Tag: open table

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.

The Open Table Chassis

Having thrown together an old school style of play for running the Combat Toolkit play tests, and having 15 players regularly continuing with open table play, it seems like time to make the game structures for this type of open table into a product.

For those interested in some detailed philosophy of open table play I recommend the Open Table Manifesto.

Just as an aside, the Stealth and Investigation Toolkits are also being worked on. As with the Combat Toolkit they will be a mix of mechanics and ruling guides. We are using the Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition) RPG as a framework for play test, obviously with the AUG mechanics swapped in for the Basic Role Play mechanics.

The Open Table Chassis is a set of rules structures to allow groups of multiple players, with multiple characters to casually play with multiple game masters, potentially each with multiple home regions in a single game setting.

For this to work each play session has a single GM, using one of her home regions, and whoever is available to play, each using only one of their player characters. A fairly “board game like” rules structure is used to break an adventure down into a cycle of 3 parts.

Prep

The players have episodes in their home location where they do things covered by fairly mechanical rules: go shopping, do training, spend growth points to grow a skill, hire people to guard treasures or accompany the group on an adventure, socialize, build reputations, acquire companions and gain quests.

Adventure

The players go off to role play in a world slightly artificially structured into areas of increasing risk, and with treasures to be gained, hazards to be faced, and factions to be dealt with.

Wind Down

The players return home, gain growth points for the adventure based on treasure gained, risks and difficulties, and for quests completed based on commitment of time, risks overall and encounters braved.

In a given session of play there will be one or more complete adventure cycles. Any adventure in progress when a session runs out of time comes to an abrupt end and the wind down is flicked through.

The chassis comes with some simple book keeping, tracking which characters are the primary quest bearers for which home town, and what the character reputations are there, and tracking things that may be transferred between GM home regions, like magic items, pieces of technology, or global rank.

The first Chassis will have a baked in fantasy genre. Its treasures will be coins, gems, jewels and works of art. There will be some generic sorcery and mysticism rules (aimed at eventually being used for Mists of the Carpathians) and a collection of play structures for dungeon, wilderness, ocean and city adventuring.

A second Chassis under development will have a baked in space opera genre, with aliens, high and low tech worlds, space ships, interstellar corporations and nations and super tech artifacts left behind by “the ancients”. This will be used to lay some ground work for the Shadow Over The Galaxy setting.

Fun times!

Combat Toolkit Nears Completion

Having just a bit more crunch than the core rules the Combat Toolkit has needed a bit more testing and tuning than the earlier rule segments. Can’t wait to start writing the Stealth Toolkit.

To play test the Combat Toolkit I created a throw together, old school dungeon crawl system. Such adventure style is sure to pit the players into combat situations, and it kills two birds with one stone, as some of its novel mechanics are needed for Mists of the Carpathians.

However the dungeon adventures, as an open table, have been popular. There are now multiple player groups delving into the dungeon every week or so. So the next product to work on in earnest is going to be an open table dungeon crawl. This will probably be our first foray into print, rather than pdf only, so this is going to be exciting.