Official ICE Forums
Systems & Settings => Shadow World => Topic started by: Terry K. Amthor on April 14, 2014, 04:34:05 PM
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Here's a fun little poll. More to come...
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I wanted to select 4 but O'well.
MDC
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I wanted to select 4 but O'well.
MDC
LOL! Well, feel free to add in the comments; I wanted to keep the picks under control.
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I also like political action adventures but I also know they can be some of the toughest to write.
MDC
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I also like political action adventures but I also know they can be some of the toughest to write.
MDC
How exactly would you define 'political action adventure'?
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How exactly would you define 'political action adventure'?
Spy thriller.
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How exactly would you define 'political action adventure'?
Spy thriller.
Ah, so like in modern terms something by Tom Clancy, or the movie Executive Decision, or something similar where there are plot twists and you are not sure who is on who's side, and there is a sense of urgency because of some impending crisis?
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I would say yes sort of Tom Clancy like, with politics as well as military factors involved. on the other hand you can have political marriages and all of the crazy stuff that goes into that.
You could also do some Game of Thrones type stuff which can go in any which direction but that is very had to model for an adventure.
MDC
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I like something like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time or Dennis L. McKiernan's Iron Tower Trilogy. Dark and menacing forces with the balance being tipped by the Heroes.
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I also like the ideas that tbigness suggests.
MDC
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I like encounter sites that aren't underground ... castles, temple complexes, ruins, lost islands, dormant volcano, etc etc
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My focus is always on converting new players- Dungeon Crawl-esque with an informative highlighting of SW lore and locales. Gotta get players to want to play in SW!
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I have started several campaigns after converting characters in other games, from Traveler to ADnD, every time with players new to RM/SM.
Portals and magical cataclysms are great ways to get new PC's from other worlds/dimensions to SW. Getting trapped on the Ethereal Plane and forced to pick or put through a random gate, opening in SW.
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nothing is worse than illogical dungeon designs.
I always hated these twisting spiralling dungeous that (although they look quite neat) make no sense as to why someone would spend so many resources contructing them.
why build a long snaking tunnel with odd rooms sticking out here and there when I can just make a simple square cave and divide it with some walls?
On the positive note.
Political intruige as the bomb. anything that has coup de etat attampts, assissinations, PC's getting used by moth sides is a win.. especially when neither side is actually the good guys.
These leads the PC's down the long hard road of morally grey choices where it's not so simple being 'heroic'
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I have started several campaigns after converting characters in other games, from Traveler to ADnD, every time with players new to RM/SM.
Portals and magical cataclysms are great ways to get new PC's from other worlds/dimensions to SW. Getting trapped on the Ethereal Plane and forced to pick or put through a random gate, opening in SW.
This is exactly what I have done - and will do again soon. It also alleviates me from expecting the players to know the source material as I do for those that have characters from the world in which we are playing.
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On the positive note.
Political intruige as the bomb. anything that has coup de etat attampts, assissinations, PC's getting used by moth sides is a win.. especially when neither side is actually the good guys.
These leads the PC's down the long hard road of morally grey choices where it's not so simple being 'heroic'
Do you have any commercially available examples of that type of adventure? Except Norek; I have Norek.
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I like something like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time or Dennis L. McKiernan's Iron Tower Trilogy. Dark and menacing forces with the balance being tipped by the Heroes.
I these as well, though I don't know how they work with a gaming / adventure format, there is a lot of "must do this" and "have to get here" type stuff that is very hard to pull off in a game. I do love the epic aspect of them though, that is for sure, and the Good (PCs and their allies) vs. Evil (the bad-guys the PCs are fighting against).
Quote from: Turbs on Today at 12:24:57 AM
On the positive note.
Political intruige as the bomb. anything that has coup de etat attampts, assissinations, PC's getting used by moth sides is a win.. especially when neither side is actually the good guys.
These leads the PC's down the long hard road of morally grey choices where it's not so simple being 'heroic'
This kind of stuff doesn't interest me at all. I hate the morally grey stuff. But some aspects of these types of plots I do like, such as having layers of things going on behind the scenes that the players have to sift through to get the full story. Stuff that isn't the regular dungeon crawl, you know. (Not that a dungeon crawl can't be fun...)
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Nice!! I'd love to see more personal ambition and flesh given to characters in a reworked "Land of the Silver Mist" adventure. While running a campaign with the original material I felt tempted to bring some foreigners with their own agenda into the area. My party encountered that "other" band that came from south of Quellbourne and just so happened to travel ahead on the same path.
