Tag Archive for: Earth-Prime

Whatever Happened to the Next-Gen?

Whatever Happened to the Next-Gen?

Available now!

Hello heroes! I’m so excited to unveil our first Mutants & Masterminds release of 2024, an Astonishing Adventure titled Whatever Happened to the Next-Gen. We wanted to start off the new year with something that speaks to Earth-Prime’s extensive history and to finally answer a couple of questions about what the 2e Next-Gen have been up to as time has moved on. This adventure catches up with a ton of fan favorites: Sonic, Nereid, and the Alterniteens, and gives players a chance to bridge the gap between their Claremont Academy PCs and the alumni.

It also features the nefarious machinations of Dr. Sin, the villainous organization he has built, and the intense rivalry between him and Duncan Summers. I love how many classic elements of Earth-Prime’s history collide in this story. There is a classic hero versus ninja in a tea shop fight that feels like it’s pulled right out of the vigilante handbook—more on that soon. The Amalgam even gets to make an appearance, which never happens! It is a PL 8 adventure, intended for characters who attend the Claremont Academy, but can certainly be adapted to other street-level or teen heroes easily enough.

One of the things I’m most excited about however, is that this is the debut publication for a new writer to Mutants & Masterminds, Aaron Einhorn. I am always grateful for the chance to bring new writers into the Earth-Prime fold and I can’t wait to see what else he does going forward. You can pick up Whatever Happened to the Next-Gen at Roll20, Drivethrurpg, or our webstore today!

Terror From The Skies!

Terror From The Skies - A brand new Astonishing Adventure for Mutants & Masterminds!

Available Now!

It’s anything but smooth sailing when a powerful storm strands an Atlantean diplomat on the surface world. With negotiations breaking down and a missing princess, it’s up to our heroes to find the source of this mysterious maelstrom and stop the Terror From the Skies! This is a Freedom City-based adventure for a team of 4-6 heroes of PL 10, with an emphasis on high-flying action, tense diplomacy, and escalating environmental hazards.

Freedom City has endured many catastrophes over the years. So,when reports of a sudden freak storm approaching the city come in, the hardy Freedonians barely pay it any notice. But even the home of heroism must occasionally bend to the whims of Mother Nature, and as the storm rages, it utterly devastates the city. The storm swiftly grounds all conventional air traffic and pushes emergency responders beyond their limit!

Astonishing Adventures brings you exciting, ready-to-run scenarios for Mutants & Masterminds, Third Edition, complete with all the action and villains you need to bring the story to life!

 

Terror From the Skies! is available now in the Green Ronin Online Store, DrivethruRPG, and on Roll20!

And be sure to check out our other Mutants & Masterminds print and PDF products, on sale now for 20% off

Interview with author Aaron Rosenberg

Earlier this week we shared the interview with Richard Lee Byers who wrote part one of the Arcane Secrets Duology, and now we’re back with Aaron Rosenberg, author of part two, Lost and Never Found!

Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza: The Arcane Secrets Duology

Lost and Never Found: From arcane talismans scattered across the country to lost heroes scattered across the multiverse, Thomas Rhymer and his erstwhile allies have their work cut out for them if they are to stop the magical menace threatening Earth-Prime. This unlikely alliance of heroes must travel through magical doors into strange worlds, unlike anything they’ve experienced before, and make it back in time to save their own.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your work prior to this novel.

Hm, okay, the short version, then. Born in New Jersey, raised in New Orleans, educated in Kansas, long-time resident of New York City. Worked as a college professor, an animation studio director, a graphic designer, a book layout artist, and a website manager. Began writing as a kid, started professionally during college in RPGs, wrote 70-some-odd books and supplements there, segued into RPG fiction, then tie-in fiction in general, then original fiction. I mostly do novels and short stories these days, and I write everything from SF comedy to epic fantasy to superheroes to action-adventure to mystery to thrillers. Lost & Never Found is on track to be my 50th published novel, which will also be my 260th publication overall.

 

Lost & Never Found is the second book, following on the events of The Doom That Came to San Francisco. Was it a challenge picking up from where that novel ended? How much did you collaborate with Richard Lee Byers on where your book started and where it was going?

Actually, it was surprisingly easy. Richard and I have known each other for years, though this is our first chance to work together, and we had a long conversation beforehand about what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go with both books and how to dovetail them together. We read each other’s outlines, so we both knew exactly where his book ended and mine began, and I read his draft before starting mine to make sure I was also consistent on the characterizations.

 

Your novel explores the Dimension of Doors, first introduced in the Mutants & Masterminds sourcebook Book of Magic. How much did you need to develop details about the dimension and how did you decide to use it as a storytelling device?

