I swear, neither I nor this blog are dead. No really, I swear, I have 4 drafts on blog posts that I have been working on (and mostly off) since my last post, but here we are with me making excuses. Sorry.
Anyway, in lieu of explaining what has been going in my life (one of the many drafts I have been "working" on does that), I had an idea for a double adventure that I wanted to put down before it escaped me. This is a two part adventure, as hinted at before, but instead of the same set of PCs for both, you have your players make two different sets of characters. The first half is pretty basic - party has to get the McGuffin to save the world/kingdom/town/whatever. Then the twist starts - these PCs are not going to live forever, so they are also tasked with hiding the McGuffin away to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. The party is provided a little bit of an extra budget from their local kingdom to supplement their recent earnings (hey, they just stormed their way to the McGuffin once, they should be loaded with dough, and the kindgom does not want to suffer that kind of inflationary spending) (on another note, Emily Dresner, aka Multiplexer, is back and posting new Dungeonomics blog posts, these are excellent reads), and they design a dungeon and stock it with traps and guardians. Then build it, and install the McGuffin at the end of it. Because you cannot simply destroy a McGuffin, now can you? So it must be locked away inside an "impossible" dungeon, obviously.
The party has fun, does something a little different from the usual "my character retires to great fame and fortune" at the end of the campaign, and then they move on to the second part of this two parter. But you do not tell the party this is the second part of a two parter, you just let them create new characters, still in the same campaign setting just a couple of generations later. Sometime during part two, the new party runs into a particularly nasty dungeon with, you guessed it, a McGuffin at the bottom of it. If this was the same party of characters, this would be intimately familiar to them, because as you guessed it, this is the dungeon the original party created. The players may recognize it, if they are really paying attention to it, but remember, this is several generations after it was completed, so even if the players took good notes, this is not exactly the dungeon they built. It has evolved, the guardians have changed, and changed the dungeon while they were at it. This new pack of PCs must overcome not only the nastiest protections the original party (and themselves, let us be honest) could come up with, but also do so without any knowledge of what the DM has changed in the meantime. Fun for the whole family!
Yes yes, this is just an excuse to get your current party to do the grunt work for your next campaign arc, but I like the continual world aspect of this game style. There is one big problem with this, and that is I have to come up with a dungeon making table, like in Pathfinder's version 1 Ultimate Campaign book, chapter 2, Downtime. They have a fantastic system of how your party can make their own buildings and organizations, and how much each part of those cost and how long it takes to build. I want that for the dungeon making part, as it makes it fun for the party - they have a budget they have to stay within, time constraints on how long to build it not to mention on how long to go acquire or construct whatever guardians they want to stock the dungeon with. A miniature game within the overarching game. I would say that I need to start working on that, among my many other half-started projects lying about my Google Drive folders, but I am pretty sure someone else has already done the work for the rest of us, I just have not spent the time on Google to find it. I will link it in when I find it.
Until next time, have fun!
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