No spoilers here.
Last night, I had the opportunity to run a pickup game of LotFP for some lovely folks on G+. I had been itching for a chance to run +Jason Sholtis's little micro-module, Zogorion: Lord of the Hippogriffs, and decided this was the perfect chance.
The Good: Brevity! This micro-module can be read in about 15-20 minutes. That's really all the prep you need, unless you want to add some more customized hooks, or reskin something.
Jason injected just enough character and personality into Zog, the main NPC, to make him a fantastically interesting character, but left a lot of the little details up to the Referee to nit pick or hand wave.
This is in no way a railroady module. You can lay the hook(s) and see how the players take them. The location described is openly laid out in the module so that a Referee can allow the players to approach the challenge however they wish. Within there are even several major items that could be drawing factors or goals for PCs besides the obvious interactions with Zog.
The Bad: I honestly can't say much about it that isn't good. Maybe the fact that he hasn't written another like this yet?
I suppose there are a few little details left out regarding Zog's lair. They are easily filled in by a good Referee, of course, so it's not a real problem. I can't lay out the details here without spoilers, so I'll leave it at that.
The Ugly: Nothing. Seriously, I can't find anything that I just scoffed at. This was easy to read, easy to tweak and tailor, and a blast to run.
Where can you acquire such a delightful module, you ask? Why at Jason's blog, of course: http://roll1d12.blogspot.com/
Showing posts with label adventure design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adventure design. Show all posts
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Locations: Maurice's Shop
The following is a small shop to be featured in my Savage Worlds steampunk-fantasy game. One of the PCs has worked in this shop for the last seven or eight years, so I think we'll be visiting it from time to time in search of gadgets, knowledge, etc.
Feel free to drop this into your world or cannibalize it. If I had any artistic and cartographic skill at all, I'd have mapped out the shop. Maybe I'll sketch it out later and share that or get someone to redo it to look purdy.
Enjoy--
Maurice’s Shop
Small for a two story shop, Maurice’s has little need for floorspace to display products. At the front, the window opens so that a counter can be raised under an awning, as a display and demonstration space for products. Maurice can be found showing his gadgets--guns, watches, machines to chop wood, to boil water without an open flame--most of every day. Once the sun sets, though, he retreats the the back room, to tinker.
A man in his late fifties, Maurice always has an apprentice or assistant--usually a young person from a family of modest means who shows intellectual and creative potential. The assistant cleans the shop, fixes broken gadgets, and keeps the books (under close watch.) Loving the companionship, Maurice pays his apprentices well and offers room and board in the loft upstairs. Maurice himself lives in a small flat just down the street.
Having studied at the finest university in the capital, Maurice returned home and worked as a researcher in the library, writing and sharing knowledge freely on the physics and science of the world around him. He quickly found that his passion truly lay in creating devices that would help people accomplish mundane tasks more quickly, and decided to open a shop for just such things.
The shop itself was Maurice’s inheritance, some forty years ago, and is all that remains of his family’s legacy. In his father’s time, Maurice’s shop was a place for buying and selling of gemstones, precious metals, and other such mined goods. The good fortune that this business brought to the family allows Maurice to spend all his time inventing and not worrying about making sales. (Incidentally, everything Maurice builds sells wildly.)
Potential Events
Feel free to drop this into your world or cannibalize it. If I had any artistic and cartographic skill at all, I'd have mapped out the shop. Maybe I'll sketch it out later and share that or get someone to redo it to look purdy.
Enjoy--
Maurice’s Shop
Small for a two story shop, Maurice’s has little need for floorspace to display products. At the front, the window opens so that a counter can be raised under an awning, as a display and demonstration space for products. Maurice can be found showing his gadgets--guns, watches, machines to chop wood, to boil water without an open flame--most of every day. Once the sun sets, though, he retreats the the back room, to tinker.
A man in his late fifties, Maurice always has an apprentice or assistant--usually a young person from a family of modest means who shows intellectual and creative potential. The assistant cleans the shop, fixes broken gadgets, and keeps the books (under close watch.) Loving the companionship, Maurice pays his apprentices well and offers room and board in the loft upstairs. Maurice himself lives in a small flat just down the street.
Having studied at the finest university in the capital, Maurice returned home and worked as a researcher in the library, writing and sharing knowledge freely on the physics and science of the world around him. He quickly found that his passion truly lay in creating devices that would help people accomplish mundane tasks more quickly, and decided to open a shop for just such things.
The shop itself was Maurice’s inheritance, some forty years ago, and is all that remains of his family’s legacy. In his father’s time, Maurice’s shop was a place for buying and selling of gemstones, precious metals, and other such mined goods. The good fortune that this business brought to the family allows Maurice to spend all his time inventing and not worrying about making sales. (Incidentally, everything Maurice builds sells wildly.)
Potential Events
- Explosion! The PCs are walking near the shop, or are making purchases, or working in the shop, when an explosion shakes the building just after twilight. Investigation shows that it was not negligence on the part of Maurice but rather someone has stolen a key component (a stabilizer, a gyropter, a magneton, etc) and run off with it. Maurice can pay well in gold or items for its return.
- Maurice’s shop is a great place to put a MacGuffin. Make it either the key item needed for a quest or the item that begins a major quest. Maurice could have invented any mechanical or steampunk device--even if he didn’t know it worked in the way needed for your mission.
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