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This is awesome stuff. I'm a bit rusty on good adventures myself, because the last time I DM'd, it was low-level 4e and I made everything up on the fly as we went along, and just MM3'd level-appropriate monsters as I made the players draw battlefields on our paper. Kai Tave posted:Everybody has nice things to say about the Great Pendragon Campaign though I've never actually played it myself. Umm...Madness at Gardmore Abbey was also supposed to be good. And from personal experiences One Shots for Unknown Armies 2E had at least two or three decent one-shots (and some that aren't so hot). Lightning Lord posted:Some favorite adventures/campaigns/scenarios for various RPGs that I've played or run: dwarf74 posted:Yeah, it's baller. I'm having to fix more stat blocks at higher levels, but it's still loving great. Are there particular components of these adventures that make them stand out from the pack? Evocative writing, compelling setting, properly indexed, balanced encounters, etc?
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Feb 24, 2017 06:12
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Eyes of the Stone Theif is one of my favorite RPG books ever published, it's so drat good. Madness at Gardmore Abbey is probably my 2nd favorite adventure.
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Feb 24, 2017 06:23
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Jailbreak for Unknown Armies is probably the platonic ideal of the premade adventure in my mind because it's an entirely self-contained one-shot adventure with premade characters that don't suck, each with various goals and relationships to one another, and an enormous amount of built-in pressure...some people are playing escaped prisoners, some people are playing hostages, some people are playing innocent bystanders, everyone's stuck inside a single rural farmhouse while a massive hailstorm rages outside, and there's a single gun with five bullets. I've played in sessions of this where the supernatural weirdness angle (because it's Unknown Armies, so of course there's a supernatural weirdness angle) never even got touched on while the entire game played out as a tense thriller between the convicts and their increasingly agitated collection of hostages usually culminating with a brief spate of gunfire. You can absolutely pick it up and run it without needing to wrench it into some brand new shape, and it helps that Greg Stolze is a halfway decent writer and game designer. It's all of 18 pages long counting the character sheets and you can get it for free from the Atlas Games website.
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Feb 24, 2017 06:48
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I'll be interested to see what people think of The Glass-Maker's Dragon once it's available for non-backers to purchase.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:13
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Kai Tave posted:Jailbreak for Unknown Armies is probably the platonic ideal of the premade adventure in my mind because it's an entirely self-contained one-shot adventure with premade characters that don't suck, each with various goals and relationships to one another, and an enormous amount of built-in pressure...some people are playing escaped prisoners, some people are playing hostages, some people are playing innocent bystanders, everyone's stuck inside a single rural farmhouse while a massive hailstorm rages outside, and there's a single gun with five bullets. I've played in sessions of this where the supernatural weirdness angle (because it's Unknown Armies, so of course there's a supernatural weirdness angle) never even got touched on while the entire game played out as a tense thriller between the convicts and their increasingly agitated collection of hostages usually culminating with a brief spate of gunfire. You can absolutely pick it up and run it without needing to wrench it into some brand new shape, and it helps that Greg Stolze is a halfway decent writer and game designer. It's all of 18 pages long counting the character sheets and you can get it for free from the Atlas Games website. Great recommendation. I just spent the last half-hour reading through it. It's very well done.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:15
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Let's not forget the Dracula Dossier here, folks.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:18
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Haystack posted:Let's not forget the Dracula Dossier here, folks. The Dracula Dossier is certainly an impressive feat and knowing Kennith Hite it's probably a fantastic read for the Venn diagram intersection of Bram Stoker fans, history buffs, and roleplayers, but I've yet to see or hear any actual play reports so I don't know anything about how it holds up as an actual adventure you'd run for a group.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:24
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Rand Brittain posted:I'll be interested to see what people think of The Glass-Maker's Dragon once it's available for non-backers to purchase. It'll be bad, just like your noxious attempts at self promotion at every turn.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:32
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Arivia posted:It'll be bad, just like your noxious attempts at self promotion at every turn. Glass Maker's Dragon is cool and good and I don't even like rand, don't be a poo poo Arivia. Not to mention the fact that it was actually relevant given people were talking about premade scenes.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:41
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Yes, barely veiled self-promotion is always relevant to the guy benefiting from it. People weren't discussing adventures in general, but specifically good ones. Rand wanders in to namedrop his pet project with the obvious intended influence being that his product will definitely match up to the others people are talking about and that ergo it is worthy of purchase. It's the same kind of self-puffery he's been doing for years, and it grates more than a little bit to see every discussion interrupted by his plug. Rand's no better than the Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story guy, he's just hanging onto the coat tails of a marginally better designer.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:55
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Kai Tave posted:The Dracula Dossier is certainly an impressive feat and knowing Kennith Hite it's probably a fantastic read for the Venn diagram intersection of Bram Stoker fans, history buffs, and roleplayers, but I've yet to see or hear any actual play reports so I don't know anything about how it holds up as an actual adventure you'd run for a group. The only Dracula Dossier actual play I know of is One Shot where Mr. Ken Hite himself is the gamemaster. Of course it's very good!
