Precious little darlings

I appear to have launched myself into something along a 12 days of Christmas run of daily blog posts. It was not intentional, it just sort of happened.

Today I would like your help.

What I want to do, over the next 12 months is produce at least ten 1st to 3rd level adventures. I would like to avoid the cliches of “You are guards on a wagon train”. I have the inspiration for two.

The first has the characters start as passengers on a ship carrying food. The town they land and disembark at is in the grip of a harsh winter and the people are starving. The ship they were on is full of food stuffs and that is loaded into wagons and carted out of the town. All the while there is an angry and starving mob being held back by soldiers. The town is quite obviously on the verge of food riots. A fellow passenger who is obviously quite affluent joins the characters on the gang plank and casually says that the characters had better join him in his carriage as that mob looks like it could turn ugly. From there the characters get invited to stay with the local land owner, who is quite obviously not starving and is really quite obnoxious and make jokes about the peasants being revolting and how he would drown the ring leaders in the harbour if he didn’t need them to work the fields in the spring. From there I can offer the characters several adventure hooks around the rebels trying to overthrow the unjust land owner, the cause for the unexplained harsh winter (defiling a sacred place), the town erupting into riots and the characters having to rescue an innocent.

The second one involves the heroes arriving at a village where they learn that rogues are blocking the road ahead and demanding tolls. That is their opening encounter but along the way they meet a druidic type woman that has her own mission to find a unicorn that has been sighted in this area. There is a back story to the lady who is trying to find an antidote to a magical poison, thus the need for the unicorn. She wants to ask the unicorn to allow her to wash its horn with purified water and use the water as the base of her antidote. This figure serves as patron to the characters and a source of healing.

So the reason I want to create all these starter adventures is all Ken Wickham’s ‘fault’. If we are going to get RMU in 2019 then Ken is quite right in that we need starter adventures. I want to include a 1st to 3rd level adventure in the fanzine each month. The longer that RMU takes to arrive means that there will be a greater stock of starting adventures. We can even offer new GMs a choice of adventures, imagine that!

It is a long time since I have had to write beginner adventures but anything that helps make RMU a success is a good thing as far as I am concerned!

As per normal the statting of these adventures will be to the limit of what I can get away with. It does mean that they will be playable in any version of RM but the finer details of NPCs, for example, will fall upon the GM to create.

p.s. There are bonus brownie points if you can work the top image into an adventure. It is entitles “I will protect you!”, it actually has three exclamation marks but I thought that was excessive.