The Bard's College

Hello and welcome to The Bard’s College. I am The Bard, and this is the first in a series of posts which will outline my experience developing a new campaign. Specifically, with this campaign I am attempting to create something I’ve long been curious about, but have never found an adequate answer to. Can you make a tabletop RPG campaign that is also a metroidvania? For anyone who is not aware, metroidvania is a portmanteau of the titles of two massively influential games, specifically Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which is used as a shorthand to describe a genre of game built around exploring a map finding keys/powerups which will open up more of the map for further exploration. I love metroidvania games and I’ve especially fallen in love with the original Dark Souls, a game that has spawned its own genre-defining label with the “souls-like” or “soulsborne” game. The real thing this experiment will teach me is whether the metroidvania gameplay style can fun...