How to Steal Ideas and Not Get Caught

 We have long advocated for a style we call Make It Your Own.  We know that as game masters and world builders, you get the sparks of ideas from all sorts of places and then incorporate them into your world.  The trick is not making it obvious about where the ideas come from.  More importantly, by the time you are finished making it your own, you will know it and remember it far better because it is your own.

You may or may not believe this, but the following mission idea is based on Smokey and the Bandit.  What’s the real plot of that movie?  These guys are bootlegging - a major crime.  In order to get away with it, they have a guy who’s job it to be the distraction.  He’s speeding, a tiny crime when compared to illegally transporting alcohol.  (Remember the good old days when they kept that crap in cans on the other side of the Mississippi?)  But he is committing his little crime so “loudly” that he is attracting all the attention and keeping the police away from the far bigger crime being committed by Snowman.

Cat and mouse is not all that original an idea for a mission, but we think we can turn this into something cool!  So, we’re in the middle of a war.  We’re going to use the Elf Dwarf War for an example.  The dwarves have been pushing their way through the Slyvanian Forest.  The dwarves were losing in the early stages of the war.  The elves were in their element and were easily picking off dwarven soldiers from behind trees.  The dwarves need to retreat before they get slaughtered.  But they can’t because the elves are pressing them too hard.

So, time to bring in the “Bandit” to distract the elves while the main army (what counts) gets out of the forest.  Admittedly, this is not a light-hearted, funny adventure, but instead something really dark.  That actually helps, because even though the movie was the spark of the idea, the players are not going to equate this mission with Burt Reynolds.

The party is brought in to be the distraction.  They are going to race around the woodlands finding small elven villages and lighting them on fire.  A risk that big is going to bring every elven soldier in the region to help put out the fire and save the villagers.  By the time they get that one out, the party should have started another in a different spot - leading the elves away from the retreating dwarves.  If they can trick the elves into thinking that the dwarves are retreating in the other direction (the direction of the fires) all the better!

Just like in the movie, Bandit never expected he would have one enemy willing to follow him far out of their jurisdiction, so how do we put Frog in here (the motivation)?  At the second village, the distraction party discovers that the elves have dwarven slaves.  Maybe they are slaves or prisoners of war or possibly dwarven criminals (at least in the eyes of the elves).  This is good, because it will slow the distraction party down because they now have non-adventurers tagging along.  But the former captives know things that are of benefit to the party.  And come on - You can’t leave them behind!

So, whether we replace Buford T. Justice with an angry elven lord who just lost his slave work force or with an elven commando who has been dying for the chance to stop training soldiers and go out hunting dwarves, there is someone willing to pursue the party across the entire forest if necessary.  They may have only counted on the locals being after them, then giving up the chase to go attend to the fires, but now they have a true enemy hunting them.  Hey, why not have both - the psycho assassin and the slave owner?  The assassin is a sniper, so he will be very difficult to spot and kill, making him last much longer.  The slave owner will have a lot of guys, allowing for a bigger battle when they eventually lock horns.

Few players are familiar with their characters being chased.  They are typically the aggressors and on offense.  This should be a whole new aspect of gaming for them, something new.  There is nothing “dungeon” about this one, nor does it feel anything like a more standard wilderness exploration adventure.
 

This post was written as part of the recently released Horror in the House of Mystique aka All About Non-Standard Adventures, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details everything having to do with those monsters that are typically huge, super strong, but also not so bright, and how this will affect their actions and tactics, as well as other game mastering tricks, but within a fully defined mission showing both the stats for point-based characters (like in Legend Quest) and class-based characters like in most of the die-20 games.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 61 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

What’s “Better” - Weapons

 

Walk through a hardware store and you’ll find a row of hammers, a row of saws, and a row of power drills, all priced differently.  So, which one is better?  The most expensive one, right?  Why?

Let’s concentrate on the hammers and saws and other hand tools, because they are going to make a better analogy when I switch this conversation over to weapons in a fantasy game, which is clearly my intent.  Why is one hammer more expensive than another?  Most likely, it is in those things that are not immediately noticeable, at least not to the untrained eye.  Is the grip better than the other one, less slipping?  Is the steel a higher grade; is there less chance of it breaking?  That’s the one we normally concentrate on.  In our Legend Quest Omnibus, we establish four grades of weaponry:  ornamental, standard, tool, and combat ready.  Ornamental covers those “weapons” that were never intended to be used, like the swords old men wear at church functions or a “knife” that is actually a letter opener.  The standard grade is what you would expect to find around a normal house - the knife you use to cut your steak.  Tool grade is where they start to get tougher:  the high quality knives a butcher or chef would have around their kitchen.  Lastly, the combat ready is those knives you would expect Seals to have strapped to their thighs during a mission.  The only major difference here is the sturdiness of the weapon - how well it resists damage.  Let’s face it - a sharpened letter opener could be stabbed through someone’s heart and kill them almost as easily as a Seal’s blade.  Damage isn’t the question - durability is.

We get back to the eternal “So What?” question.  Why do you as a GM care if a weapon is standard or combat ready?  First off, I have used these grades to help in loot.  Do you want to arm some poor commoners, but you don’t want to hand over a treasure trove of resale steel to your PCs?  Give them bows and hand axes that are of standard grade.  No self-respecting weapons shop would take used, low quality weapons.  Plus, it makes sense.  Need to help your PCs get their weapons and equipment for those first few missions?  Let them buy sub-standard weapons.  They can always upgrade after they start to be successful.  Should all their weapons be “combat ready”?  No.  Tomahawks and cudgels would almost never be “combat ready”.  More likely tool grade.  Not only is a cudgel made out of wood, making it weaker than a sword, but it’s barely crafted at all.  Similarly, swords would almost never be crafted at standard grade, unless by con men in a traveling show.

