Wild Adventures Core Rules

[poosticks7]

I've come up with another set of tables: They are something a little different. I'm sending them to James for his opinion.

It concerns something I noticed while doing the other Tables.

[Wbweather]

Okay, a few observations / thoughts after writing a couple of these:

To start with, I think the rolling for Heroic Ventures during creation of the outline probably needs some tweaking. I was trying to roll out the parts of one adventure and rolled 4 combat sequences in a row. There really needs to be a decent mix of venture types. Generally a combat or encounter should be separated by a journey. Two combats or two encounters in a row becomes difficult. Two journeys in a row is doable if the company is investigating or searching for something at the endpoint of the first journey and then embarking on another journey based on their findings. In my adventures, I decided that I would roll again if the same venture type came up twice in a row. Another possibility would be to roll the encounter types and them reorder them if necessary, interspersing the journeys between the various encounters and combats. I think it works better to have at least one of each type of venture in your finished story. I don't think you can really leave out a journey phase.

I think too that there has to be some flexibility. It may be that one item from the table doesn't fit the rest. If I feel like the story is flowing nicely except for one plot element, then perhaps it is just best to leave it out. For example in the Slave Child adventure, I was actually supposed to have a journey to a Forgotten Battlefield after the Great Hall and before the final encounter. After struggling for quite a while to fins some way to fit that bit into my plot narrative, I finally decided that I had a decent adventure as it stood and that forcing an element in, just to follow the rules wasn't going to improve it.

Finally, I think that if you want a story to fit into a campaign it requires a good grasp of the source material. I think James said it earlier:

One of the benefits of using these tables (which I had not thought about really) is that they force you to study the material, both Tolkien and the TOR books, just a little bit at a time. With prolonged use, one could really become quite a Loremaster!

Thanks to the great supplement provided by Cubicle 7 with a little bit of research it can be a lot of fun to flesh out one of these Wild adventures. I think I could throw together a quick random adventure on the spot, but it does take a bit of time and research to make an adventure fit snugly into the world of The One Ring, but then I think that is mostly do to ignorance of the material on my part. I have enjoyed rereading many sections of the books and rediscovering facts, people, and locations I had completely forgotten about.

[poosticks7]

Perhaps have all 3 as a start point then roll x amount more (depending on length)

That way you have a nice base point.

Also I don't see a problem with rolling an extra number of ventures and discarding one as needed, nor with rearranging the order - this is a tool to encourage creativity not stifle it.

So for a 5 part adventure you have the base 3 ventures - roll 3 more, discard 1 and rearrange to fit as needed.

[Wbweather]

Yeah, that sounds good.

[Majestic]

I've been a huge fan of a supers game since the early 80s - the game is called Villains & Vigilantes (V&V). For character creation, to figure out how many super powers the PC gets, players roll 1d6+2, then they roll a Weakness, and then they discard either one of their powers (or discard two if they also want to discard the Weakness).

I think some mechanic similar to this - where you roll some amount, then can discard one or two (or roll a certain amount and then mix and match as the GM sees fit - might end up working best for this.

[jamesrbrown]

Funny, I was thinking about these things too and here are my thoughts:

1. Each adventure should have at least 3 Parts with all 3 heroic ventures represented.
2. If an adventure has more than 3 Parts, heroic ventures should never be back-to-back. For example, there shouldn't be a Journey, then another Journey. If that was the case, it would be a long Journey that could be included in 1 Part.
3. So, each final result on the Heroic Ventures table needs to yield a different result from the previous and the adventure needs to include all 3 heroic ventures.

With these three basic principles in mind here is the procedure according to length of adventure.

1. Short (3 Parts) - Roll a Success die on the Heroic Ventures table for Part One. Roll a second die, looking for a different result for Part Two. If you roll the same as Part One, perhaps Part One needs two adventure seeds (a longer Journey, a more dangerous Combat, or a complicated Encounter). Once you have results for Part One and Part Two, Part Three is focused on the remaining heroic venture. So, if you rolled Journey then Combat, then Part Three would be Encounter.
2. Medium (4-5 Parts) - Roll as above, but Part Three is not defaulted to the third unused venture, but must be different from the previous result. Part Four is determined using the same rules, but Part Five must use a heroic venture that hasn't been rolled yet (if all 3 have not been used).
3. Long (6+ Parts) - As above, and make sure all heroic ventures are represented among the Parts. In a long adventure, my recommendation is to include every heroic venture at least twice.

In my Wild Adventures document, I show the length of adventures as "Short (2 Rolls)" etc. Instead of saying rolls, I will change that to Parts. That should help clarify things better. Also, I am going to test what I have written above and if all goes well, I may edit the document to reflect these suggestions.

I really like the idea that if you roll the same as the previous result, it means that you will also roll for an additional adventure seed for that Part and must improvise how they come together. For example, I begin by rolling an Encounter for Part One. I roll again and get another Encounter. That means Part One will need 2 adventure seeds. I could end up rolling "Tolls" and "Night-watch" and the improvisation for that would be even more interesting.

[Wbweather]

While rolling out an adventure plot, I noticed that there is no combat table 5 for The Greatest of the Forests.

[jamesrbrown]

While rolling out an adventure plot, I noticed that there is no combat table 5 for The Greatest of the Forests.

Nor should there be? All the sets of tables only contain 4 Combat tables.

[jamesrbrown]

Finally got the Kingdom of Dale tables uploaded. Thanks again poosticks7! These are based on Rich H's Dale Supplement.

[Wbweather]

Oh yes, my mistake.