Hot answers tagged adventure
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The thing with science fiction settings is that when technology creates a problem for the PCs, it can also generally create a solution. Part of the heist genre is figuring out what the alarm systems are and getting your hands on the gadgets you need to neutralize them. Other valid tactics include social engineering tactics like bribing or impersonating the ...
30
Thus far, the party has tended to follow up more on smaller leads, like interesting caves, a village with a plague, etc., rather than major leads,
Why do those leads end up being minor? Can you turn an interesting cave into a major lead? Maybe the cave leads into the massive underground dungeon that was rediscovered. Or maybe the cave has a family ...
27
Paperwork
In most contemporary or near future settings, any time there is any sort of alert, there will also be an incident report. If a guard has to fill out a report every time he hits the alarm, s/he will make darn sure s/he has a situation requiring all that extra work.
Your automatic alarm is going off? grab a hand-held and go check it out. Is ...
21
First and foremost: get a handle on your player's senses of humor. If you've a group that loves slapstick but hates punning, the "dungeon of alliterative animalia" likely isn't going to be fun.
The remainder have worked for me.
Absurd names. Mayor Dinky Winky the Underequipped of Phallidon. A beggar who proudly lists his lineage to 10 generations of ...
20
In Sandbox campaigns, what the players are doing is the centre of the campaign. If they do not investigate and stop the fire falling from the sky, then there is a consequence and you should play it out as if real history is unfolding before them. I find that the best way to do this, is to image what the major characters of the world are doing (in shells ...
20
Location.
They will live near a water source, and probably near their fields...
Neolithic hill forts are fairly common. It's a walled village atop an artificial hill, built on the floodplain. It may also have a cistern and/or a well down through the motte/tel. Walls are likely wood, possibly also dry-fit stone for part of the height.
I can tell you from ...
19
First of all, start with a different game (system.) Using anything Lovecraftian (CoC, ToC) would be a dead giveaway. Pick a (very) easy, generic system, preferably something your players are not familiar with. You'll want to tell them you read an interesting review about it someplace and would want to give it a few shots, to freshen up your gaming.
...
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Anything you find in the SRD is Open Gaming Licence content and thus free to use so long as you abide by the terms of the OGL. You'll note that it does not contain XP or Wealth-By-Level rules, and you'll also notice that it doesn't really contain fluff; those rules (and the fluff) are still WotC's property and cannot be used. Beyond that, you're perfectly ...
16
Even though the players are the center of the campaign in a Sandbox, they are not the only cause of action in the world. They want to investigate the village with plague. Let them. Meanwhile the fire raining from the sky continues (and unlike videogames, does not go into a static point of no extra destruction until the players show up). Maybe the Fighter ...
16
"Step away from that alarm, rookie. We don't need the 5-0 kicking in the door and making everybody play nice. When you've been here as long as I have, you'll realize that a night like this is a night to have some fun. Why did I sign up to be a security guard if not to lay down some pain every once in a while? Let's go kick some ass!"
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The answer about turning the small leads into bigger leads is great, but may not fit what you want to do with the game. I've dealt with this in several ways, usually escalating:
Just have boring answers to the leads. "Sorry, the caves turn out to be not that interesting," or "the caves are frozen over and would require weeks or months of work to chisel ...
15
I tend to use something like Tarot cards for things like this. One to three cards for a location, major npcs or sometimes even player characters. One just to give a general feel of what might happen. Different decks normally have slightly different pictures. Sometimes looking at the card will give me inspiration, sometime the reading of a card. The suit of ...
14
The very simple answer is: you don't.
Roleplaying is about making decisions that have consequences. As a Game Master, it's up to you to make those consequences interesting and fun, but that doesn't mean they should always be beneficial to the party or the characters that incur them.
If the players set off an alarm, then they will learn pretty quickly that ...
12
People sometimes claim to like pure sandbox play, but then they get bored or easily distracted for this exact reason, not knowing what to focus on. Really they want a little railroading. Some groups are self-aware enough to come out and say this, some aren't. But if you're starting to get that kind of feedback, it may be time to make some of those leads ...
12
As a spinoff to valadil's answer, I would try talking to all the players about it and try to get a consensus.
