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What kind of fantasy adventures would you like to see? (poll)


Fantasy Module Poll  

58 members have voted

  1. 1. What kind of Fantasy modules do you prefer to buy?

    • Hack and slash dungeon crawl
      13
    • Political intrigue
      21
    • Mysteries or puzzles
      16
    • Epic, sweeping long storylines
      24
    • Unusual settings (underseas, in space, other dimensions, etc)
      11
    • Over the mountains and through the forest quest
      20
    • Silly or humorous adventures
      8
    • Horror or gothic suspense
      9
    • Exploration and survival
      22
    • Sandbox filled with mini adventures
      29
    • Urban adventures
      23
    • Role play heavy (romance, moral choices, etc)
      16
    • One-shot single adventures
      5
    • Long chains of connected adventures
      3
    • Full campaign settings
      5


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I voted for the unusual.  I really enjoy have my players and characters leave their comfort zones and have to adapt to a new world.

 

I am currently working on a fantasy/Space setting in which the characters start out as your fantasy world but they will start to gather hints that what people consider magic is actually advanced technology.  If they come to this realization the story is designed to take them to space.

How the story will work out I am unsure but I am sure that it will be interesting. 

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I'm guessing "Epic, sweeping long storylines" and "Political intrigue" :).

 

However, there's a reason that's considered a classic 30 years on: few products have lived up to that bar. I never ran the campaign as-is, but I still have the original books and stole liberally from it.

 

I do think that there is demand for long storylines: Paizo has been making out pretty well with their adventure paths, which - like Enemy Within - are sequential episodic adventures strung into a single storyline. Unlike single adventures, they seem to be commercially viable. In fact, our gaming group just started one last weekend (Rise of the Rune Lords), after our regular GM burnt out on her own homebrew (high level) campaign and suddenly put it on hiatus.

 

When I published my own hero system campaign online in the same style (years ago) it got a metric buttload of downloads and I got a lot of feedback from GMs, suggesting that Hero system GMs are in the same boat.

 

cheers, Mark

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Paizo has been making out pretty well with their adventure paths, which - like Enemy Within - are sequential episodic adventures strung into a single storyline. Unlike single adventures, they seem to be commercially viable.

I don't know whether we can really generalize from Paizo's success - especially for something like HERO. First of all, Pathfinder adventure paths often are about taking characters from the very beginning up until "epic" levels. So quite often you don't buy them for your campaign, they are your campaign. And given the peculiarities of D&D 3E/PF, this saves you a lot of work building encounters/monsters/NPCs. Games with a smaller "grind" factor wouldn't benefit as much from that. And the pure storylines of the adventure paths I've seen aren't really that great. They're very well crafted for what they are, don't get me wrong. (Although I'm not the biggest fan of a lvl. 1-20 laser focus on one style/campaign goal in general)

 

Also, Paizo has made a pretty great eco system for themselves. Better than WotC, who's success/legacy was working against them. They have one setting, and while there's lot of third party support, a lot of that is coming from very small publishers, none of which are doing anything remotely resembling Paizo's APs. Compare that to the height of 3E's success, where you had multiple settings from the core publisher, plus lots and lots of relatively large companies doing rival adventures.

(To be fair, Paizo is more focused on adventures, whereas the Wizards never could say no to a potential splatbook)

 

Speaking of sandboxes, while I like the gaming style, I'm not sure whether this is a good idea for adventures. Plots and mini adventures tend to annoy me more than they would help, in the past I was happier with actual setting/background books. Detailing cities or sections of the world (e.g. Thieves World or various Wilderlands books). What's the gold standard for actual adventures here? And please don't say Keep on the Borderlands ;)

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Well I voted for Urban, Political, Sandbox and Roleplay Heavy. 

 

Re. Adventure Paths.

 

I'm disappointed by the lack of cohesion across the story arcs. Full Disclosure: I admit I'm only really familiar with one (Age of Worms.) I did recently look at the Mummy's Mask path with the intent of using it but, just from the synopses, it seemed to have have the same problem of plots being all over the place. Added to this there seems to be a need to throw in all "appropriate" monsters of a given style into an adventure path. Desert setting? All deserty monsters MUST make an appearance. Cold setting? Ditto for cold monsters.

 

I think this might be an artefact of the level system + the expectation of "level appropriate" challenges. It's very difficult to make a big boss who can be used across a bunch of levels in DnD/Pathfinder. I think that a, for lack of a better word, "culture" of design has grown up from this that encourages the use of bad guys behind the bad guys, each a higher level than the last, until eventually it's the Drow* who are behind it all. 

 

 

*All throughout 90's anyway. I think it's Demons now days but don't quote me.

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I don't know whether we can really generalize from Paizo's success - especially for something like HERO. First of all, Pathfinder adventure paths often are about taking characters from the very beginning up until "epic" levels. So quite often you don't buy them for your campaign, they are your campaign.