Since Richard had set things in motion with Gatekeeper, it made sense to continue his involvement, and that gave me the perfect opportunity to really play with the Dimension of Doors. I had the basic description, of course, but it was so open I had a lot of space to maneuver, and of course you can go anywhere with it , which just gives you endless possibilities. That was really at the crux of this book, too, flinging these heroes to strange new worlds—it’s a classic comic book trope, and I had a lot of fun playing that up. Plus it gives that great dichotomy between the group still in our world and the others in these new worlds and then the few in the Dimension itself.

 

While your novel works with characters from the previous book, you also get to introduce new characters, who don’t appear in Doom. Did you choose which ones from the Earth-Prime setting you wanted to use and why those particular characters?

We discussed it beforehand, which characters Richard wanted to use and which I wanted, and the good thing is, there was a lot of overlap! But yeah, his focusing on certain members of the Sentinels meant I got to continue using them but was also able to bring in their remaining teammates. Also, I really wanted to write the Shadow Knights, Richard basically used them in his specifically so I’d get to have them available for mine. They’re just too cool for words! Rhymer is also such an interesting character, and I hope my take on him is new and exciting.

 

The arcane and magical themes in the duology make it somewhat different from the usual four-color superhero fare. Your book, in particular, shows this contrast between the shadowy arcane world and the, let’s say simpler, world that superheroes live in. Which side do you think has a harder time of it in Lost & Never Found?

Oh, the superheroes, easily. Arcane types tend to be “in the know” as far as how the world really works, the forces underlying our own, etc. Superheroes tend to be more surface-oriented, particularly in a four-color setting—they deal with immediate problems but are often clueless about the shadows pulling everyone’s strings, the cosmic-scale objectives and conflicts, things like that. And that’s especially true because folks like Rhymer seem to delight in being vague and confusing in their explanations! There’s a lot of “mere mortals were never meant to know” when you’re dealing with arcane types, so the heroes are at a real disadvantage. An arcane character is far more likely to adjust quickly to a completely new world than a superhero, if only because the arcane know about other worlds and have probably studied them, even if they’ve never been to one themselves.

Of course, on the flip side, it’s a lot more common for arcane types to get paralyzed by indecision, weighing all the possible outcomes and all the ramifications. Superheroes tend to be a lot more immediate, a lot more direct, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need.

Author Aaron RosenbergAaron Rosenberg is the author of the best-selling DuckBob SF comedy series, the Relicant Chronicles epic fantasy series, the Areyat Islands fantasy pirate mystery series, the Dread Remora space-opera series, and, with David Niall Wilson, the O.C.L.T. occult thriller series. His tie-in work contains novels for Star Trek, Warhammer, World of WarCraft, Stargate: Atlantis, Shadowrun, Mutants & Masterminds, and Eureka and short stories for The X-Files, World of Darkness, Crusader Kings II, Deadlands, Master of Orion, and Europa Universalis IV. He has written children’s books (including the award-winning Bandslam: The Junior Novel and the #1 best-selling 42: The Jackie Robinson Story), educational books, and roleplaying games (including the Origins Award-winning Gamemastering Secrets). Aaron lives in New York. You can follow him online at gryphonrose.com, at facebook.com/gryphonrose, and on Twitter @gryphonrose.


You can back the Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza RIGHT NOW over on Kickstarter!Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza

Interview with author Richard Lee Byers

As you may already know, our current Kickstarter campaign for the Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza, also features two brand-new novels set in the world of Earth-Prime. Recently we had a chance to catch up with Richard Lee Byers, author of the first book in the Arcane Secrets Duology, The Doom That Came To San Francisco!

Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza: The Arcane Secrets Duology

The Doom That Came to San Francisco, by Richard Lee Byers: In three alternate worlds, three arch-villains are about to meet their final dooms. Before the final strikes fall, they are snatched away and drawn into a conspiracy to conquer Earth-Prime. Quickly overcoming Gatekeeper, the guardian of the nexus between worlds, they begin a full-out offensive in San Francisco. Arcane hero Thomas Rhymer, drawn to the battle by his dark premonitions, must quickly gather allies to defend the city and Earth-Prime!

 

Tell us a bit about yourself and your work prior to this novel.

I’m a fantasy and horror writer who’s done well over fifty novels, dozens of pieces of short fiction, scripted a graphic novel, and has a screenplay under option and in preproduction. The majority of my novels connect to RPG worlds although I’ve also worked in settings that are all my own. I may be best known for my Forgotten Realms fiction. Most recently, I’ve written a Marvel Legends of Asgard trilogy for Aconyte Books and a novel set in the new fantasy world Archvillain Games is developing.