Ok, I got to vent this! I had all characters of the second group made up. They even had their own personal quarrels and history with one another. And what did my folks do when it became apparent they were about to face a strong enemy TOGETHER?
...they ambushed the other party and hacked them up except the two love birds that are too dumb to climb the common piece of rock.
Grrrrrr!!!!!
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I love tasks set in or around a good castle. There is great fun in completely wrecking the bad guys castle or palace, fighting along wall tops and swinging from balconies on slightly dodgy curtains.
In the last game session we played the GM described the above ground features of an ancient dwarven fortress. One player turned to the rest and said "I bet there is smoke coming from at least one of those windows before we leave here." and you could almost hear the characters loosening their swords in their scabards at the very thought of it.
Nothing better than a good old swashbuckle on the bad guys home turf.
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The poll is still open! Love your input as I wrap up Gryphonburgh and muddle through several new adventures for Eidolon (mostly they are intrigue/investigation/mystery--this is a large city with many political factions and social classes--with some adventure thrown in; others are more purely athletic. Also on the back burner but simmering are Emer II and Wuliris adventures. Of course with Wuliris we have hostile Elves, the remains of Zor, and at least 3 still partially functioning Taranian bases filled with ancient tech, cryo units... machines... and maybe other contemporaries who have already discovered them?
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Here is a throught for you Terry, nearly everyone who if most active on these boards are GMs. I have the impression though that although we all used to play almost weekly when we were younger or at college now we find it harder to find the time with work commitments, family life and the miriad of other things that put demands on our time. It also seems that we are all getting older, there are less young players and GMs coming through and none of us are elvish. The group I play in, in shadow world, meet a few weekends a year and then play all weekend probably cramming in 36hours of play. The quality of play first thing in the morning and after midnight is probably not what it could be and certainly not what it was when we were younger. This is a touching tail I know but it has a point. We have massively toned down the level of political intrigue type adventures we do because we cannot retrain the more subtle clues over the months between sessions nor can we spot the more subtle hands at work after midnight on the second day of play nor can we always make the connections between events that may happen relatively quickly for the characters but a long time apart for the players. I can, however, beat the doodoo out of a war troll at any time of day or night though.
We are working our way though the Curse of Kabis, we have I beleive, four parts now of the scaptre. That has taken five years of human time to get that far but we are on day 126 of the characters adventure. I know this because my character has kept a journal of everything they have done. I type it up after the session and share it with the GM and players as a memory jogger of what we did the previous session, rather like reading the minutes of a meeting, but also the GM corrects us if we have made a glaring mistake that the characters would not have made such as confusing two NPCs or blaming the wrong person.
If we are a representative sample of your audience keep us in mind when you are weaving your plots that at times we love to feel important mingling with the elite of Kulthea, visiting remote and mythical places and saving the world, but sometimes we just want to hit something really, really hard because we are not allowed to hit our bosses and/or employees (delete as applicable).
I know this does not apply to every GM and player and some of them are young and have razor sharp minds and thrive on political intrigue and subtly, to them I say 'just you wait'.
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Peter-- You have a very good point! (but please, do not point it at me! ;)). I remember Pete's last campaign (talk about political intrigues, spanning centuries!), where we could only meet every few months because of various factors. We spent the first few hours of each session just refreshing our memories as to what was going on.
So, be assured that I don't have anything too complex unless you want it to be... sometimes there is an adventure that is perfectly fine on the surface, and something else lurking underneath that may or may not be uncovered. The most complex 'main' crime is a murder mystery or two.
TKA
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Don't get me wrong, there was a time when I would get the greatest pleasure from spoiling evil plots with counter intrigues of beautiful elegance, it is just now I am more of a "kick in the door at midnight and putting my boot on your throat until you stop doing whatever it is you are doing" sorta guy.
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I always liked doing some Political stuff over the net. And the net stuff really kept the playing in-tune to what was going on during the weeks we were not together.
MDC
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I could imagine that working really well with the time to consider your every move and to mull over the 'evidence' and compose your responses.
I am about to start my very first pbp game with Warl as GM. I have never done it before. I must say I am looking forward to it. The great irony is that I have had no gaming since April but in October I start GMing my Forgotten Realms set game, I get to play hopefully both my Shadow World characters, a 20th level thief and a 15th level Illusionist, and Warls game is about to kick off. A bit of an embarassment of riches.