Tag: new release

The Adventure Cycle is Released!

A framework to run a network of open table fantasy games. Each game master has one or more villages and each player has one or more characters that go on adventures across different game master’s tables.

Characters have their abilities, reputations, social rank and possessions that follow them from one game master’s village to another.

In each village they have their relationships with the local characters, and the tribes and factions in the lands around. They have quests, property and hidden treasure that are specific to a village.

Prior to a Session the Game Master for the session
will do some prep on the villagers, the adventure
region and encounterable situations.
An Open Table Session consists of the following
distinct steps:
1) Session Set Up Sequence: Any character creation
and existing character tidy up, including closed quest
effects.
2) One or more Adventure Cycles as follows:


adventure cycle step 1: Village Episodes Sequence.

  • Focus Recovery.
  • pay taxes
  • Max 8 episodes per character (up to 2 may be reserved for step 3).

An episode always involves a single activity of a
specific type. The episodes types a character may
enact are:
• Buy a Cottage
• Buy or Sell Equipment
• Buy or Sell Gems / Jewels / Art objects
• Enroll Adventure Hirelings
• Gain A Companion
• Philanthropy
• Secure Your Treasure
• Seek a Quest
• Seek the Right to Buy a Cottage
• Socialise
• Spend Growth Points
• Train a Skill
• Work a Profession

adventure cycle step 2: The Adventure Sequence.

  • Focus Recovery.
  • Determine quest active for each character.
  • Play out the adventure
  • Note acts of renown and infamy

adventure cycle step 3: Village Return Sequence.

  • Heal characters
  • Gain growth points for the adventure.
  • Gain growth points for quests closed.
  • Test reputations for changes.
  • Split treasure.
  • Village episodes. (Max 2 reserved from earlier)


Adventure Cycle Steps 1 and 3, in the Village, are
designed to be highly structured to handle adventure
“down time”, and generally contain few opportunities
for full depth role play. They do, however, provide the
context, motivation, and rewards for what goes on in
the adventure. The adventure itself is where all the
exciting role play happens.

Here is how everything hangs together now.

The adventure cycle provides a play structure that uses the core rules and toolkits to provide character action and development mechanics.

There has been a lot of play testing of the Adventure Cycle, at its peak 2 game masters and 16 players in 4 session streams each week. A lot of extra stuff has been developed in draft form, such as a magic system and dungeon crawl details. These will get polished up and provided later as Adventure Cycle Plugins.

The Adventure Cycle is available now as a “Pay What You Like” PDF, 58 pages, at DriveThruRPG.

Combat Toolkit Released

Combat struggles have risk for characters who must brave death, or serious injury, to fight through the enemy in order to rescue prisoners, hold a rear guard action to let friends escape, blast away in savage firefights to defend an important position, or fire missiles to disable a deadly orbital space station.


This toolkit expands the mechanisms of The Book of Struggles to add some detailed support for combat. It provides rules extensions for managing injuries and how they heal, the method by which a combat struggle can apply injuries to characters, and the mechanisms for medical intervention.

The toolkit also supplies a set of guides for handling different situations such as brawling, close combat and firefights. Additionally you are given sets of possible non injury complications that might arise commonly in those combat situations.

This toolkit builds on the All Us Gamers RPG core rules:

Core Books and Toolkits Integration

So what’s next?

Time to begin the journey into print with the first setting. The dungeon setting created for play testing the combat toolkit has become quite popular, despite being very raw, so that is going to get all the attention. Stay tuned for a kickstarter on this.

At the same time there are other toolkits to develop. The next most useful one is going to be the Stealth Toolkit, which will cover sneaking around, and trying to catch sneaks in the act.

Here is the backlog of projects for a more complete picture:

Toolkits

  • Stealth
  • Espionage
  • Chase and Race

Settings

  • Open Table Retro series – Dungeon, Wilderness, City, High Seas
  • Mists of the Carpathians
  • When the Plague Came
  • Shadow over the Galaxy
  • Timepaths