Advent Calendar Retrospective

Written by Tracker007

Ahead, something rose from the mist: a crumbling castle, its stone walls half-worn by time. With no other choice, you dashed for its doors, pushing them open with trembling hands. But as the heavy doors slammed shut behind you, a chilling presence filled the air. This place was far from empty. Something else was waiting inside.

Hey folks, I’m writing to recap the most ambitious Christmastime event on the server yet: the Advent Calendar: Custom Magic Vampire Christmas! This event combined card design games, Jumpstart, and TTRPG-inspired adventure elements to produce the next addition to our server Jumpstart pack collection. So, how did we do it? What happened? What even is the Advent Calendar? Read on to find out!

The Custom Magic Advent Calendar is an event that I started on the server many years ago, which was initially a collection of 24 silver-border design prompts for anybody to hang out and design for fun. It was a smashing success, and every year since has evolved into something more. In years past I’ve done as much as develop our own website (https://customjumpstart.com), and morph the design prompts into actual functional Jumpstart packs. Since then, events keep adding on to the collection of Jumpstart packs we have, and occasionally we get to playtest them all. Manage to get your designs on there, and they’re practically immortalized!

This year, I was inspired by the Robert Eggers film Nosferatu that would be coming out on Christmas, and decided to put a fanged spin on the usual holiday-focused premise. But I had more of an idea: what if the participants could choose their own path, and build the pack based on their adventure together? Thus, the RPG Jumpstart event was invented.

The premise was fairly simple: I created a map of a classic vampire’s castle (or at least repurposed one I found online) and the beginning of a story, and every day participants could vote on the next room to explore in the castle. Every room they explored would unlock a new part of the story and art to match it. In total, the map contained a total of 18 possible rooms that had art chosen for each, so everybody truly had a say in how it ended up.

The full story can be found here on the Custom Magic Discord server

For anybody who wants it instead, a quick recap of the story is as follows (spoilers!)

With that story, our participants created a lovely-looking pack with plenty of Blood token and discard synergy. There are a whole lot of pieces here that can combine with synergies in current and future Jumpstart packs, and I’m excited to see where it ends up playtest-wise! Of course you can check out the pack over at the Custom Jumpstart site, but I’ve included it here for your pleasure.

To cap it off, what about the paths we didn’t take? Below are arts for some story paths that never ended up fitting in our storyline, but could’ve ended up changing the whole thing altogether!

Overall, this was a very fun event to run. It was cool to see the community shape up and choose their own adventure, and it was an amazing creative exercise to DM for everybody in this entirely new way. If there’s enough demand for it, I’d love to run another adventure in the future. Drop us a line and let us know what kind of events would interest you!

Fangs a lot,

Tracker007