Sunday, November 12, 2017

I very occasionally throw stuff up on here and see what sticks.
I'm most interested and intrigued by adventure design and GMing. Often there just not enough going on for me when I'm a player...the pacing is too slow and my agency is often also very low. I find it frustrating as a player to have my meta contributions neglected I.e. Attempts to contribute to the "world" at large. I get it, I really do. So I chose to GM.

That said slamming an adventure together is t an easy thing and I've always admired Mouse guards approach to adventure design. To be honest I think that is the games biggest contribution to rpg design as a whole ...so I was anxiously looking forward to Torchbearer for a more classic version of the same...well that's not really what Torchbearer delivers ... it just goes in another direction which is fine, but it abandons a really great device established in Mouse Guard.

So I've boiled my Dungeon version down to;
Men (adversaries, and other wise - generally interesting "human" ( I.e. Dwarf, Elf, halfling etc are lumped in here)
Monsters ( like it says on the tin all the things that want to prey on the PCs that aren't the above men)
Mazes ( this is the location under investigation it can be a city or a dungeon or whatever but it's a maze figuratively because negotiating the location is frought with danger because it's what it is - if it's a dungeon it's got traps and cave-ins, and gas (burp... pardon) and all that. If it's a city it's got its own problems - etiquette (street or silver spoon) it's got laws, it's got distractions etc.
Magic - this last category is really bringing the weird - plannar travel, a dungeon made from a huge gargoyle, Flying Fortress's, going to "heaven" or "hell" all that great coooky stuff.

In mouse guard you have weather, wilderness, mice and animals as the categories. You then pick two and flesh them out just off the cuff. Nothing too elaborate just a nice amount to fill Play for the evening. There's a lot more going on in the design of Mouse guard so I recommend you pick up a copy of second edition because it's really a great game to put in your collection.

So hack Mouse Gards structure we have Men, Monsters, Mazes & Magic. We pick two and scetch out an idea for the evening.
The classic two for old school rule play is of course Monsters and the Maze doing this on the fly as the game unfolds is tottaly feasible you look at monsters or combinations of the same that sit at a good challenge for the PCs and you map out figuratively ( I build it like a flow chart) the maze and your off. You need not do it improve either. You can take you time use some other charts from other books to help you flesh out your picks. Now down to what this REALLY is. It's a destroyer of blank pages +4. It's not truly anything but a prompt to get your GMing juices flowing and getting an evenings play started. You can make it as elaborate or as lite as suits you can you can quickly get material for entertainment spooling out very quickly - it removes the pretention barrier and boils things down to basics. So what happens if I pick men and monsters? Well it's really up to you ... what it says to me is the location is meh I'm thinking it's an ambush set by bandits for the PCs but the local Orc tribe got wind of it and are going to get new slaves once the dust clears ....and that's and evenings play and that's all this device was for so good let's add players to create chaos with that basic skelleton. Men and monsters could also be the PCs have gone to worship at temple the priests and other worshippers are the men, some have to be protected others placated, still others rescued etc. the monsters? So the PCs are there for a holy day. Something goes snafu and the dead from the crypts get up for some "punishing cardio" on the living.

So that's it a little page starter to give you an evening play. String these together for a campaign and your golden.

I'll look at fleshing this out further because it's been useful to me so far but I'm probably NOT sharing everything I do which makes it easy for me. So I'll examine that a bit more and elaborate.

Have fun at the game table!