Coming soon - Get a detailed view of why an account is flagged as spam!
view details

This post has been de-listed

It is no longer included in search results and normal feeds (front page, hot posts, subreddit posts, etc). It remains visible only via the author's post history.

14
Adventure Modules in Story Games
Post Body

Howdy y'all!

I want to premise that I'm a long time player of PbtA games even if I never wrote in this sub before, having run multiple systems since the very early 10s like Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Sagas of the Icelanders, Masks, Hogwarts, World Wide Wrestling and The Sprawl. I've also run a lot of PbtA-adjacent games like Ironsworn, City of Mist, Undying (an underrated gem in my opinion!) and Dream Askew.

It's obvious why "Adventure Modules" aren't common for PbtA games, since the game focus has been largely shifted towards an improv-heavy style, but most of the PbtA games could handle very well adventures kickoffs (like Dungeon World's dungeon starters), procedurally generated content (like dungeons from The Perilous Wilds), or structured premade long-term campaign elements/scenarios/settings/custom moves (such as prewritten Arcs from Masks, Icebergs from City of Mist or Fronts from Dungeon World)... or a well-balanced mixture of the three, with just enough blanks/guidance to tie in the characters in the premade content without feeling too heavy-handed. I used to prepare kickoffs multiple times to trim on character creation and make a direction-led repeatable one-shot adventure for convention play.

As a consequence of a discussion about the purpose of adventures on system's accessibility (here, down on r/TheRPGAdventureForge), most of the arguments boiled down to the fact that "well-designed adventures make a game immediately be more handily playable, and an intro adventure should be included in all systems" to whom I generally agree. Looking at the current trends in the hobby (from OSR games to neo-trad games from Free League), in the last few years, a growing trend was including an intro adventure inside the actual book. Personally, I recently noticed I was more inclined to run a system (at all!) if it had a pre-written short intro adventure included in the rules to let me stretch my wings while I was learning the ropes of the new system.

My question to you is the following. Have you ever heard/run/used/written adventures by running a PbtA game? What kind of "Adventure" do you think would be fitting for Story Games, if any? What are the pitfalls of designing adventures for story games and what are the advantages?

Author
Account Strength
100%
Account Age
6 years
Verified Email
Yes
Verified Flair
No
Total Karma
84,829
Link Karma
6,308
Comment Karma
76,436
Profile updated: 2 weeks ago
Posts updated: 10 months ago

Subreddit

Post Details

We try to extract some basic information from the post title. This is not always successful or accurate, please use your best judgement and compare these values to the post title and body for confirmation.
Posted
2 years ago