Infinite Cryptids!

 For Cryptids & Conspiracy, the first campaign module I'm working on for Missions & Mayhem, I want to keep things brief. For this reason, I've got only a handful of cryptids, aliens, paranormal entities, and prehistoric beasties statted up for the game. 

However, I've got a "Create-A-Cryptid" system for GMs to make their own. It's got guidelines for giving the creatures stats, and also several random tables for the cryptid's appearance and behaviors. With that, a GM will never run out of strange creatures for their Heroes to investigate. 

I finally finished up the creature section. Yesterday, I wrote some guidelines for how to structure missions (adventures) in the game. Most cryptid hunts won't be "dungeon" adventures, although a haunted house could be. So I've got guidelines for using the 5-Room Dungeon narrative structure in a more loose sense to stage not five encounters in five locations in a row, but five stages of a mission with some advice on the types of possible encounters that could happen in each stage. 

So, to keep score, I've got complete: 

Advice on what sort of campaign this is (or could be with modification)

3 Advanced Classes

Psychic Powers

Relevant Gear/Vehicles/Weapons

Guideline for creating Conspiracy groups

Creatures

XP guidelines

Mission creation guidelines 

 

What I still need to finish: 

Freelancers/Hirelings/Services (halfway done)

Occult and Alien Devices (notes only) 

Example Missions (I plan to include two or three short ones)

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So I'm almost done with this. Of course, I still haven't finished the Mission Creation Guidelines for the main rule book. Need to work on that, too. That and a bit of a better introduction/explanation of the game at the start are all I need still to work on for the main game. Well, of course there will still be some adjustments as I continue to play test it.  

After Cryptids & Conspiracy, I'll probably start working on Bughunts & Bedlam, the military sci-fi/horror module (based on Aliens, Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Terminator's Future War, etc.). I'd like to have three modules done before I start getting the main book finalized and laid out for release. But who knows, maybe I'll have all five of my planned modules done in time. 

Dinosaur Island

Another successful play test of Missions & Mayhem. 

Even though the rules aren't complete yet, I used the Cryptids & Conspiracy module to prepare for today's play test game. 

I was inspired by a board game I had as a kid, called Dinosaur Island. There's a newer game with the same name, riffing off of the Jurassic Park franchise. The 80s game wasn't a very good game, but as an 8 year old, it was fun. The idea is that players go around the island, trying to get the best photos of dinosaurs. The player with the best photos at the end is the winner. No need to hash out the problems with the original game (which even as 8-10 year olds, we realized wasn't that fun after one or two games unless we put some toy dinosaurs on the board to spice things up). 

The concept was good enough. I grabbed an island map made by the Welsh Piper (thanks!). Then I started to make some random encounter charts, but I realized I needed a rationale for why an island full of dinosaurs would be undiscovered in 2026. So one LOST style anomaly and a missing expedition party later, I had my set-up. 

In C&C, I have a suggested organization that Heroes can work for, the Fortean Investigations Association (FIA). In my game, it's an NGO but I suggest it could be a governmental organization, or even a loose collection of amateurs sharing findings, depending on the campaign. The FIA sent a team to investigate the anomaly. They found a way through, but their signal was cut off. The final message was one of the team members saying, "Is that a dinosaur?"

The Heroes were sent in to try to find/rescue the first party, and also collect evidence of any dinosaurs, cryptids, or other weird things. 

I won't go into too much detail, because I will probably include the adventure as an example in the finished book. But of course their first encounter with a dinosaur on the island, via random roll, was with a T-Rex! 

No one has been eaten yet, but we stopped in the middle of the adventure and will pick up more next time. They all had fun, and we got to test out the money/shopping system (semi-abstract seems to work well), the encumbrance rules, a chase (with gambling), a little bit of combat, some investigation work, some exploration, and some clever thinking. 

Some Updates to an old Dungeon

The Seoul-based TTRPG in Korea group is gearing up for their Online Summer Con. The days haven't been decided yet, but it will be a weekend in August. I'm hoping it will be either the 2nd or 4th weekends, because on the 3rd I'll be up in Seoul for an academic conference and won't have a lot of time to get online and play games. 

Of course, the 2nd week is the final week of English Camp, so I can't play in any Friday games, but Saturday afternoon/evening, or Sunday will work for me. 

The 4th week is best for me. Nothing much else going on that weekend. 

Assuming I have time to run something, I've been working on updating an old one-shot adventure I made during my time in Yamanashi. I ran it for them so they could experience a mid-level game, with more powerful characters and enough magic items. They ran through the adventure, but I don't remember exactly how it turned out. I have a few notes from those sessions (I think we spent two evenings on it), but they're incomplete. 

So I'm updating it for the Summer Con. And if it goes well, I'll also probably run it for the Busan Tabletop Gaming Con (that's not the official name yet, just the one I prefer) that Justin, Scott and I are organizing. 

The adventure as I wrote it back then (20ish years ago) had too many monster encounters and not enough interesting puzzles/situations. I redrew the maps, simplifying them a little but also making them less linear at the same time. I took out or changed some monster encounters, rearranging a few things. I added more exploration/navigation/spelunking challenges. I've upped the treasure a bit, but since this is a one-shot, that's probably not so important aside from magic items. After the Cons, I'll probably format this and sell it through Hidden Treasure Books, though, so the treasure content may matter to players in the future. 

