At Gen Con this year, I played Night Mother’s Moon, a modern Call of Cthulhu scenario which sends the investigators on the hunt for a crazed man who is hiding from occult-obsessed gang members. While I had some problems with the adventure, there was an an exciting section where we had to plunge into abandoned […]
“The next time you see sky, it’ll be over another town. The next time you take a test, it’ll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they got to do what’s right for them.” I love the energy of action horror of the 1980s. […]
This adventures blog now has over thirty free adventures for my fellow GMs to use, steal, or draw inspiration from! But just for fun, I took a look at how many adventures I started… and then never finished for a variety of reasons. Often, writer’s block comes from a lack of inspiration, a game design […]
A couple of years ago I found an old FASA Star Trek adventure that didn’t quite work out of the box, and rejiggered and remolded it into something new. I find that rebooting decades old adventures is not only a fun archaeology experiment, but also keeps my game design senses sharp. Designing around existing constraints […]
In previous posts, I’ve said how much I enjoy savage fantasy — fantasy adventures set on the primeval edges of the world, where life is cheap and magic is weird and dangerous. Conan’s Hyboria, Warhammer’s Old World, and Dark Sun are rife with savage potential. Sandbox adventures are especially appropriate for savage fantasy. A sandbox […]
Over the last few years, I’ve written over a dozen free horror adventures that you can find on this website. They range from horror adventures that span unusual historical settings, to takes on rare genres (at least in RPGS) like 80s slasher films and 1950s retro cheese. In that time span, I’ve also discovered new […]
In our modern era of generative AI, cybercriminals, and tech company failings, and the metaverse as far away as ever, I thought it would be a good time to dive into the genre that has been one of the most requested since I started this blog — cyberpunk! Not having played a cyberpunk game for […]
It occurred to me recently that the best, most classic RPG adventures come from a small handful of genres. Fantasy has a dozens of classics, horror has even more, and even science fiction has some fantastic ones, especially if you count the Traveller and Star Wars D6 ones. One genre that clearly does worse than […]
Horror makes for one of the best genres for one-shot RPG adventures. Horror adventures are usually short, with many of them easily able to be finished in just one night. Horror characters are usually archetypical and fun to play. Roleplay a crazy old cat lady for a campaign? No way! But for one night, where […]
Last year, I did a fun game design experiment where I asked Call of Cthulhu fans what some of the most underused and forgotten Lovecraftian monsters were. I then took one of those obscure creatures — the alien Insects of Shaggai — and wrote an entire adventure around them. Centering an adventure around a monster […]