 

Nicely put - but to be honest, I think this is a very large part of their appeal. Us old grognards can complain about spoon-feeding and how in our day, you had to sketch out your own adventures with dirt and a sharp stick (and we liked it that way!), but observing our own GM, I think the reason she's starting over with an adventure path is because it drastically reduces the amount of prep. time she has to do.

 

Adventure paths do suffer from the grind and escalation mechanism, but that’s inherent in D20 and the resource management style of the game. Still, the appeal for a harried GM is undeniable. The GM who has started us on the recent adventure path used to do what we are discussing – taking published adventures and adapting them for her ongoing campaign, but the last adventure came close to wiping us out (and we did suffer one permanent unplanned PC fatality) … while the one before was a bit of a cakewalk. As the party increases in power, adapting single adventures becomes a bit of an art. I think that’s what pushed her over the edge, though she also noted how time-consuming it was to do.

 

This, I think, is why adventure paths have succeeded financially, where single adventures –even in the same settings - have failed. They offer an out-of-the-box solution.

 

And if it’s time-consuming to adapt a D20 adventure to a D20 group, imagine the stretch needed for a Hero system GM!

 

Although Paizo is making hay with their own setting, it is neither crucial (nor, apparently, especially lucrative) – with a few nips and tucks, you can use their adventure paths in any D20 setting, since so much of the material (ancient ruins, depraved wizards, elves n’ orcs, etc) is simply generic. That’s hard to do for Hero system, since there is no “generic language” of monsters and powers. A scenario that uses the Tuala Morn setting is not going to translate at all well to Atlantis and vice versa.

 

There’s also a separate problem: one catch to adventure paths (or any long scenario) is keeping the PCs on the railroad … er, advancing the plot. The game we just started contains one of the most blatant bits of railroading I’ve come across, to get the “heroes” together and headed in more or less the right direction. That was clumsily handled, but it is true that some groups have difficulty with getting things started. Sandbox style games (which is what I tend to run) can get around the railroad problem by allowing the illusion of freedom, but they require a GM who can ad lib, and not every GM can. They also require the GM is at ease with the background and material … and if you really are, you probably don’t need published material so much.

 

And there is a third, but related problem, which is that for any long-running game, it becomes more and more difficult to predict what capabilities the PCs will have (and therefore plan for it in advance and lay the railroad tracks). A murder mystery will need drastic modification if one of the PCs has – say – retrocognition. In D20, you can make pretty safe assumptions about what won’t be available at a certain level. Hero system has a special problem in that you can’t make those assumptions: a starting fantasy party could easily include a PC who can fly, teleport or turn invisible, which renders some challenges moot. And of course they can diverge even more radically as the game progresses.

 

That makes tying a long-term series of adventures to a setting even more attractive, because in Hero, it’s one way to ensure some control  of what the PCs can and cannot do.

 

None of these are insuperable problems – I’ve run several games that had plotlines that developed pretty much as originally envisaged, after several years of play*, and I’m in the process of setting up a new game of the same kind. But such a game demands descriptive planning, not prescriptive planning. The precise details of each challenge can then be tailored to the PCs I actually end up with. It’s not a sandbox game so much as a series of linked sandboxes J

 

Cheers, Mark

 

*as a GM, I always find rewarding that moment when the players figure out that what they thought was going on was not in fact what was going on, or recognize that what is happening now is a direct result of something they did years or months ago.

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Just to follow up that post, perhaps the answer to "What kind of fantasy adventures would you like to see?" is "Campaign-in-a-box". Whether Herodom assembled would go for that idea (Hero has always been about rolling your own, after all) or even whether they are numerous enough to support that approach, I don't know (I'm sceptical, to be honest: it kind of seems like a niche within a niche). But then, that's also been true of individual adventures.

 

On a more positive note, good quality fan content is relatively cheap to produce and distribute today, so maybe the question of how financially viable it is, is not that relevant. Nobody's going to make a living writing adventures or adventure paths for Hero, but that doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

 

cheers, Mark

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That's actually kind of what I have in mind.  I'm releasing adventures and source material for a single campaign world, instead of trying to make them generic.  The next big release planned is a bestiary (yes, I hear you groan, but bear with me) not of the usual stuff everyone always has, but only the things unique to the campaign world.  That way I can put references to creatures that nobody knows about or that are unique to my world in adventures and such and people know what they are.  The Fantasy Codex is a piece of this puzzle; the spells mentioned in the scenarios and the spell system are explained.  Each bit will help make a full setting so that players and GMs have a coherent single place to work in and I can put out materials for that world.

 

Its a bit of a risk, given the creativity and uniqueness that Hero tends to spawn in GMs, but like you said, its pretty cheap to put stuff out so its worth the risk in my opinion.  And as far as I'm concerned, anything that helps Fantasy Hero spread and grow is worth trying.

