I learned a big lesson writing this month’s free adventure! Mood changes everything. Coming off of Gotham ’39, a noir adventure filled with twists, interconnected families, and dark secrets, I yearned to move on to something simpler. Good GMs know when to pull back and do something different for their players (and they’re own sanity). […]
Tag: Fantasy
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 […]
I’ve written a lot of adventures for this site over the years – twenty-seven in all! Somehow, I also find time to run other adventures, too. I recently had a blast running Goodman Games’ Tomb of the Savage Kings for Dungeon Crawl Classics, my favorite OSR game, which was only improved by the appearance of […]
Part of the job of running a site full of self-authored RPG adventures is making sure I find time to play other creators’ great adventures! Recently, I had the opportunity to run two great fantasy adventures (light spoilers ahead!): Creep Scrag Creep Review Dungeon Crawl Classics is my favorite OSR-style games. It feels so much […]
The most popular entry on this blog has been my solo adventure, Beyond the Vale of Madness. The fact that I launched it in March of 2020, just as COVID was rearing its ugly head, probably helped. So this month, just as we are seeing a glimmer of hope that we can soon return to […]
This month I review two other one-shot adventures that I enjoyed running: Quest Givers’ MacDeath and Alien: Chariot of the Gods. And to save you a little work, you can download some of the VTT assets I used at the end of the blog. Both adventures are solid, grim one-shots that you can finish in […]
Fantasy roleplaying games are home to many magnificent, fictional cities. From the sprawling metropolises of Waterdeep, Lankhmar, and Sigil to the corrupt and insidious Arkham, Menzoberranzan, and Bögenhafen, these great cities connect players and stitch campaigns together. How many adventurers have had an ale in Baldur’s Gate? How many investigators have saved Arkham from cosmic […]
There are many sub-genres of fantasy adventure — high fantasy, low fantasy, style sword and sorcery, whatever Planescape is, and lots more. But my favorite type of fantasy for a one-shot adventure is savage fantasy. Savage fantasy’s defining pillar is that it is dangerous, unpredictable, and unbalanced. Tough and unpredictable adventures are perfect for one-shots, […]
The first adventure for a generation of roleplayers was Bargle’s underground lair. Featured in the 1983 red box set, this D&D solo adventure did a fantastic job of teaching rules, introducing bizarre monsters (the dreaded rust monster!), and even giving characters a compelling emotional reason to delve into a dangerous dungeon — the murder of […]
Harry Potter has a special place in my creative consciousness not only because of my love for the books and movies, but also because I got to design and produce the very first Harry Potter videogame (a whirlwind of a production that I’ll save for another time, but all-in-all, fond memories of the insanity). A few months […]
