zaar passages from the Ratcatchers series. That's always dangerous, as it once again prompted a full re-reading of the series. But a few days after finishing that re-read, I was inspired to create a short scene myself, between Heden and Zaar, at the Dawnforge. I'm not much of a writer, but I think the scene captures what the name means to me better than I could explain in plain prose.