But to break it down a bit, you seem to have a two interrelated but separate problems:
This is "his" world you will be continuing without him.
Without him, the team will be light on combat power.
The first, I don't think is too much of a ...
12
I think the single largest thing you can do to make sure that everything works smoothly is to make sure that everyone is on the same page as far as expectations. You are welcome to have any level of paranoia/security you want, as long as your players understand that going in. If they know it's there, they'll plan for it. If they're unaware for carefully ...
11
Clues and Map scraps.
First they need a clue to point them in the right general direction. That's fairly easily accomplished by the usual methods, whatever works in your game.
Next: if the party finds, buys, is given a partial map (mapscrap), that gives them the essential tool to go find the objective (macguffin).
But don't think in terms of classic maps, ...
11
For this, I usually look for inspiration at series episodes. You'll notice how many good series intersperse "breather" episodes between their "arc story" episodes. Still, those breather episodes always carry small hooks to the main plot, or maybe they introduce new characters, new situations...
add into the session things that, looked up front don't seem ...
11
It depends on what you want to use and how you want to use it. As Lord_Gareth mentioned, all of the content from the System Reference Documents are available under the Open Game License. If you write your adventure and setting in a sufficiently generic way, you may not need to bother with the OGL.
The answers for Copyright of Existing Systems might also be ...
10
The closest is probably Richard Graves’ The Mad Demigod’s Castle, available on Dragonsfoot. It doesn’t write up the ruins, but it does write up level 1, and contains connections to the various Castle of the Mad Archmage levels.
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Converting monsters up or down by 5 or fewer levels is straightforward and listed in the DMG (I think around pg 190, but I'm not positive). You can also swap out monsters pretty easily with premade monsters from the DDI compendium.
Skills are going to be a bit tougher. A ladder has a consistent DC. If there's climbing to be done you can't just say the ...
10
Being a family man and a DM/GM, I have not made special accommodations for my children by changing the game system used. I simply adjust the burden of the system mechanics I expect the child(ren) to shoulder. I have my children, as young as 5 describe to me the hero they wish to play. I then build the character for them based upon their input and my asking ...
9
I just read Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World RPGGeek, and like all of his games it contains more than one brilliant thing. But for this case, the brilliant thing I'm going to suggest that you take a look at is the Countdown Clocks he created. Without directly stealing the clocks (which I intend to do for my own games, even outside Apocalypse World), you ...
9
It may be that the types of characters that your players have created are not suited to this style of adventuring. Zak wrote an excellent blog post about this: Sandboxes And The Roguish Work Ethic
A hook isn't automatically a hook for a bunch of lovable rakes:
"A cleric has been found dead in the
town square."
"Well why should we care?"
...
9
The Fighting Fantasy books are, as you've already discovered, particularly bad choices if you don't want a lot of fighting.
I would start not with any published setting--especially since high fantasy and slaying goblins and dragons seem to go hand-in-hand--or even with the idea of a role-playing game at all, but rather collaborative storytelling. Take some ...
9
Most of the advantage people/creatures have when setting up low tech defensive works tends to be environmental/situational. Unless in time of war, generally it's safety first though, and low cost - you don't have a pot of boiling oil or black pudding lying around for someone to trip over.
Besides @aramis' great suggestions, I'd tend to say once you get ...
9
One word: conflicts. Conflicts drive action and plot.
It sounds like you already have a grand scheme, but you want to drive the day-to-day adventuring within it. To get there, I'll build an example as we go. We'll look at three levels: the grand story, the region, and the local neighborhood.
The Grand Story
Let's assume the overarching Grand Story is a ...
9
When I've done this before, I look at the example of a television series. During the first season, they have a 'pilot' or a short season.
With that in mind, I usually hit these points:
Plan for an arc that will be resolved during the scenario, so that even if the game doesn't continue, you have closure. To this point, make the final conflict the final ...
9
Her domains are Death, Fate, and Winter.
So aside from the obvious raven iconography, consider the vultures who "hold no pity for those who suffer and die, for death is the natural end of life."
She is prayed to during funeral rites, so consider fire elementals flavored as funeral pyres.
Perhaps chain golems, chain guardians, and other such constructs are ...
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