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Feb 24, 2017 07:59
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Kai Tave posted:The Dracula Dossier is certainly an impressive feat and knowing Kennith Hite it's probably a fantastic read for the Venn diagram intersection of Bram Stoker fans, history buffs, and roleplayers, but I've yet to see or hear any actual play reports so I don't know anything about how it holds up as an actual adventure you'd run for a group. I think the general format of the GUMSHOE games are good insofar as they treat scenes as scenes, with a "lead-in" to tell you how the players should ideally be getting the idea to proceed to that scenes, and a "lead-out" to tell you what the players should be picking up from it. You can almost hear the DOINK DOINK between them.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:05
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The One-Shots compilation for Unknown Armies is also somewhat (in)famous for having an adventure that would probably be somewhat awkward to run these days. Fly to Heaven is another self-contained adventure featuring a cast of pregenerated characters trapped in a single location having to deal with a sudden and unexpected threat...namely they're all on a passenger airliner when a terrorist hijacker takes control of the plane and threatens to fly it into the Sears Tower. Of course Fly to Heaven was written and published in 1999, so they had no way of knowing that in two years' time the idea of terrorist hijackings to fly planes into buildings would go from a sudden plot twist in an RPG adventure into a thing people were watching happen on the news at home. There's a lot about the adventure that simply wouldn't work very well these days in the aftermath of 9/11 even if you take the stance that it's been long enough to not weird people out by playing out something similar at the dinner table, like the general idea that the passengers of an airline hijacking would largely remain cowed because hey, all this guy wants is some money and a chance to demand some prisoners get released, we'll just hunker down and ride it out. On the other hand parts of the adventure are like retroactive black comedy as the primary antagonist's attempt to brute-force his way into the Invisible Clergy as the archetype of The Terrorist involves making up a scary-sounding foreign name and choosing "Apu al Sayid" because all he could think of was The Simpsons, but he knows Americans can't tell one dark-skinned guy with a funny name from another so gently caress it, who cares.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:07
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I've heard that the Colymar campaign in the Heroquest: Sartar book is quite good from the few trip reports I've read.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:18
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Kai Tave posted:The One-Shots compilation for Unknown Armies is also somewhat (in)famous for having an adventure that would probably be somewhat awkward to run these days. Fly to Heaven is another self-contained adventure featuring a cast of pregenerated characters trapped in a single location having to deal with a sudden and unexpected threat...namely they're all on a passenger airliner when a terrorist hijacker takes control of the plane and threatens to fly it into the Sears Tower. The shame of it is that Fly to Heaven is one of the better UA adventures and is largely unrunnable by pure coincidence. As alluded to earlier, some of the UA canned modules in One Shots and Weep are really bad, and To Go is pretty marginal ("hey, UA PCs, which of these uninteresting and/or unlikable NPCs dio you want to give cosmic power? None of the above? Tooooo baaaaaad").
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Feb 24, 2017 08:19
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Antivehicular posted:The shame of it is that Fly to Heaven is one of the better UA adventures and is largely unrunnable by pure coincidence. As alluded to earlier, some of the UA canned modules in One Shots and Weep are really bad, and To Go is pretty marginal ("hey, UA PCs, which of these uninteresting and/or unlikable NPCs dio you want to give cosmic power? None of the above? Tooooo baaaaaad"). Yeah, To Go is perhaps the biggest disappointment out of the lot because the fundamental premise is a really good one...go on a roadtrip across America to collect the fragments of cosmic enlightenment capable of sending someone up to one of the big seats, going from tracking down a hamburger ground out of a mystically-infused cow to getting tangled up in a cocaine smuggling operation, weighing in on a jury trial, sitting in on a high-stakes poker game in Vegas presided over by an Avatar of the Merchant...but it all builds up to an incredibly unsatisfying Human Revolution-esque "choose which of the three endings you want" resolution which is perhaps the single biggest cardinal sin an RPG adventure can make in my opinion and why so many of them suck. It especially sticks out because while Unknown Armies has always had a substantial cast of named NPCs in the background it's never really been the sort of game where players are expected to be spear-carriers while two NPCs duke it out in the spotlight, plus To Go was the only major long-form campaign ever made for the game, so for it to wind up the way it did with the ultimate reward being to choose which of three forgettable (or unlikable) NPCs got to place their hands on the steering wheel of the world was kind of a let-down.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:28
