Wednesday, August 31, 2011

A September of Short Adventures: Intro

Here we go!
On Friday the September of Short Adventures (SoSA) will begin, and I (along with at least 13 awesome OSR bloggers) will be posting one "minimalist scenario" per day, except on Thursdays, that readers are free to use for any of their old-school tabletop role-playing needs. There are a few introductory and administrative things to say first...
  1. The game system that I'll assume as a baseline is 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1e AD&D), along with its implied fantasy/medieval setting. This particular edition is out of print, but there is a free "retro-clone" rule set; see OSRIC. 
  2. Still, there won't be too much edition-specific material here. I don't even know if I'll give more than a handful of "stat blocks" for monsters or NPCs, for example. From what I've seen in the OSR blogosphere, DMs want to see cool ideas first and foremost, and they're usually happy to chug through the mechanical bits on their own, as a part of customizing the ideas to their own particular world and to the experience levels of their PCs.
  3. /Matt's original intent for the SoSA was for these adventures to be relatively brief (i.e., no maps, no long descriptions, no long lists of NPCs) and to share a consistent format. I'm not going with the default format, which means that some posts may be long and rambly, and some may just be brief "Short Adventure Seeds" that give only the flavor for the idea.
  4. Although MY original intent was to do 25 unconnected adventures that one can drop in to an existing campaign here and there, the DM hamster-wheels in my head started making connections between them.  Thus, there's a set of 6 posts coming up later that describes a new campaign setting, as well as 4 separate posts that present some seemingly unconnected NPCs....
  5. If I was publishing these in print or for profit, I'd certainly do more research to make sure that I'm not unconsciously swiping the ideas of others. As it is, I can't guarantee that any one of these posts won't be a close cousin of something I once spied in a silver-age comic book, or in an old TSR product, or in a lengthy random table posted by prolific bloggers like Zak Sabbath.  :-)  You's gets whats you pays for!

1 comment:

  1. It seems our minds are very closely aligned here. Nos. 2-4 are more or less true in my case too, but there's always the danger of 5 of course. I'm looking forward to this a lot.

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