ADVENTURE!
The trill of adventure, my favorite genre.
So some good news in these dark months, after some rigorous spell checking and a lot of help reformatting from my beloved wife, the book in its digital form is now complete.
The lore, players section and the GM’s section is finished with full art and everything bar the page numbers and the design elements necessary for print such as the bleed areas.
This has been a year of hard, but extremely enjoyable work, learning the hard way how to lay out a game’s document as well as the finer points of graphic design and formatting for a book. I could not have gotten this far however without my friends, family, and of course you reading this newsletter. Knowing there are people out there that believe in this project has been a real boon to me in times when everything felt like it wasn’t worth continuing.
So if you are reading this, I want to say a big thank you.
I have achieved a tentative agreement with a TTRPG publisher who will handle the printing and distribution, I just have to run a successful kickstarter.
As for the kickstarter itself, I’m thinking mid spring, around easter time would be a good time to kick it all off. Trust me I'm not going to shut up about it once it's up so you will know.
Something I would be interested to know is what sort of things you would like to see as stretch goals and additional add ons?
Things like custom dice, decks of cards and little knick knacks are off the table, but what I am thinking of is of course the special edition cover, an art only pdf, a custom made soundtrack, and a pad of character sheets.
If there is something you would like to see then please sound off in the comments and let me know
So, with the news out of the way, let's talk about adventure.
So my favorite genre of fiction is adventure, it's a famously nebulous genre that can slot into lots of other genres and styles, but the ones I’m thinking of is the classic adventure.
So for a more solid example I’m talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, The Mummy and Jurassic Park.
All of these stories have a few commonalities that flow through them that are super important to making a story and adventure story.
So firstly you have a character or characters who WANT to be on the adventure, they want to plunge into the mystery and find what they are after, be it a treasure or an answer. This is especially important in tabletop game stories, as your players don’t have the need to refuse the call of adventure (unless they really want to annoy their GM). Your characters need the gold, or to get the treasure to save the town, or get revenge on those who wronged them.
The second is you front load the story with a sense of mystery, what is Jurassic park? Where is Hamunaptra? What happened to Dr Jones sr?
this sense of mystery and the promise of a fantastic place to explore that is so very tangible. This also helps with the sense of enthuseasum of the characters to go on the adventure and go to this mysterious place filled with danger and treasure.
Thirdly you need some really memorable action, but more importantly action that uses the texture of the environment. You have a sword fight in a sinking ship, a shootout in the middle of a blizzard, a fist fight on the back of a wagon. Rather than an empty room or platform brawl now so prevalent with disney's action tv shows. The characters don't just need to defeat the antagonists, they have to figure out and overcome the dangers and challenges of the environment. This makes the adventure feel like it takes place in a real environment rather than a chessboard.
And lastly you have just a bit of horror, the dinosaurs, the melting nazis, the hordes of skeleton pirates are lurking in the shadows. A fair amount of adventure stories fall into the super niche sub genre of Magical Realism, a genre of fiction where there are strange and fantastical elements in the story, but the strangeness of the word is not commented upon by the characters. No character states “no, this can't be real, ghosts and demons don't exist…” rather that the supernatural is an un remarked upon part of the world.
If you want to up the ante and have a story with greater stakes for the characters, a very easy way to do so is to get horrific and throw in the blood and chains and mountains of skulls. You don't have time for doubting characters to say “this makes no logical sense!” Because a demon has already burst out of the stable boy and is trying to hack you to pieces.
And then of course on this framework you can have all sorts of other elements that can fit in surprisingly well; mystery, romance, thriller, drama, they can all fit within this framework and not feel like it's coming out of left field.
So yeah, that's why I love adventure as a genre, and why so much of it is in the game. Sound off about your own experiences with this sort of thing in tabletop games or your own diet of art and media.