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Month: November 2024

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Things of Power

The Rings of Power introduced something that had been part of a Middle-Earth campaign I ran back in high school based on information from The Lord of the Rings’ appendices and The Silmarillion—there were five Istari, and the two Blue Istari disappeared into Rhun. I can’t remember much more than that, but in that campaign, the two Blue Istari returned, one taking Dol Guldor in Mirkwood and the other re-claiming Minas Morgul in Mordor at a time when the Reunited Kingdom was eating itself alive due to dynastic politics. So, this adventure is going to mimic that first adventure way back before even the first Lord of the Rings movies, when all we had was Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and Rankin Bass’ Return of the King.

I’m thinking that the dying empire and the necromancer who is at the heart of this one-pager have a long history. In my thinking, the empire is the second rising of an ancient polity, and it had gained dominance after battling with an upstart kingdom led by a powerful enemy known as The Necromancer. Well, the emperors called them a necromancer, but they were more of a sorcerer. The emperor brought together a coalition of powerful nations under its leadership, defeated the sorcerer’s kingdom, and then forced itself on the coalition as a kind of overlord. That was two hundred years ago. The empire is falling apart as this story begins.

This is kind of a mystery, and much of it is finding more clues to the identity of The Necromancer at the centre of it. As the one-pager is intended for inspiration and outline rather than details, anyone running this scenario would probably add more clues than are mentioned.

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Losing Sanctuary

In most adventures that I’ve written, the PCs are able to gain a direct victory—overpowering the opposition through physical, mental, or social means—but it’s always interesting to change it up and present them with a problem that the direct approach can’t solve. That’s what it’s like when you are the smartest or the strongest in the room. That led me to think about a situation ’s what it’s like for a real underdog. In our world—and, to be honest, historically—that’s been the fate of displaced persons. This isn’t the first time the subject informed my RPG writing.  I had plans to write on the fate of a particularly famous group of likely displaced people during the Late Bronze Age collapse—Sagas of the Sea Peoples got recycled as the Sword’s Edge adventure Poles of Power. This one-pager is still a kind of a power fantasy—it’s a lot cleaner and removed from real suffering than most refugee situations—but it presents a situation the PCs can’t punch their way out of.

Story

The PCs control Sanctuary—this could be a tavern and inn, it could be a quarter of a city, or it might even be a city or town itself—that sits between two opposing powers. It is the only safety for the refugees from the war. The PCs can’t openly use violence as the opposing armies have escalation dominance—they can bring far more force to bear on Sanctuary than the PCs can even hope to oppose. As the war is coming to a close, both armies seek battlefield victories to improve their positions and the polity’s negotiation position. The PCs need to protect Sanctuary and the refugees finding shelter until peace or at least stability arrives.

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In Between Days

This one-pager is inspired by Mr. Inbetween, and that series has so many different jobs and scenarios that it’s tough to pick just one to act as inspiration for an adventure. However, there were many more interpersonal scenarios—especial in the personal parts of the main character’s life—than there were action scenes. If one is going to take inspiration from Mr. Inbetween, it is low-level criminality interlaced with understandable personal problems. This is difficult to replicate in most RPGs unless the adventure is part of a longer campaign in which the PC or PCs have invested in their character’s personal lives—likely including a partner and children. Lacking that, the scenarios from Mr. Inbetween are similar to many other criminal intellectual properties. I’ll take a stab at one leaving it to you—the person using it for inspiration—to figure out how to stick the landing.

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Falling From the 76

This has been a difficult one-pager to formulate as Fallout 76 lacks the very robust narratives that existed in the previous entries in the Fallout series. In the end, a key theme of all the Fallout games is building on top of the collapse—not just surviving but thriving. So, in this game, the PCs are going to do the same—reclaim the wasteland.

I am not blind to the use of this kind of narrative in the history of colonialism, but since this a game, we can set the parameters, and in our story, the wasteland is not a fiction but truly a place abandoned. But that pretty much necessarily means its dangerous, and that’s where the PCs come in.

Props to The Starlost for some key inspiration on this one.

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House of the Eternal Road

I explained one-pagers briefly in my last one-pager post, and there is a kind of rough explanation in an older post at Sword’s Edge. A one-pager is a very basic adventure outline that is a useful reference for improvisational game management.

This one-pager is based on the movie Road House, which I reviewed at Sword’s Edge—although it’s also very Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven. It lacks any mechanics and so is system agnostic. Although I envision it as post-apocalyptic, it’d totally work for fantasy as well. Other genres might take some shoe-horning.

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