Years ago a common criticism of Call of Cthulhu‘s investigative adventures was “if the players fail a single Spot Hidden roll to find a clue, the adventure is over.” I think that’s mostly a lazy critique. It’s like saying if your D&D players never find the dungeon, the adventure is over. But there is some […]
Every year I try to sus which of the free one-shot TTRPG adventures on this site gets the most eyeballs. Obviously, it’s hard to tell how many plays each one gets (which is why I ask you to tell me!), but it’s clear some adventures are more popular than others. Based purely on downloads, this […]
This month, I revisit mythological Greece with The Scourge of Triton, an adventure designed for newer players. (This must be a theme this month, as I recently posted a video on the best starter adventures for Call of Cthulhu!). There’s lots of debate about what makes a great starter adventure. Veteran roleplayers like myself probably […]
Regular readers of this blog will know that I occasionally go back through old adventures, look for ones that don’t quite work, but have a good soul, and reboot them into something new. Rebooting an adventure is a very different creative process from writing a new one — by adapting someone else’s older work, you’re […]
I’ve worked in the videogame industry since 1996, and some of the first games I shipped were on the Game Boy. That’s a long time to watch game design evolve, along with the hardware to push pixels. Somewhere back in the Xbox 360 era, I came up with a fun XBLA game concept — Dinosaurs […]
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 […]