 

The Earth-Prime setting is richly developed, with hundreds of characters and twenty years of lore and development; was it intimidating stepping into a setting like that? How did you navigate it?

I didn’t find it intimidating because I have so much experience working in other richly developed settings. Also, I had visited this world before/ I wrote some short fiction for it.

I had the further advantage of knowing my book would focus on the supernatural. So I didn’t have to immerse myself in outer-space stuff, for example. I just needed some basic familiarity. I also knew that at the time I was writing it, Green Ronin had a big supernatural multi-part adventure in development, so to avoid continuity glitches, I didn’t use characters who were going to be involved in that. I went with a number of the others. I knew Thomas Rhymer and liked him from using him in one of my short stories, so I chose him to be my primary protagonist.

Finally, there are a number of characters on Earth-Prime who (I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets here) are to some degree inspired by classic characters from DC and Marvel. If you’re a lifelong comics fan like I am, that helps you get a handle on them.

 

How much of the concept for The Doom That Came to San Francisco came before you delved into Earth-Prime setting lore and how much of it developed out of it?

That’s a tricky question to answer because, as I mentioned, I’d written Earth-Prime short fiction before taking on the novel. So the premise came to me pretty quickly, and then I tinkered with it until it was a good fit for the characters I intended to use.

 

Why San Francisco? With the various fictional cities like Freedom City and Emerald City on Earth-Prime, why is Doom set in an analogue of a real-world city?

San Francisco is Gatekeeper’s home base, and he was the perfect character to play an important role in the novel. So that’s where I set it. San Francisco also has the advantage of being quite an interesting city, and I did my best to showcase some of what’s interesting about it. As readers will discover, though, the story does visit one of Earth-Prime’s cool fictional cities as events unfold.

 

Did you find the game-system details about characters’ various abilities inspirational, limiting, or some of both?

To be honest, it was information, often interesting, never limiting as far as I recall. I find that when I write fiction set in an RPG world, I don’t have to absorb every detail of the game mechanics. In the case of superheroes and supervillains, I just need the concept of the ability being represented and who’s mightier than who. If I’ve got that much, I’m good to go.

Author Richard Lee ByersRichard Lee Byers is the author of well over fifty horror and fantasy books including the Marvel Legends of Asgard novels The Head of Mimir, The Rebels of Vanaheim (a Scribe Award finalist), and The Prisoner of Tartarus. He is perhaps best known for his Forgotten Realms books. He’s also written scores of short stories, scripted a graphic novel, and contributed content to tabletop and electronic games. A screenplay he wrote based on his prose work has been optioned and is now in preproduction. Richard is a frequent guest at GenCon in Indianapolis and Necronomicon in Tampa. He invites everyone to Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

 


You can back the Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza RIGHT NOW over on Kickstarter!
Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza

Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza!

The Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza is now funding on Kickstarter!

You can help us get long-demanded M&M 3E books back in print and pick up two brand new Earth-Prime novels while you’re at it!

Mutants & Masterminds fans, it’s time to get many of our Third Edition titles back in print and to do that we need heroes like you. We know you’d love to get print copies of books like Power Profiles and Gadget Guides, and we want to put them in your hands. We’ve also just run out of the fifth printing of the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook and with any RPG, you’ve got to keep your core rulebook in print.

Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza

So, here’s the plan. The initial offerings of the Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza are the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, Gadget Guides, and Power Profiles, and our basic funding goal is $30,000. As we unlock stretch goals beyond that, we will add more books to the campaign, and you can get them as add-ons to your pledge. The Cosmic Handbook, for example, becomes available as an add-on at $42,000. It’s that simple!

Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza

Still not sure? Check out these Ronin Round Table articles by Steve Kenson:

Back the Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza today!

New Earth-Prime Fiction!Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza: The Arcane Secrets Duology

Two new Mutants & Masterminds novels are available in several reward tiers and as add-ons:

  • The Doom That Came to San Francisco, by Richard Lee Byers: In three alternate worlds, three arch-villains are about to meet their final dooms. Before the final strikes fall, they are snatched away and drawn into a conspiracy to conquer Earth-Prime. Quickly overcoming Gatekeeper, the guardian of the nexus between worlds, they begin a full-out offensive in San Francisco. Arcane hero Thomas Rhymer, drawn to the battle by his dark premonitions, must quickly gather allies to defend the city and Earth-Prime!
  • Lost and Never Found, by Aaron Rosenberg: From arcane talismans scattered across the country to lost heroes scattered across the multiverse, Thomas Rhymer and his erstwhile allies have their work cut out for them if they are to stop the magical menace threatening Earth-Prime. This unlikely alliance of heroes must travel through magical doors into strange worlds, unlike anything they’ve experienced before, and make it back in time to save their own.

