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.

Why Shadowrun Sucked

 Let’s get something established right away.  When we are talking about Shadowrun, we mean the first edition (first two editions?).  We haven’t so much as looked at a Shadowrun product in a couple of decades.  Maybe they fixed some of this, but they probably didn’t.  Someone besides FASA owns it now, and we wish them the best of luck, if somewhat half-heartedly.

But here’s what sucked:  There were two aspects of the game that broke the golden rule of RPGs:  Don’t split the party!  Deckers could hack their way through the matrix, and mages could astral project.  While they were doing this, anyone who wasn’t a decker or a mage couldn’t follow, couldn’t participate, typically couldn’t even watch.

The problem was that hacking your way through the matrix was pretty cool.  It was a major part of the game.  In a lot of situations, you might have needed to have the decker(s) handle the hacking piece in order to move to the next stage of the adventure.  What do the rest of the players do while the decker is handling things inside the internet?  They sit around bored, that’s what they do.  Use of the astral plane was far less often, but if used, the exact same thing happened - most of them sat around bored.

It is important as a GM to keep the players involved and entertained.  Having the majority of them sitting around while someone else is “adventuring” isn’t why they came.  If that was what they wanted, they could watch that on the internet performed by people who do funny voices.

As cool as running through the matrix can be, it should be something the party can share.  Establishing a non-standard adventuring site like this is exactly what we want to encourage, but not when only a small part of the party can participate.  The same can often be true when trying to run adventures in dreams or some of the other strange places.  While we are going to continue to encourage all GMs to use non-standard adventures, only use ones that all of the player characters can participate in.

 

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.

 

Alchemy Noobs

 I often like to cross-genres for my fantasy campaigns, and one of the easiest I think is for the alchemists.  Who do you think becomes alchemists?  Not the hard working farm kids trying to grow enough food for their families.  Not the soldier’s kid who is raised in an athletic and military environment.  Even the adventuring mages have more physical power than the alchemist who sits at home and plays with his chemistry set.  By all accounts, these should be the ultimate geeks, sitting in the basement making healing potions.

So, when it comes to alchemists developing new products, I like to think geek when I’m doing this.  What do I mean?  Well, I see alchemy as a great way to invent new monsters.  We’ll get into the chimeras at some point in the future, but just because an alchemist thought it would be a great idea for a guardian for his lab, doesn’t mean it has to make sense.  This is where I cross-genres - Think of all the really stupid superheroes you have seen and assume that some alchemist would have thought they were a good idea.

How about bouncy ball golems - hard rubber balls that throw themselves at the enemy and then bounce back.  Or the super stretchy halfling - able to become a full 6’ tall when he wants to, though still incredibly thin and not very strong.  How about deranged poisonous bats?  Ok, that one might have some promise, if they weren’t so insane that they would attack each other.  The point is - not every enemy your players come up against is going to be a brilliant strategist.  Some of them are going to be loony.  You can play that for comic relief, but you can still make it dangerous.  Take our first two for example.  As the party is fighting them off, the stretchy halflings start to form together.  Put six of them together, and now you have a stretchy giant with some real power.  Or perhaps they start using their arms as slingshots and catapulting the bouncy balls at the party with some real force behind them.  Or both!

This is a game!  Games are supposed to be fun!  Fun often consists of laughing at the unexpected.  But just as the party starts laughing at their enemies, then the giant shows up with the slingshot-ers and it becomes a real fight.  You know what?  That’s a fight they are going to remember, if for no other reason than it was just so odd.

 

Does this kind of content interest you?  If so, we hope you will consider joining us in our Small Bites project or the full title of How to Build Your Fantasy World in Small Bites!  We continue to build our community of game masters and world builders, and we would love to have you join us!

This post was written as part of The River of Youth aka Potion Making 4 Noobs aka All About Magical Ingredients & Alchemical Health, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  (These book titles just seem to keep getting longer!)  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 all the ingredients and components used in that really popular book’s spell casting, as well as alchemy and how it can be used for the health and wellbeing of the fantasy community.

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 78 pages of content in the Game Masters’ edition, click here.