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Bored of Lands

While the movie Borderlands might have been a blight on the concept of civilization, the games are awesome. I’ve already kind of created my version of a Borderlands adventure, but what about something closer to the actual game and its actual plot? It’s relic-hunting in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. In this case, it’s getting a key and a map, setting you up for the further adventure

Story

What brought the team together. Who cares? The team is together and they are looking to get rich. On this POS planet, that means finding The Bunker—a warehouse of riches and armoury of the highest of tech weapons. This planet was the sight of a war, the scars of it are everywhere. It’s just that it happened before people came here, and the civilizations that were part of the conflict were also consumed by it. Is the legend real? Let’s hope, because that’s your chance to make it out of indentured servitude to BAC Corporation.

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Spilling the Tea

Smuggling has a long history, and a lot of it is not exactly what you would expect. While now smuggling might make you think of drugs or people, smuggling has generally been a means to avoid taxation rather than a prohibition—though Canadian breweries and distilleries made a mint through smuggling during the US Prohibition-era, when alcohol was banned. Did the tea smugglers or the salt smugglers of the day face a criminal underworld like those that inhabit the drug smuggling world of today? Almost certainly. These were not cooking enthusiasts who just wanted to get ingredients to their favourite chefs! Smugglers did undertake some jobs we might think of as humanitarian—and some probably still do—but they were in it for the money, and not looking to better humanity.

But that would make a boring story.

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Stray

I’ve been away, but now I’m back. More one-pagers on deck. This time, it’s a bit of a murder mystery. I usually do something like mystery box stories for my campaigns—there’s a question the PCs need to resolve, and it generally has many layers and red herrings. That’s not something you can really do in a one-pager as it tends to be too complex. It’s also very different from a murder mystery. In a murder mystery, you generally know the answer and work back from there to find out what kind of clues might be left. In a mystery box game, there often isn’t a single answer and the clues themselves are often doorways to greater mysteries. A lot of times, events or items in my games that aren’t intended to be mysteries become mysteries because of how the PCs interact with them, creating greater complexity—I’m also a fan of improv game mastering. Rather than increasing complexity, as the story moves forward in a murder mystery, complexity is reduced—the number of possible answers reduces to one.

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Radio, Radio

The intent is for this to be set in the modern or near modern period. With the focus on a pirate radio station, it wouldn’t make much sense to have it set before the 1960s. Radio will probably continue to have a role in culture and communications for the next few decades, but already many are turning to online sources for the same purposes as my generation engaged with radio. In a cyberpunk setting, this might be a specialized streaming service. With corporations having so much power, misusing corporate IP and possibly siphoning off even the tiniest modicum of their profits, would likely not end well. The geographic setting of neither the city nor the origin of the radio pirates is specified. This is on purpose and hopefully will allow you to better implement the story for maximum impact with your players and maximum integration into your game. As will become evident, a diaspora is a key part of the story. Not providing specificity is not to imply that every geopolitical crisis that displaces populations is interchangeable, or that the populations themselves are interchangeable, just that many of the strategic factors are similar.

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Ditch the Witch

No one’s entirely good and no one’s entirely bad, and sometimes, bad people do good things. Usually, we’re all just normal people with failings who make mistakes. Sometimes we talk about redemption—but what are we redeeming? Most religions accept that people won’t be able to live up the tenets.

And it’s just fun sometimes to subvert expectations. The hero isn’t an anti-hero, just a person who made a mistake. This isn’t redemption, they’re not a bad person trying to atone, they’re just a person who can’t ignore suffering when they have the means to alleviate it.

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All Clear, All Broken

This adventure is designed for a cyberpunk or near-future dystopia kind of setting, but could certainly be adapted to almost any genre with a bit of work. Instead of an arcology, maybe it’s a village the local lord has abandoned. Maybe it’s a neighbourhood in a city in an ungoverned space.

The basic premise is one that has been seen throughout history—when the authorities decide not to resource civil order in an area, someone ultimately arises to impose it. Those that arise as alternative providers of civil order are either criminal organization or they evolve into one. It then becomes really difficult of state authorities to then reassert power over the area, if they ever try. The areas have often become heavily criminalized with extreme sanctions for those cooperating with the authorities.

The adventure works best if the region is one the PCs know well through previous interaction. It might be the location of a safehouse, or perhaps an informant or other ally that has helped the PCs previously. A situation like this might end up feeling like a status quo the PCs do not consider shifting or that the PCs do not need to address. I mean injustice and oppression is everywhere, right?

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The Nuclear Option

As you maybe have noticed (or maybe not), I was recently thinking about Aliens. It remains one of my favourite movies, and another recent viewing has done nothing to shake my admiration and adoration. So one might expect that a one-pager based on Aliens would be a bug hunt—tragic or otherwise—similar to the situation on LV-426. The thing, is, I’ve already kind of done that in the Ideas and Hooks section in Starship Commandos. But I do like the idea of space marines (I mean . . . Starship Commandos), so I definitely want to do a seed based on that concept.

Instead of xenomorphs, this story is about the marines taking control of a vessel possibly smuggling nuclear weapons. The Marines can be part of any geopolitical structure that will fit in your campaign. For my campaign, I made them part of the United Systems Interstellar Command (USIC), leaving the exact nature of the United Systems undefined so that it could be expanded later if necessary with input from the players

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New Cyber Wave

While I’ve already done a one-pager inspired by Cyberpunk 2077, given it’s return as an Edge of Inspiration, I figured I’d go back to the well—especially since a band/musician is so integral to the story. Following one plot thread, the player can end up in a bunch of music industry flavoured nonsense.

Story

The PCs are all linked to an up-and-coming band called ‘HandMark.’ What started as a bunch of teens goofing off looks like it might break wide open. The band has a growing social media presence. They’re making money both with real live gigs and virtual ones. And now they have a collection of songs they think will put them over the top. One magical night they put it all together. Working through the night, they record the perfect session. They are ecstatic. They collapse in the studio, exhausted. But in the morning, all the recordings are gone. The studio staff had left just before the band had flaked out and claim to know nothing. There’s no hope of recreating that magic. The band needs those recordings.

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Who Doesn’t Love A Library?

This one is more of a one-page component of an adventure than the adventure itself. This is an answer to the issue of PCs finding information. Sometimes, it’s just as easy to hand it over—have one of the PCs with the proper build know the information. Sometimes, it can be fun to breakdown how and where they get that information. For me, when it comes to ancient or otherwise forgotten knowledge, I force them to do what I did for so much of my time in university: do a little research!

Story

In search of forgotten or obscure knowledge, the PCs seek out an archive that they know to have ancient sources—tomes and scrolls and maybe cuneiform tablets. The knowledge of which archive to visit and where that archive can be found might be it’s own little adventure following a similar path.

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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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