I am coming up to speed with the second wave of 50in50 adventures. I really wanted to do something Robin Hood and/or Arthurian in nature but the subject matter demands more than the short format adventure allows.
It could well be a future project, but now is not the time.
Last week I spent a day writing an adventure for Dissident Whispers. That adventure in the image below is my submission.
Now, what that tells me is that I am pretty terrible as page layout.
Here is a similar format adventure I wrote for Zweihander, but I did the layout.
You can instantly see how pedestrian my design is compared to a professional doing the layout.
What I would quite like to do with the 50in50 adventures is practice my ‘one page dungeon’ skills.
The general format I use is:
- Plot Hook
- Key setting info
- Location/map/key
- Significant NPCs
- GM Guidance for running the adventure
- Bestiary
I try and get all of that into around 1700 words and they fit on two sides of a sheet of US Letter paper. I can also fit in the location map and a piece of art or two for good measure.
What I like about these is that they are instantly gameable. If your players go off piste and you suddenly need something fun in the right place, a folder full of these will save your game session.
If I were to bold on my normal conventions of A Level; where NPC levels are described relative to the Average level of the party. H notation where numbers encountered are described as relative to the size of the party (H equals the number of Heroes). My bestiary provides alternative monsters for Low, Mid, High and Very High level parties.
Now what you have is not a single page but an adventure that will work with any number of characters, at any level in just a couple of pages.
I cannot write for Shadow World but I would be very surprised if you could not place these adventures into just about any setting. I am looking at things with a local influence of just a few miles around the actual location.
How does that sound?
I suspect that the adventures will be more ‘traditional’ and include more dungeons, temples, crypts and dark places. My first set of 50in50 adventures tended to be more towns, villages and wilderness.