You’ll find even more information on the Reprint Extravaganza Kickstarter page.

Gadget Guides: The Right Tool for the Job

Mutants & Masterminds Gadget GuidesYou can tell that Power Profiles was written and produced serially, because we included “Armor Powers” pretty early on: powered armor is a common type of super-power in the comics, and it starts with “A” so it was right up-front on the list of power themes. However, it quickly became apparent that if we were going to do additional power profiles on all of the various power effects involving devices and equipment that the series (and the final book) was going to be almost twice as long!

So we decided early on to set aside all of the other power themes involving devices and equipment, other than things like “Tech Powers” and things that were innate super-powers interacting with technology or the like. That list was expanded upon with other themes specific to equipment, building an outline for a new series of serially-released PDFs we called Gadget Guides.

Gadget Guides is “Power Profiles, but for equipment” so it’s no surprise that it, too, quickly sold through its print run, with copies of the out-of-print book going for sky-high prices on resale sites. Even more than Power Profiles, Gadget Guides spans styles, genres, and power levels, with chapters ranging from Archaic Weapons and Steamtech (19th century steampunk) to Alien Technology, Cybertech, and Mecha! Robots get into the act as well; we ended up writing stats and a background for the giant robot on the cover, in fact. (It’s a Terminus probot.) It’s not even all technology: Gadget Guides includes chapters on magic items and magical rituals and on psychic technology and devices.

That makes Gadget Guides a kind of “stealth” genre book for Mutants & Masterminds as well. If you want to use M&M to run adventures or campaigns for cyberpunk, far-future science fiction, the steampunk 19th century, modern super-spies, battling giant mecha, super-vehicles, or an archaic setting with magic and psychic powers, the book has all kinds of tools to help you do any or all of that. That’s in addition to its usefulness for a general superheroic setting, which has to account for all of those various sub-genres and more. Gadget Guides pairs well with the newer Time Traveler’s Codex as well as Power Profiles, covering the technology available in different time periods and settings characters might visit (or come from).

Just like Power Profiles, Gadget Guides is a catalog of inspiration when it comes to particular character types. Just flip through its pages and you’ll have all kinds of ideas for heroes and villains using particular types of technology. It’s also a handy resource for inventors (covered in Appendix I of the book, by the way) and gadgeteers: Rather than having to build-out different devices on-the-fly at the game table, you can just reference the catalog of devices already built in Gadget Guides to see if they fit your character’s point “budget”!

In short, Gadget Guides does for equipment what Power Profiles did for innate powers, and then some, giving you a complete “toybox” for arming and equipping your Mutants & Masterminds characters.


You can back the Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza RIGHT NOW over on Kickstarter!

Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza!

Power Profiles: Giving You the Power

Mutants & Masterminds Power ProfilesUsed copies of Power Profiles have been selling for hundreds of dollars on auction sites. On the one hand, that’s flattering; it’s nice to have a book you wrote be in that kind of demand. On the other hand, it’s frustrating, because Power Profiles was meant to be the kind of useful resource every Mutants & Masterminds group would want to have, and obviously that’s true … if only we had it to sell to them.

Power Profiles developed as a twofold idea. First, a regular series of short-subject PDFs we could develop and release electronically, then collect into a book when we had enough of them, if they proved popular. Second, we discovered that one of the things gamers liked about the DC Adventures Heroes & Villains volumes were the huge number of worked examples of powers in Mutants & Masterminds. Players could say, “I want to play a character like X” from the DC Universe, and just look in the books for that character to see how they were put together. Since we knew the DC Adventures license was limited and the books had a limited lifespan, we decided a fun PDF series would be to look at various archetypal powers (and power-sets) in M&M. Thus, Power Profiles came into being.

It breaks things down into powers by theme: Air Powers, Animal Powers, Armor Powers, and so on, as opposed to the core M&M rules, which focus on the effects of various powers. With more than thirty power categories, each with two dozen or more powers, the book has over seven hundred ready-made powers for use in building M&M characters! So you can come up with a character theme (like “Ice Powers” or “Magic” for examples) and just flip through Power Profiles for ideas. What’s more, even the powers you don’t choose can be useful, serving as a catalog of potential power stunts a character with that theme might be able to do. The book is a treasure trove of character ideas and ways to customize or expand an existing character.