The basic premise is that there is a tower built by a wizard. A dragon destroyed the wizard long ago, and has laired in the caves beneath the tower ever since. A new wizard has shown up and taken over the tower, but stirred up the dragon. Both the wizard and dragon are problems for the local lord, so he's asking adventurers to deal with one or both problems for him. 

So players may decide just to deal with the dragon. Or just with the wizard. Or get ambitious (in a 3-4 hour time slot) and take on both. And of course I'm prepared with ideas for if they try to team up with one side to take out the other.  And the inevitable double crosses that may happen. 

I found a file with some pre-made BECMI characters that I used for another project. That means Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling are classes, so it doesn't completely follow my TS&R rules, but I'll use them anyway for simplicity. They were 1st level, so I updated them to be anywhere from 5th (the Elves) to 8th level (the Thieves). I had pre-made magic item packets from the time I ran this adventure in Yamanashi, so I added those magic items (with a few changes here and there) to the characters. And updated them with TS&R abilities (mostly for Fighter types, since I have rules for Sweep and the like). 

I need to finish up a few more encounter area descriptions (the wizard's lair). And for the Seoul Summer Con, scan the maps and prepare them for a VTT. I'm looking forward to running some old school D&D for hopefully some new blood.  

The Star Wars Campaign

I was supposed to run my TS&R Jade game this afternoon, but it's the end of semester/holiday season, so plans fell apart. It happens. Next week, we have family plans, the weekend after that is Christmas, and New Years the week after that. So probably no more D&D play until January. Bummer. 

But I'm working on the next game for my Star Wars campaign. As usual, I'm having a hard time coming up with things for this game for two reasons.  

One, in order to keep the Star Wars feel of the game, the books recommend more railroad game play. Have a plot. Give the players their goal. Let them loose. And really, the players seem to enjoy that. They're not all up for self-directed, self-motivated play. But I try to add as much freedom into the scenarios as possible, dictating the set-up but not the resolution. But it doesn't feel right forcing them into these set-ups sometimes.

Two, if they were up for self-motivated play, I'd feed out of my depth. I've seen all the movies, read some comics/novels (most of the comics I've read have been fine, the novels I've tried were trash), watched the Disney+ shows and most of the animated stuff, played various Star Wars video games, etc. I've got pretty good knowledge of the Star Wars universe (and Wookieepedia is just a search away). But I still feel daunted by just letting the players loose in a galaxy with thousands of planets. That's an awful lot to keep track of, and that's even if they only ever visit the main planets from the movies (and I keep sending them to other planets partly to allow myself room to improvise when I need to). 

But despite the misgivings I have about the way I'm running the campaign (I want a more open, player-directed game, but feel hesitant to throw the gates wide open because of all the work that would give me), it's going well. We play maybe once a month or every other month, whenever I've got some interesting set-up prepared. 

A few sessions back, the party escorted the Hutt princess Marjon (daughter of their sorta patron, Bumpomo) to Coruscant for a fancy high society ball. When the ball got attacked by Zygerian slavers, one of the two Jedi in the party was using the Force. Right in Palpatine's back yard. So when they went back to doing smuggling/salvaging/whatever for the Hutt, a Sith Inquisitor started tracking them down. They had an encounter and forced the Inquisitor to flee. Later, the Imperials moved in on the Hutt planet called Dandoran, they helped Bumpomo the Hutt flee to Nal Hutta. 

On Nal Hutta, they racked up a lot of charges and fees (Hutts be Hutts, after all), and to square the debt, were sent to salvage an old Banking Clan ship that was lost in the Clone Wars. After some hijinx, they located the ship, and started exploring/looting it. But the Inquisitor, his Death Troopers, and some bounty hunters had followed them, and in the end, the party managed to defeat them all. And among the money and minerals and other resources on the ship, they found some beskar (Mandalorian steel). 

So now I'm working on the next adventure. How will the party's Mandalorian PC contact some other Mandos to get that beskar turned into better armor? I had an idea, but it would have required me to either run a short 30 minute session to get them to the big decision point, then I'd have to stop to prep based on their choice, or else prep two or three very different scenarios trying to anticipate their likely choices. 

I didn't want to run a short little session like that considering how infrequently we play, but thankfully, I figured out the idea for how to add more layers to the "30 minutes" that will stretch it out to a full session of 2-3 hours, thanks to a brief chat with my son (who plays the Mandalorian). So things are going well there. 

I probably won't get to run D&D until next month, but I'll likely have this Star Wars adventure ready pretty quickly.

Have you heard about the contest?

 So, you've been DMing for decades. You know how to create a dungeon, wilderness, city, or whatever sort of adventure. But are you able to organize that process you have in a way that would make a good teaching tool for new DMs? Can you film a video tutorial of your process? I bet you can.

Check out the first (hopefully annual) AUTHENTIC ADVENTURES TEACHING CONTEST. 

I'm one of the judges. Impress me!

First Prize $800 US

Second Prize $200 US

Third Prize $50 US

Plus one Honorable Mention to be awarded

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If I hadn't been asked to judge, I really would have joined this contest. One of my players is thinking of branching out into GMing for the first time ever (at 55!). My older son is every now and then considering if he'd like to DM a game or not. Having my thoughts organized in this way would be helpful for them. But since I'm judging, I'm relying on all of you!