Sounds like a good Mothership adventure, doesn’t it? No dice, we’re back in Lanton town. ‘Tis the season for Graverobbers, and while I plan next moves for the Pocket Guide I’m thinking about the best way to include a starter adventure. This is an adventure game, so no adventure would be like cutlery without soup.
I honestly hadn’t considered randomly generating a starter adventure as an option. I love bespoke, playable spaces put together by level designers. It’s most of what I do and a lot of why I love this hobby in the first place, and while randomly generating a dungeon is fun in its own way you undoubtedly lose something.
However! Let’s consider our needs in this specific instance. We want a quick, introductory adventure. Quick is important - even the six-room dungeon I had been working on for this has branching paths, sticky decisions and potential pitfalls that could easily see a group, especially a new one, delving for hours. It’s easy to underestimate play time when writing one-shots - I wrote The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 for quick convention play and I’ve heard stories of folk getting multiple session mini-campaigns out of it. I ran a second session of it Sunday night and we’re still not done.
So, quick is good but we can go quicker. Why not a simple series of randomly generated obstacles? One or two things in the way of some treasure, a half-hour maximum of play to get to grips with the world and the basics of the game. And if a session does run longer, that lets the players experience the Black Market / Red Moon loop as well, win-win.
This also keys in to the “introductory” aspect, as a Dealer who wants to run this multiple times will be able to keep things fresh. Could even be done with the same group. Plus a bunch of random tables is one of the best ways to describe an adventure game setting - plus plus, that’s a bunch of material to pull from for other sessions, even more easily than from something more structured. An adventure comprised solely of random tables almost functions as a GM screen in this way, and I’m all for material pulling double duty.
Anyway, it’s an idea I’m toying with. Below are some tables, the likes of which you may be seeing in the upcoming final version of A Pocket Guide to Smocklehythe. As always, remember to pick up this “early access” release, and you’ll get the full version free when it comes out and avoid the price going up.
Tonight, beneath a Red Moon…
On the Smocklehythe riverbank is an old graveyard, surrounded by…
1. A six-foot, old brick wall
2. A jagged, rusting iron fence
3. An old, low dry-stone wall
4. Thick, thorny hedgerows
5. A shallow, stagnant moat
6. Badly mended wooden fences
The night guard wields a hooded lantern (£1), official truncheon (£13) and…
1. A hungry bandog (£10) on a heavy iron chain (6d)
2. A pistol (£13), powder and shot for one firing (1d each)
3. A silver whistle (£1&6d)
4. A vial of good whiskey (6d)
5. An accomplice, walking in step
6. A hot meat pasty (2d)
You know that somewhere here lies your prize, a grave…
1. Within a mortsafe, the guard has the key
2. Beneath a great stone statue
3. Unmarked, therefore conspicuous
4. In one of four identical vaults in the crypt
5. Under a worn headstone, nearly unreadable
6. Yet to be buried, six feet down in a freshly dug plot
The treasure in the coffin turns out to be…
1. Only the usual, two large funerary coins (£1 each)
2. A solid silver ring in the shape of a serpent (£1&4d)
3. A gold tooth in the skull, sharply pointed (£1)
4. A little stone talisman, protects against possession (6d)
5. A vial of deadly poison tucked in the inside pocket (£3)
6. Nothing. Old bones, black fungus eating at the coffin
But you are not alone…
1. An incompetent rival bumbles about nearby
2. A mourner has snuck in to keep vigil by candlelight
3. The beleaguered old gravedigger whistles as they work
4. A fox in the undergrowth, watchful and wary
5. An adder in the grass, quick to strike if disturbed
6. Roll a die to see how many rats are about
And in the darkness stirs…
1. A roaming spirit, a chill on the wind
2. One final scream as the spirit of your quarry departs
3. The bones and sinew in the coffin grasp hungrily
4. An imp dedicated to mischief, eating candle-flames
5. A grim, the local warden spirit, bark without bite
6. The graveyard cat
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