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slap me and kiss me posted:Does "not many" mean that you know of a few decent ones, or are you just hedging your bets and assuming that somewhere out there someone managed to put something together well? The absolute best pre-made adventures ever made are the ones for Costume Fairy Adventures, the Big Pie Caper and Tomb of Follies. I highly recommend looking them over for an example in how to do a pre-made adventure well. The main take-away is that the pre-gens give you way more NPCs, events, and locations than you need, and then gives you the ability to randomize which ones happen, or just choose a couple of your favorites, or a mix of both. The adventure has a core plot that's always there, but since everything around that core can be changed, it gives a lot of replayability and also lets you customize the adventure to suit the players you're with. In addition, they know exactly the tone they want to use - goofy, silly fun - and stick to it in every aspect of the writing. This way, it all feels like it belongs together, even when you go from the room with girl scouts getting their dungeoneering merit badge straight to the room with the Infinite Kobold Generator. Also each adventure lists like 6 possible endings based on what objectives they accomplished, with a good dozen sub-objectives that can modify those, and then also a "but if none of those fit, here's where to start with your own wrap-up" clause after all that. CFA is a really, really good game. gnome7 fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Feb 24, 2017 |
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Feb 24, 2017 08:44
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Kai Tave posted:The Dracula Dossier is certainly an impressive feat and knowing Kennith Hite it's probably a fantastic read for the Venn diagram intersection of Bram Stoker fans, history buffs, and roleplayers, but I've yet to see or hear any actual play reports so I don't know anything about how it holds up as an actual adventure you'd run for a group. I've just started a game of The Dracula Dossier mixed with Delta Green, I can tell you how that works out, but it would of course only reflect the quality of that particular mash-up as ran by me.
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Feb 24, 2017 09:07
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I had an amazingly good time running the Orpheus line of adventures from White Wolf. You're employees of a corporation that has worked out how to temporarily turn its agents into ghosts by inducing near-death experiences, and of course uses this to make money by spying on people, exorcising hauntings, and tracking down the ghosts of business tycoons to get their account details. Of course as you keep poking the supernatural it starts poking back, and each book escalates the campaign (and character's abilities) in amazing ways. You have to deal with the oWoD system and quite a bit of it is plot seeds rather than statted out encounters, but it's the best campaign I've ever run.
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Feb 24, 2017 09:53
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Arivia posted:Yes, barely veiled self-promotion is always relevant to the guy benefiting from it. People weren't discussing adventures in general, but specifically good ones. Rand wanders in to namedrop his pet project with the obvious intended influence being that his product will definitely match up to the others people are talking about and that ergo it is worthy of purchase. It's the same kind of self-puffery he's been doing for years, and it grates more than a little bit to see every discussion interrupted by his plug. Rand's no better than the Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story guy, he's just hanging onto the coat tails of a marginally better designer. Please stop doing this.
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Feb 24, 2017 12:04
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Kai Tave posted:My opinion is that there aren't very many high quality pre-made adventures out there. Adventures and pregen characters are like two areas that almost all RPGs universally falter in imo. Great Pendragon Campaign (Pendragon) Dracula Dossier (Night's Black Agents) Night Below (D&D) The Enemy Within (WFRP) City of Lies (L5R) Masks of Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu) Mountains of Madness (Cthulhu) Walker in the Wastes (Cthulhu) Orpheus (Orpheus - hit and miss in parts but overall solid) Eternal Lies (Trail of Cthulhu) Darkness Revealed (Trinity) Dead Gods (Planescape D&D) Darkening of Mirkwood (The One Ring) To Go (Unknown Armies, though I agree the end doesn't live up to the rest) Delta Green has a lot of superb adventures as well\ Kai Tave posted:The Dracula Dossier is certainly an impressive feat and knowing Kennith Hite it's probably a fantastic read for the Venn diagram intersection of Bram Stoker fans, history buffs, and roleplayers, but I've yet to see or hear any actual play reports so I don't know anything about how it holds up as an actual adventure you'd run for a group. Dracula Dossier is, for me, probably the best campaign out of all of the above, it inspired me to do a crazy amount of handout and prop work, make a trailer for the game etc. The only negative is that I got divorced in the middle of running it and never got to complete the campaign. It's truly excellent on so many levels from the tools it goves the GM to player action and choice and a whole host of elements that come together to make it sing. PST fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Feb 24, 2017 |
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Feb 24, 2017 12:07
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Kai Tave posted:The ideal selling point of published adventures has, in my mind, always been the notion that you would want to sit down and not have to gently caress with it, it just works out of the box with maybe some minimal tweaking for your group, not something you have to chop away at and fix all the holes and okay, now it kinda sorta works. I'm a much bigger fan of the nWoD modules, since they generally just give you a bunch of NPC stat blocks, the relevant rules for the weird poo poo, and each NPC has a personality rundown with goals and likely methods. CoC modules do this to an extent, but also like to have random "haha you die gently caress off" moments alongside far too many "make the PCs roll for this thing, if they don't roll low enough then the game stalls out" which is just stupid. Fortunately those are easy enough to just skip and say "you find X" without a roll.
