Community

I'm writing this blog post on behalf of the LFR Global Admins to talk about some changes to the way the campaign will distribute adventures going forward.

If you haven't already read Chris Tulach's Organized Play report from the December issue of Dungeon, go ahead and do that now. [1]

You should also read the announcement regarding the end of the private (home) play reporting category in January 2011. [2]

Since LFR launched at Gen Con Indianapolis 2008, all adventures have been released through the RPGA ordering system. Over the last several years there has been an increasing emphasis on retail store play as the primary target for WotC's in-house Organized Play efforts, and the D&D Encounters program [3] has been a huge success in that regard. Neither WotC nor the campaign staff see LFR and Encounters as competing with one another -- they offer very different play experiences, for one thing -- but from an Organized Play perspective, it's much more important to use the more formal mechanisms of the WPN (such as the ordering and reporting system) for Encounters than it is for LFR.

In other words, Living Forgotten Realms remains an important and thriving part of the landscape, but it doesn't necessarily make sense to use the same sanctioning and reporting systems for LFR that are used for Encounters, especially with the end of the Player and DM Rewards programs. There is a lot of LFR being played at retail game stores, of course, and we hope there always will be -- but there's also a lot of LFR being played at conventions and game days, in libraries, and in people's homes. Ultimately, WotC suggested -- and we agreed -- that moving to a simpler model was the right decision for LFR. We can still have convention-only events and use the ordering system to distribute those events, but the vast majority of LFR content will be made available through a direct-download model.

Our goal is to make the LFR section of the Wizards Community the focal point for all information and discussion related to the campaign. The Community site has almost everything we need -- there's a messaging system, a calendar, the ability to write blog posts, a polling system (which we'll use for collecting Critical Event Summaries), and a forum system. Really the only thing that's missing is a way to allow the distribution of adventures, because the Community site doesn't currently support file uploading and downloading (although that might change in the future).

To fill in that piece of the puzzle, the Global Admins have created a Living Forgotten Realms download site [4] which we will be using to supplement the Wizards Community LFR pages. The download site is where you'll go to get new content, but the LFR Community is where you'll go to talk about that content and to interact with the campaign staff and your fellow players and DMs. We won't recreate any aspect of the Community site on the LFR download site -- it will basically just be a bucket of links. The Community site is important to Wizards and to the campaign staff because it's how everyone will track the level of participation in LFR, which helps Wizards make decisions about how to allocate resources in the future. So we want to make sure to keep a strong showing in the LFR Community and to use all the features of the site.

You can check out the new download site right now -- it's live, and currently hosts our new LFR pre-generated characters (as described in the LFR Campaign Guide, these pregens are legal for LFR play at 1st, 5th, 8th, and 11th level, and you can "adopt" your pre-gen after playing it, advancing it as you would any LFR character). We are also starting to release new adventures through the download site, but again, all the discussion about those adventures should take place on the LFR Community forums. (As of this writing, CORE2-11 The Sign of Four is the first new adventure available for download from the new site. It's a two-round P3 adventure and we'll be following it up with quite a bit of additional new content between now and the end of the year.)

You will notice that the visual design of the new site is rather unexciting: that's by design -- the site is a place for us to host and distribute files, so it doesn't need to be fancy. Over time, as we have a larger and larger amount of content hosted there, we'll add some basic things like search and a more sophisticated organization of the adventures, but for now, it's just a simple page where you can get all the newest LFR content.

So what happens to all the "old" LFR content (by which I mean, everything that isn't on the new download site)? All LFR adventures, other than convention-only adventures (such as the Adventuring Company adventures), will be removed from the WPN/RPGA ordering system in January 2011 when the home play category retires. We will not be adding any new adventures to the ordering system with the exception of any future public play exclusives. Instead, Wizards is creating a new static download page that will be linked through the LFR Community site. That page isn't up yet, but when it's ready, we'll post a prominent link here (and on the new site). On that page you'll find LFR adventures that were previously available through the ordering system. WotC will track the download of those adventures, and we're asking that people please not link directly to the new download page -- we want you to get there by clicking through the LFR Community home page so that those clicks can be tracked and the campaign can get "credit" for the activity.

One important aspect of this transition is that not all of the existing LFR content will make it to the new download pages. Some of the older LFR adventures will be retired when they are removed from the ordering system in January. This blog post is already long enough, so I'll make a separate post (probably on the LFR Community Wiki) with every single LFR adventure -- past and present -- and what its status will be after all these changes happen in January: retired, moved to the new Wizards download page, or moved to the new LFR community download page.

TL;DR:

There's a new LFR download site at www.livingforgottenrealms.com where we will be releasing new adventures and hosting other official LFR content, such as the pre-generated characters
When the home play category goes away in January 2011, all LFR content will be removed from the RPGA/WPN ordering system, other than convention-only adventures
Wizards of the Coast is creating a new static download page that will host some, but not all, of the existing LFR content that's in the ordering system. That page will go live when the LFR content is removed from the ordering system in January 2011 (exact date TBD)
Some of the older LFR adventures will be retired when this transition occurs. We'll post a list on the wiki, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to start catching up on those older LFR adventures that you haven't already played.

I'm sure that there will be a lot of questions -- we'll do our best to answer them. I've created a forum thread for that purpose. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of the LFR community. We're really excited about what we're going to be able to do with the campaign in 2011 and beyond!

Talk to you later --

Sean
----
M. Sean Molley (on behalf of the other Global Admins: Pieter Sleijpen, Greg Marks, and Joe Fitzgerald, and the entire LFR campaign staff)

Links:

[1] wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/drrep...

[2] wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4news...

[3] wizards.com/dnd/Event.aspx?x=dnd/4new/ev...

[4] www.livingforgottenrealms.com