ADVENTure Calendar: Week 1!
Welcome to the ADVENTure Calendar!
The rules are simple: make something RPG related every day for 24 days (December 1st to 24th) and post what you make at the end of it all on the itch jam page.
Since I can't imagine myself committing time to RPG content creation daily, I thought I'd alter the rules for myself a little. Instead I'm:
- Doing something TTRPG related everyday
- Writing up a review of what I did every Sunday (or Monday)
On December 24th, I'll post everything that I made on itch, but not everything that I ended up doing. Only the content I created.
Day 1 (12/1) - Temple of the Moon Priests
I started December off strong with Temple of the Moon Priests, a one-page, system agnostic dungeon adventure. I ran the dungeon in by-the-book Into the Odd with a couple of friends.
I had a lot of thoughts on how it went, and they'll slowly make their way into blog posts of their own sometime. To keep things quick I'll give a little rundown of my general thoughts, and then my thoughts specific to the adventure.
General Thoughts
- I had never actually run Into the Odd by the book before, and instead opted for running hacks that included the rules I assumed necessary for a subjectively fun game. I was pleasantly surprised to find that these personal "sacred cows" (like inventory slots/encumbrance, advantage and disadvantage, etc.) were not actually as important as I had imagined.
- Into the Odd really pushes the fiction first, rules second mindset through its lack of mechanics. If there had been more mechanics for advantage, combat procedures, or things like that, I think that would've taken focus over the fiction itself.
- Random characters are extremely fun! I usually go the semi-random route by doing "roll or choose on the following table" for most table based character generators, but in this case I stuck by the book and did fully random pregens. The players got to pick who they wanted to play, and each one took their character like a writing prompt and ran with it.
- On a similar note, I want a better random character generator for low fantasy ItO. In my own house-rules document I wrote up a random generator, but that was designed around high fantasy heroes (a la D&D 5e) rather than lowly medieval peasantry. Perhaps I'll write a low fantasy character generator sometime.
- Note that for the above, I used Dreaming Dragonslayer's fantasy starter packages which was fun, but I just want my own.
Adventure Thoughts
- The adventure ran extremely fast. In under 3 hours, the party got to the tomb, explored the entrance, went through, triggered traps, talked to NPCs, fought multiple fights, and got the sky shard! This is in part due to it being an ItO game (which tends to run faster in my experience), but it may also be part of an adventure structure thing.
- I wish there were more resources throughout. Things like random encounter tables, names for the NPCs, and some more information or suggestions on what the sky shard actually did would be really nice. I understand that that's information that I, the GM, can prepare, but I'm running this adventure because I don't want prep! These kinds of things are what I'd consider core elements for any pre-written adventure.
- On a less critical note, the map was amazing! It was really easy to visualize what everything looked like, and the players got a hang of it even without a physical copy.
- The "Knucklebones" rival adventuring party was also really amazing. They added a lot of conversation to what would otherwise be a very quick and boring dungeon crawl, especially given that the temple had few monsters or non-Knucklebones NPCs actually inside of it.
- Lastly, the adventure opened up a lot of threads and closed only a few of them. What was the deal with the owls? There's no way for the heroes to find out. Similarly, what's with the matching sun and moon signs? Why is the lowest level shaped like an amphitheater? Why is the sky shard important? Some of this information is unknown, and some of it is known, but only to the GM.
Day 2 (12/2) - Character Creation for Jangli
Today I worked a lot on the character creation mechanics for Jangli. Eventually, the mechanics ended up to be more generative than creative (i.e., your character is randomly generated using tables, rather than being a creative invention of the player) with only a little room for player choice.
The character generation rules are also extremely similar to goobernut's Mangayaw. Characters first roll three attribute scores (STR, DEX, WIL), roll Grit (basically HP), take some basic equipment, and then roll for a background, weapon, and piece of additional equipment.
One thing I'm still considering is whether or not to add some kind of regional or national origin to character generation. It could be as simple as a d10 table (1-3 seafolk, 4-6 mountainfolk, 7-8 hillfolk, 9 sandfolk, 10 foreigners), but I think it would give some nice variation to the characters, and would tie them in to this political war drama style world.
So, now that we've discussed it, let's roll up some completely random characters!
Day 3 (12/3) - The Candy Emporium!
Continuing my Mausritter game, we're running the Candy Emporium!
Unlike Temple of the Moon Priests, there isn't a lot to note here. The game was fun, and the heroes finally figured out what dark magic was afoot. Some highlights:
- By the end of the adventure, the players had no idea if what they did was even morally ok. Never thought that'd happen, but because of a weird sequence of events and some leaps of logic they managed to do the right thing (sort of) by the end.
- Ran for 7 players who constantly split into separate groups. Do not recommend.
- My players started correcting each other on playstyle, encouraging each other not to get into fights or take unnecessary risks with the dice. Love how they shifted their mindset already from modern D&D to the OSR!
- This is the first adventure I've run in which there was absolutely no combat. The players didn't want fighting and neither did the NPCs. When tensions got high, clever convincing managed to win the day.
December Plans
For the rest of December, I'm planning on continuing to post every Sunday/Monday with ADVENTure Calendar updates! I think we'll only have one more session this month honestly, so that'll get a quick write up like the ones above.
Another thing I'm trying this month is Asians Represent's 30 day challenge. Jangli will be the main focus there, so expect a lot of posting about it in the rest of the ADVENTure Calendar updates.
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