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Feb 24, 2017 15:04
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PST posted:Great Pendragon Campaign (Pendragon) Ravenloft and Red Hand of Doom are drat fine modules.
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Feb 24, 2017 15:05
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I've been reading through some Shadow of the Demon Lord adventures for starting characters, and they each seem pretty good. You've got murder mysteries, jailbreaks and village defenses covered. They have a scene structure that flows pretty well, with methods for leading the PCs from one event to the next, and suggestions for what might be happening elsewhere as a consequence of them skipping scenes. I've never run a written adventure in my life, but I would like to start a thread to run people through a couple of these as one-shots both because I want to run the system and because I'd like to get people interested in the game.
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Feb 24, 2017 15:19
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Arivia posted:Yes, barely veiled self-promotion is always relevant to the guy benefiting from it. People weren't discussing adventures in general, but specifically good ones. Rand wanders in to namedrop his pet project with the obvious intended influence being that his product will definitely match up to the others people are talking about and that ergo it is worthy of purchase. It's the same kind of self-puffery he's been doing for years, and it grates more than a little bit to see every discussion interrupted by his plug. Rand's no better than the Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story guy, he's just hanging onto the coat tails of a marginally better designer. Yeah it's much better when some rear end in a top hat is plugging a stupid loving bland setting that they didn't even write. Great improvement.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:23
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Holy poo poo how have you people not learned to put Arivia on ignore already. Can we put that in the rulebook sticky?
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Feb 24, 2017 17:28
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Yawgmoth posted:Holy poo poo how have you people not learned to put Arivia on ignore already. Can we put that in the rulebook sticky? I have a hard time holding it against her when she's so bad at being mean to me.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:30
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I know I should put her on ignore, but she's just so loving stupid and it's hilarious.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:37
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Kai Tave posted:Of course Fly to Heaven was written and published in 1999, so they had no way of knowing that in two years' time the idea of terrorist hijackings to fly planes into buildings would go from a sudden plot twist in an RPG adventure into a thing people were watching happen on the news at home. To be fair, at that point we had already experienced one bombing attack to try and knock over the World Trade Center (in 1993) so the idea of terrorists targeting a tall, symbolic US structure wasn't exactly guesswork, even if the means in Fly to Heaven was prophetic. Similarly, the parody RPG Violence features an encounter with a "Bin Laden Cell" prior to the 9/11 attacks with the WTC being their first potential target listed.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:41
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I have an idea! Ed Greenwood is a pervert.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:46
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dwarf74 posted:I have an idea! That's not an idea.
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Feb 24, 2017 17:57
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dwarf74 posted:I have an idea! I think Ed Greenwood had this idea a long time ago. 
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Feb 24, 2017 18:11
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Shhhh... just sit back and wait...
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Feb 24, 2017 19:43
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I want to write the ultimate bad adventure with all the elements of a bad pre-made adventure just to see if all the bad elements together would make it sort of so bad it's actually kinda good. Highlights would include:
What am I missing?
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Feb 24, 2017 21:54
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Parts where progression requires leaps of logic or sitting around until someone succeeds on a roll of Basket Weaving. Preferably, both.
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Feb 24, 2017 21:57
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Ratpick posted:I want to write the ultimate bad adventure with all the elements of a bad pre-made adventure just to see if all the bad elements together would make it sort of so bad it's actually kinda good. A few insta-kill traps that the player will have no prior anticipation of, random bullshit that exists to destroy player's equipment/levels/wealth and other hard-earned stuff, and a female character that exists solely to seduce and then trick a player character into a terrible trap.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:05
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An escalating series of Lurker and Mimic encounters that deliberately exploit the tactics players are most likely to use to avoid them. e: if it seems like I'm obsessed with this idea it's because I really want to do it to my players but can't honestly justify it to myself, so it all comes out here
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Feb 24, 2017 22:06
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Ratpick posted:I want to write the ultimate bad adventure with all the elements of a bad pre-made adventure just to see if all the bad elements together would make it sort of so bad it's actually kinda good.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:07
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Ratpick posted:I want to write the ultimate bad adventure with all the elements of a bad pre-made adventure just to see if all the bad elements together would make it sort of so bad it's actually kinda good. A rape monster that will, no matter how the PCs protest and no matter how good they roll, rape at least one of them.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:19
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Ratpick posted:I want to write the ultimate bad adventure with all the elements of a bad pre-made adventure just to see if all the bad elements together would make it sort of so bad it's actually kinda good. An angry three-page screen accusing people who don't enjoy the adventure of being hitlers who are killing "Real Gaming."
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Feb 24, 2017 22:21
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