Power Profiles also offers some worked examples of “How do I…?” power creation questions, how to use the existing power effects for different types of powers, perfect for both players who don’t want to do all of that work, and just want to pick from a ready-made set of powers, and for power designers who want examples of some of the things the system can do. I’ve lost track of the number of times someone has asked me at a convention event about a particular character or power type in M&M and all I had to do was pick up a copy of Power Profiles and show them how those powers were set up. With the book out of print, I sorely missed that option at recent events!

Demand for Power Profiles was the initial motivator behind the Reprint Extravaganza. Circumstances haven’t aligned for Green Ronin to send the sourcebook back to the printer but now, with the core rulebook also out-of-print, this Kickstarter is your opportunity to claim all of that power for yourself.


You can back the Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza RIGHT NOW over on Kickstarter, and if you back the campaign in the first 48 hours, you’ll get the full PDF of our upcoming book Astonishing Adventures Assembled FOR FREE!

Mutants & Masterminds Reprint Extravaganza!

A Few Words on Languages

Tabletop roleplaying games can give us some funny ideas about languages and linguistics. At least, I know they did for me in some regards. Starting with a certain Popular Fantasy Roleplaying Game comes the notion that player characters are all multi-lingual, speaking three, four—as many as seven or eight languages fluently! This is often compounded with the notion that entire species share the same language, or that there are special languages for fantastic creatures from dragons to elementals to the denizens of different planes of existence.

Later RPGs have taken a more nuanced, and certainly more detailed approach to languages, including various levels of fluency, and things like complex charts showing the relationships between “language families” of earthly or imaginary languages, which may grant some greater understanding or closely-related tongues.

understanding the Language can be very important

“I’m not sure what you just said, but I don’t care for your tone!” Art by James Ryman

The Modern AGE rules have a somewhat laissez-faire attitude about languages. The sidebar on page 16 of the Basic Rulebook says characters should “be able to speak, read, and write whatever languages” they “would pick up due to their cultural and social class” suggesting a limit of three. The Linguistic talent in the game handles learning additional languages and requires a fairly significant investment, since talent degrees aren’t easy to come by, and each degree in the talent grants only one additional language. It would take a new specialization to create the true polyglot character who speaks a dozen or more languages.

Fantasy AGE likewise offers a Linguistics talent, for characters truly dedicated to speaking other languages. The game’s ancestries follow the fantasy standard of an ancestral language (all elves speak Elvish, for example) along with a “Common tongue” used and understood by everyone, for the most part.

Mutants & Masterminds treats language fluency as an advantage, one rank grants an additional language the character can speak, but each additional rank doubles the number of languages, so it’s fairly cost effective to create someone who speaks a dozen or more of them. Of course, in M&M, the ability to speak and understand all languages is on the table for just 2 ranks of the Comprehend power, so there isn’t a lot of point in having more than a few ranks in the Languages advantage, other than to represent the character’s own skill and knowledge.

Individual Game Masters have to decide the role languages—particularly unknown languages—will play in their campaigns. In some cases, the language barrier can be an important element of adventures or the setting. Others prefer to generally ignore the problem in order to get on with things; the Threefold setting for Modern AGE, for example, includes magical “universal translators” for characters working for the world-spanning Sodality, so GMs don’t need to worry about whether or not the characters speak any of the local languages—at least not until their translators are lost or stolen! Likewise, the Cosmic Handbook for M&M recommends Comprehend as a “default” power for star-spanning campaigns, unless you want to institute some form of “Galactic Common” that all alien species speak and understand.

When building worlds of your own for RPGs, you might want to give some thought as to how people say things, and what languages they are saying them in.

Bite-Sized Siege of Starhaven

The Guide to Starhaven for Mutants & Masterminds

Editor’s Note: This Ronin Roundtable is intended as advice for GM’s of Mutants & Masterminds, and it contains a few spoilers for would-be heroes in the Siege of Starhaven adventure.

 

Hello heroes! It’s great to be chatting with you all again after the spectacular extravaganza that was Gen Con. It was my first time attending and I am happy to confirm that the legends of its grandness were not overstated. I had such a great time being amongst so many gamers and just seeing everyone truly happy to be immersed in this grand hobby of ours. There just isn’t anything quite like a con to help reignite the passion for gaming. Thank you to all of the players who participated in my events and to everyone who stopped by the Green Ronin booth.

It was great getting to run Siege of Starhaven from the new Guide to Starhaven sourcebook for players, but one thing I learned quickly in my con prep was that this adventure is definitely not a four-hour experience. This probably isn’t shocking as it was written by the person who is often accused of running 1.5 shots so often that we’ve started calling my 1 shots  “special limited series” over at the Untold Stories Project. I have a habit of overwriting, which can be useful for GMs at home, but not so much for a convention experience. