A Challenge Is Issued!

That eternal question of "What do I run?" seems to be developing an answer.

 Thinking of how to speed up and streamline the adventure/scenario-generation process, I'm drawn to Ashes Without Number. The way it lays out the prospective campaign structure and provides adventure design tools feel like something that can generate something gameable fairly quickly. So I've been trying to put a bit more effort into fleshing out that setting and making it even more robust.

I realized that my home base needed more fleshing out. There's a temptation to treat the home location as rather generic to make it easier for the players to relate to. But I rolled Enclave tags for it just like the other Enclaves, and it would give the location a nice bit of flavor.

Those tags are Splinter Group and Evangelist. For a long time, I wasn't sure where they splintered from, but I think I've got it figured out. Part of that was the desire to keep it generic, but once I fought down that impulse, I took a look at the candidates.

Because the area is so rural and out of the way, there are only 2 other Enclaves for them to splinter from, Ferndale and Squatch-ville. While there is the possibility of them splintering from a more remote faction, let's take a look at the local situation first.

Ferndale feels somewhat obvious as the radioactive environment is likely to result in an exodus, but the description of the Splinter Group tag describes a level of animosity involved in the splinter and I can't see the people of Ferndale treated with anything but a sad empathy. They have made the decision to be resigned to their doom.

But Squatch-ville has more potential for internal splintering. We've already established that there's a noble class of Sasquatch ruling over the human settlers and that there are problems under the surface that are being ignored. If those problems have been brewing long enough, there could be groups splintering for periods of time.

This does mean that the people living in Eureka may or may not be related to the pre-apocalypse inhabitants of Eureka, which does make things interesting. Since part of the old city is designated as a Ruin, my thought is that the entire city had previously fallen to ruin (or at least occupation by ratfolk) and the arriving splinter proceeded to establish themselves there.

Though now I feel like I need to know more of Squatch-ville's deal. The people of Eureka didn't splinter recently (there's a separate Enclave tag for that), so whatever problems they have have been brewing for a long time, at least a generation. That might also offer clues as to what the Evangelist tag is about.

As part of my efforts to flesh out the setting, I will be attempting to participate in Barking Alien's Campaign Tour Challenge.  I know my history with completing these blogging challenges is not great, but it seems like a good challenge at a fortuitous time.

What Is a Good Adventure?

After my grumbling last week about the quality of published adventures, maybe I should do some commentary on what makes a good published adventure that I would consider running.

The first thing I look at is the ability for the scenario to take different shapes. This doesn't have to be major. If there's a cool optional asset or disadvantage or choice to make, that's going to be a plus in my book. A simple railroad is not going to cut it for me.

On the other end of this, there's the "mini-sandbox." A lot of OSR adventures tend to be this. There's no strict order to the encounters, and there's no real assumption regarding how you engage with any of the encounters.

And let's not forget that there's a lot of room in between all of this. A dungeon might have a story and a final boss to defeat and also include lots of side rooms and details that the party can explore.

The other thing I look for are mandatory die rolls. Does the adventure list a die roll to access a necessary part of the plot? This is just lazy design. I suspect it largely comes from the idea that "making a die roll" and "doing something" are inherently the same thing. If someone doesn't make a Search check, are they really searching? That sort of thing.

But what happens if the party fails that roll? The GM has to fudge something to keep the scenario on track and those are rarely satisfying.

Both of these things are elements that tell me that an adventure is good or bad. But there is one other thing that will keep me from running an adventure, regardless of quality: Managing NPC agendas. This is just something that I don't believe I can do effectively. 

I also dislike lying to players, even through a mouthpiece NPC. A hidden villain, or other NPC with a major secret, that the PCS are interacting with through the course of the adventure is a non-starter for me.

I would like to improve that, but it's something that's going to have to come with time and effort.

 Unfortunately, the new work situation prevented me from attending the monthly meetup for the first time in forever.

I'm currently thinking about trying to drum a session in the next two weeks to make up for it.

Which brings up the eternal question: What do I run?

I could run one of the adventures that I could have run at the meetup, either D20 Modern or Ashes Without Number which I have already written adventures for. But I've already run them at previous events. So I might feel comfortable running them in a pick-up environment like another meetup, but I think asking people to make the effort to come and game with me outside that schedule calls for something new.

But adventure writing is a slow process for me, especially if I'm trying to write something that doesn't suck. So on top of the usual challenge of coming up with inspirations, I've got to make steps to bullet-proof the adventure. (I'm realizing that I should spend some time writing about what makes a good adventure for me, whether I'm reading them or writing them, but I don't think this is that post.)

I did talk about my basic procedure for prep a while back, so I don't think I need to go over the steps again. But I think it would be useful to figure out how to speed up that process.

A lighter system might help, but it's going to have different demands. All Outta Bubblegum is super light, but it still took a while to figure out how to write an adventure for it. Another thing that took a lot of time was figuring out the backstory sufficiently to make it work. How do you kidnap Santa Claus, especially as we've granted him an increasing number of magical powers,

So maybe I'm looking for a stronger setting or at least set of setting assumptions so I don't have to do that level of work for every scenario.

Another possibility is to dig out a system with a lot of published adventures and run one of those. The big one here is D&D in all of its flavors and variations. But not all of those adventures are particularly good.

 No conclusions here. Just a progress report that's keeping me away from making actual progress. Though stay tuned for my thoughts on what makes a good published adventure.

 Well, I said I was going to be blogging more, so here we go.

 I started my new job this week, so I've been dedicated to training for the last few days. This has largely consisted of hours and hours of training videos. I did get some measure of practical experience today, though it is my least favorite part of any job: Making phone calls.

The worry that I am intruding on someone by calling them out of the blue makes me anxious. And the fact that these were, in fact, telemarketing calls reminds me of the ire that many of us have for telemarketers. When I was looking for work, telemarketing was one of the jobs I most definitely did not want. It's not what this company hired me for and the training videos suggest that there will be other things I will likely be doing once business starts in earnest.

This does mean that I'm somewhat busy up until my gaming club's monthly meetup this Saturday. I'm not sure I would have something new for them, anyhow. Even if I were to try to dedicate myself to the pursuit (which is something I have tried thanks to my recent unemployment), I don't think I could come up with a scenario for me to run within the space of a week.

It feels like I can run a heavily improvised game at the drop of a hat, or I have to spend many months crafting artisanal adventures.

I've got my starter D20 Modern Tabloid World scenario, as well as my starter Ashes Without Number adventure, ready to go. And now the pregens for each have backstories, which should make it easier for players to pick up what I'm putting down.

Resolutions

 Another year over and not a lot to show for it.

Not nothing, though. I lost my job a few months ago, so I've definitely been in a downer phase. But it did allow me to develop some material to actually try out Ashes Without Number.

I also learned the value of backstory. While I haven't done campaigns for quite some time, I have kept myself busy with one-shots for the local gaming club. So I've written some adventures and made sure to provide pre-gens. But these have always been purely mechanical constructions, a set of stats to roll against as necessary.

Then someone asked on the gaming club's Discord server: How much backstory is appropriate for a pre-gen? I realized that my answer was "None" and that quickly followed the realization "Am I doing it wrong?"

For a game like D&D, the mechanical setup of a character actually conveys a decent amount. Elven fighter, dwarven rogue. Halfling monk. It tells you enough that you can have an idea of what they are like and what they can do without having to read the character sheet in depth. And even though I don't do D&D anymore, that thinking stayed with me. Especially for one-shots, where the character is only going to get a limited amount of "screen time."

This caused me to go back through my collections of pre-gens and try to assemble a few paragraphs of backstory.

For my D20 Modern pre-gens for my "Tabloid World" scenario, I tried to come up with a basic paragraph explaining the character's deal. While it is a class-based system, the classes are deliberately flexible and bland, so just saying "Smart Hero" tells you a lot less than "elven bard." So I went back over the choices I made and tried to tie them together and turned that into a tight paragraph. I then spent another paragraph describing an encounter with the bizarre that led them to working for the Midnight Star (named after the tabloid themed Weird Al song).

Then I went over my Ashes Without Number pre-gens. For now it's just a paragraph for each one giving a rough explanation of their abilities and a bit about how they learned or used them. A little bit to tie them to the local area and/or what made them pull up roots and become a wanderer in the wastes of Humboldt and Del Norte counties might be nice, but I think there needs to be more detail on the current version of the setting for me to have enough of a handle to make those sorts of additions. Maybe filling in those details for the characters will give me more of a hook into the setting. We'll see.

But my crowning achievement would have to be the backstory work for my All Outta Candy Canes Christmas adventure. The All Outta Bubblegum rules don't do character stats. The only stat you have is how much Bubblegum each character has remaining, but the character's deal doesn't involve the rules at all. My previous solution was a character sheet consisting of a photo of a military action hero and a little form inspired by the GI Joe action figure file cards for the player to fill in as they chose.

This year, I upgraded that approach by filling on the file card myself. In some cases, it was very easy, since they were pulled from the live-action GI Joe films. I just used the GI Joe file card for that character. In other cases, I tried to extract the relevant information regarding popular film characters and populate the cards with that. For example, I couldn't not include Arnold Schwarzenegger in my list of action heroes, so I dug up what information I could about his character Dutch from the movie Predator. Since the premise of my All Outta Candy Canes adventure calls for military action, I tended to favor roles that were military in flavor. So Stallone goes on the list as Rambo.

This resulted in probably one of the best runs of this adventure.

Now that I've gone on about my accomplishments this year, what are my resolutions for next year?

Blog more: I'd like to get back to a weekly schedule. Mostly for my mental health. Like I said, I've been in some doldrums lately (and actually for a while) and one thing I can do is imitate Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth and try to escape the doldrums by keeping my mind active. Whether this means this is a gaming blog, and Oz blog or a descent into madness, who can say?

Run a campaign: This has been on my list for a long time, but only rarely accomplished. My usual standard is 2 sessions in continuity with each other. And I haven't always made it.