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That's actually kind of what I have in mind.  I'm releasing adventures and source material for a single campaign world, instead of trying to make them generic.  The next big release planned is a bestiary (yes, I hear you groan, but bear with me) not of the usual stuff everyone always has, but only the things unique to the campaign world.  That way I can put references to creatures that nobody knows about or that are unique to my world in adventures and such and people know what they are.  The Fantasy Codex is a piece of this puzzle; the spells mentioned in the scenarios and the spell system are explained.  Each bit will help make a full setting so that players and GMs have a coherent single place to work in and I can put out materials for that world.

 

Its a bit of a risk, given the creativity and uniqueness that Hero tends to spawn in GMs, but like you said, its pretty cheap to put stuff out so its worth the risk in my opinion.  And as far as I'm concerned, anything that helps Fantasy Hero spread and grow is worth trying.

 

And if you put together a interesting world you might also consider publishing in a form that can be used with Realm Works

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No tab for "all of the above?"

 

I like pretty much all of the categories except the humor category. not that i dont think that humor belongs in rpgs, of course it does, but i feel for humor to work in rpgs it must remain very organic. i'm almost never a fan of forced humor. not big into douglas adams (blasphemy, i know) or terry pratchet or any of that ilk. to me that type of humor is very forced.

 

I remember one instance of humor ina game i ran where the PCs were in pursuit of an object that had been stolen from them. they determined that it was in an armed encampent of soldiers who had gathered under the banner of an exiled noble who claimed to be the true emperor of the area. the pcs had an airship (one of the pcs was its captain) and decided to "assault" the encampment with their airship as a distraction while the groups rogue snuck into the tent where the object was being kept and obscond with it.

 

In the course of this assault, the enemy soldiers below determined that their arrows and bolts could not reaxh the airship effectively and officers made the decision to call upon their resident mage to handle the situation. they called him out by yelling "SUMMON THE MAGE!", which was echoed across the camp until an individual came from out of a lavish tent toward the center of the encampment.

 

I had decided to make the army mage a dandy who always primped himself and dressed foppishly but has absolutely beautiful, luxuriously long hair. he emerged from the tent primping himself. The officers approached him and expained the situation. the foppish mage sniffed, flipped his gorgeous hair and stepped forward and began casting a complex and powerful spell.

 

The ships captain had the ability to summon elementals, so she called forth a fire elemental and had it pepper the army mage with bolts of flame. the army mage began dancing and hopping to avoid the firebolts and in the process, his gorgeous hair caught fire and he screeched like a little girl with a skinned knee.

 

That scene pretty much had my players falling out of their seats with mirth, and it was completly organic, made up on the spot. that kind of humor is really difficult to build into a scenario.

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I agree, and while you and I are apparently in a minority of fantasy readers, I'm not fond of the Discworld books for the same reason.  I don't care for humorous or comedy adventures, partly because the comedy is more than sufficiently provided for by the players in my group, and partly because it never seems to really work.  Its usually too contrived or makes a mockery of fantasy, which is ridiculous enough to begin with.

 

I just felt like it should be in the list, because I was trying to cover all the bases :)

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I agree, and while you and I are apparently in a minority of fantasy readers, I'm not fond of the Discworld books for the same reason.  I don't care for humorous or comedy adventures, partly because the comedy is more than sufficiently provided for by the players in my group, and partly because it never seems to really work.  Its usually too contrived or makes a mockery of fantasy, which is ridiculous enough to begin with.

 

I just felt like it should be in the list, because I was trying to cover all the bases :)

pretty much.  The problem I have with most of the humor-based fantasy is that it makes quite obvious fun of the genre and I love the genre, so I'm not particularly cool with someone making fun of it.

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I suppose its not surprising that sandbox does well, since the way the poll is listed it is targeted at GMs who would run a game.  The surprising results so far are how well "Over the mountains and through the forest quest" is doing (I'd have thought it would be too cliche and dull to people) and how poorly unusual settings is doing.  It seems like people prefer their fantasy familiar :)

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The surprising results so far are how well "Over the mountains and through the forest quest" is doing (I'd have thought it would be too cliche and dull to people) and how poorly unusual settings is doing.  It seems like people prefer their fantasy familiar :)

 

I'm actually surprised how well Unusual Setting is doing. Most time from what I've experienced unusual settings go to far, and become too specific and based around whatever "unusual" element the writer comes up with (All the races are descended from Magical Space Unicorns and the whole campaign takes place on a floating disk) . So if that "unusual element" doesn't appeal to a potential GM then the whole book becomes "useless". It is a lot easier to add "unusual" to an existing "standard fantasy" setting then to strip out the "unusual" from a specific setting. 

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