Why else?  Well to keep your adventurers on their toes.  These guys are supposed to know what they’re doing when it comes to the tools of their trade.  Have they neglected to train in skills like Appraise and Weaponcraft?  Adventuring is not the same as fighting.  Adventurers should be rounded in a way that soldiers and sentries never have to be, and even some of those guys would have the skills required to judge weapons.  It’s really not about screwing your party over; it’s about maintaining an element of surprise and reality.

 

This post was written as part of An Adventurers’ Guide to Equipment aka All About Gear, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one is showcasing the gear adventurers would want with them on missions.  Not just the boring stuff, but some of the “normal” stuff with some variation and some style.

We hope we’re getting you interested.  If you want to see the World Walker edition for FREE!! click the link here.  If we’ve hooked you and you want to get the full 42 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.

Toot Toot

That was our own horn. Well, we’re not actually tooting our own horn, we’re telling you about other people who did. Here is a short list of some of the products currently rated as FIVE STARS on RPG Now:
Legend Quest - Full Rule Bundle
City of Rhum Bundle
City of Rhum
100 Professions
100 Towns
A Baker’s Dozen Villains
Character Foundry
Forge of Imagination: Spark of an Idea
Warriors Guild of Rhum
Empty Crypt
Amberrose Incident

Clearly someone thinks we're doing something right. Maybe you should check them out too!

Grain Into Gold Comments

Every once in a while I troll the internet looking for mentions of Legend Quest or some of our supplements. Here's one I found at the bottom of a long series in a forum. I have a new favorite person!

Thanks for the folks who recommended Grain into Gold. HOLY CRAP. This thing is awesome. It's everything I wanted in a nice quick table, sufficiently detailed enough to be used on the fly. Which is perfect, because I really want a certain level of realism/predictability with respect to the world itself, to build verisimilitude, without having to be a computer and keep track of a ton of crap in my head or in some spreadsheet.

Seriously awesome system-neutral PDF, well worth the price. Highly recommend it.

The Blacklist TV

Have you seen the episode of The Blacklist (season 2 - episode 6) called The Mombasa Cartel? Towards the end, Red is threatening the rich guy and explaining Dembe Zuma’s backstory. He ends with something like, “and that’s the difference between good men like him and men like you, and me”. At which point Red shoots the SOB.

You’ve heard me talk about the main campaign in Fletnern that is centered on Forsbury and is very urban oriented. Well, the party leader, one of the most powerful swordswoman in the world, has a bodyguard - a huge dual weapon fighting ogre, former gladiator. We often have a very difficult time explaining the relationship between the two. The Blacklist did it great! Dembe said there was no point to killing the son of an unmarried mother at this point in time, but Red did it anyway. Why? Because he cares about Dembe and felt avenging the deaths of his family in this fashion was warranted. They’re friends, yeah, but it’s different, it’s more. Their tied together. She can’t imagine letting that guy get away with something he did to her friend 20 years ago. Dembe was right. There was no point, but that’s the way Red shows that he loves him. (No, not like that!)

Blacklist - Good show. Hate the girl; love the ideas!

Royalty - Expanded

Here is a review of our product Royalty: The Royalty is another useful niche product from the people who brought us Grain Into Gold. It does what it purports to do: it comes with a boatload of NPCs. It's sadly not as much of a look at processes as Grain into Gold is – it's a collection. If you need a menagerie of connected NPC aristocrats of various sorts, many of which are relatively generic if not for the intricate family lines, then this would be a useful product. I find that the NPCs could've used some more expansion, and more of a variance – there's an awful lot of whining miscreants and cheeky gossips. Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] Despite his criticism, he still gave us 4 stars. We take this criticism very seriously. Because Royalty was intended to be used to fill out the most commonly met people in a fantasy world court, there is an overabundance of courtiers and gossip mongers. In an effort to address this issue, we have expanded Royalty with 50 additional NPCs. These folks are the ones who may not be as visible or may be actively hidden. We hope this addresses your comments and keeps our customers happy! Enjoy! You can see Royalty - Expanded here.

Board Enterprises Reviews

You know what - Some people get us and some people don’t. No really, we’ve had reviewers write things like, “I just don’t get where they were going with this.” You know why? Because they’re gold farmers. I’m not just trying to belittle people who write bad stuff about our products. But Board Enterprises products are focused at an underserved portion of the market - Those mature players who want help building their worlds and enhancing the role-playing aspects. Hopefully you can tell by most of our blog posts - We’re trying to get your players to become invested in their characters and your world. A little bit of passion there will go an enormous way to everyone having fun and coming back time after time. That is what I always strive for as a GM - To get the players to care at least a little bit.
There is an enormous segment of the market out there who see FRPGs as they do their video games - How much damage does it do? How much gold do I get? How quickly can I make my next level? If any of those three questions defines your style of role-playing, then Board Enterprises products are not for you.
We focus on role-playing - What happens to your character between missions? Who are the people who inhabit the world (the ones you are not out to kill)? Can a weapon be cooler than it is effective? Would my character actually agree to do this mission, and if not, what else would he do? If any of those questions appealed to you, check out our stuff, but be careful when you read some of the negatives reviews.