Comments on: Re-molding an Adventure

By: John Arcadian

John Arcadian — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:42:13 +0000

@Martin Ralya - Thanks for the compliment. There are 2 things that I can attribute my wide GMing experiences to. 1. Playtesting a lot of new ideas for Silvervine. 2. Running a lot of convention games and trying to make sure that players at my table walk away talking about Silvervine and getting players at other tables to come over and ask what is the game that we're playing. When you run the same adventure with 3 different groups of people in a week, or have a day at a gaming store where you keep throwing together 2 hour improv games for about 12 hours you keep trying to come up with something new.

By: Martin Ralya

Martin Ralya — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:06:11 +0000

Having just commented on your first Johnny's Five article, John, I can safely say that our GMing Venn diagrams have significant non-overlapping areas -- you've done so much stuff that I've never done as a GM! Thanks for an excellent article.

By: John Arcadian

John Arcadian — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:42:48 +0000

@Matthew J. Neagley - Will you eventually get to the point of running a sci-fi campaign set far in the future where the PCs fight off a corporate goon squad in a crater, only to find the last remnants of a tent and ferris wheel? :) I like the way the party got into the Ravenloft setting as well. Very unique way to do it. @Scott Martin - These are not the ghouls you're looking for.

By: Scott Martin

Scott Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:15:59 +0000

I'm a fan of the islands out of time-- if they go left instead of right, all that "left path" stuff can come back as consequences or world flavor. Maps, characters, and everything else can be brought back later-- you might as well benefit from the prep sometime! Beyond reskinning, it can be fun to take an encounter or setting and convert it to a parallel in a whole nother system. The political war between rival vampire factions can be reskinned as the machinations of senate factions in your Star Wars game. Bonus points if they're arguing for the same outcomes!

By: Matthew J. Neagley

Matthew J. Neagley — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:00:42 +0000

If I have time, part of my post-adventure closing is to look at the various elements and make a note or two about their future use potential. This NPC escaped and may come back to cause trouble. This location was destroyed by the adventure. It could be re-visited as ruins or after it's re-built, etc... One of my favorite re-done adventures was "Return to the Carnival of the Damned." One of my firends groups ran an adventure where they hosted a carnival and handed out free drugs to all atendees (in the vein of "The first hit is free") and the whole location got sucked into Ravenloft. I re-did his adventure (from descriptions) and had my group (including some of the original players) explore the petrified, haunted ruins of the carnival. The PCs almost immediately self-destructed. So, on my "list of stuff on the back burner" is "Son of Return to the Carnival of the Damned" a re-redo featuring the original locale and (still unsolved) mysteries, with the new group of PCs as new haunts.