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 started with big sandboxes like Keep on the Borderlands where there were few rails, and you were one 20’x20′ square room away from getting murdered by a horde of angry kobolds.

Over the years, as roleplaying evolved, so did starter adventures. Star Wars Tatooine Manhunt threw the players an interesting and complex story to deal with, set in a very-large, very-familiar setting, with very-familiar characters. Notably, Tatooine Manhunt maintained the deadliness. For a Star Wars adventure, surviving this one took some effort!

Call of Cthulhu takes a different approach. Edge of Darkness, one of its most iconic starter adventures, has a solid story, but tries to strike a balance between a sandbox and a linear adventure. There’s a small location to investigate– a creepy old farmhouse — but the adventure gives players a handful of other locations and characters to investigate before they get to that farmhouse. Edge of Darkness does a great job of showcasing Call of Cthulhu‘s clue-filled investigations, social elements, and deadly occult foes. Sure, not everyone may survive this one, but hey, it’s Call of Cthulhu.

And finally other starter adventures take a completely different approach. Most of Dungeons & Dragons’ introductory adventures, like the well-written Lost Mines of Phandelver, aren’t dangerous at all. But instead they set out more to teach the players about the rules and cooperation vs. throw any real challenge at the players (at least compared to some of those older adventures). And Phandelver has both linear sections as well as a small, open-ended section when players enter town.

So do any of these “great starter adventures” have anything in common? Believe it or not, yes.

The Three Rules of Great Starter Adventures

• Great Starter Adventures are Familiar. Newer players are learning mechanics and a new setting, so it’s important to keep the core of an adventure familiar to them. Whether it’s Keep’s “dangerous caves”, Star Wars’ Tatooine, or Cthulhu’s abandoned farmhouse, those are all places easy to imagine. Players immediately get the dynamics, they are quickly immersed, know what’s risky or not, and can improvise faster when they understand the setting.
• They have clear challenges and obstacles from the beginning. All of those adventures spell out the challenge in the first few minutes. Keep has a dangerous cave that desperately needs clearing out, Tatooine Manhunt has a rebel operative that has to be found ASAP, and the mystery-filled old farmhouse is introduced by a sick old man right away. And the bad guys are obvious too. No one is going to mistake an orc or someone that looks exactly like IG-88 as a good guy.
• They can be standalone… or kick off a campaign. Many GMs make the mistake of inventing overly complex campaigns before running their first session. With new players, you never know if they’ll like the game to come back for more. All of these adventures do a nice job of working in one session – even if you don’t get through the whole thing – but still give the group lots of options to continue into a short campaign. These adventures do a wonderful job building in hooks and suggesting there’s a bigger world…

And even though all of these adventures are designed for new players, they have enough complexity and robustness for veteran players to enjoy. Veterans can politic and pit gangs of monsters against each other in the Keep’s Caves of Chaos. There’s a whole world of smugglers and villains to manipulate in Tatooine Manhunt, plus plenty of dangling plot threads. And Edge of Darkness has so many ways to approach the danger in the farmhouse, that no game will play out the same way. Good beginner adventure does not mean bad expert adventure.

The Scourge of Triton

And so this month’s free adventure is The Scourge of Triton. In this adventure, a feckless king angers Triton, and now the god of the deep is threatening to unleash a massive boar on the kingdom unless forty teens are sacrificed to the god. To stop the boar, the PCs must adventure into its home — the underworld — and across the sea to find weapons capable of defeating it.

Obviously, ancient Greece is a familiar setting. And Triton’s curse happens in the earliest moments of the adventure, giving the players a clear problem to deal with. And while the adventure can be concluded in one session, I purposes included lots of plot hooks that give the players options if they want to continue playing in this world, as well as threads and threats that the GM can include to make the adventure less linear and give more experience players more agency (treacherous Spartans FTW).

What are your favorite starter adventures for any game system? Let me know in the comments below.

Get THE SCOURGE OF TRITON here for free:

• The Scourge of Triton (GURPS Greece)
• The Scourge of Triton (GURPS Greece) – Printer Friendly
• The Scourge of Triton (Old School Essentials)
• The Scourge of Triton (Old School Essentials) – Printer Friendly
• The Scourge of Triton – VTT Tokens & Assets

Related: The Honey Tree of Pelion – Another Ancient Greek Adventure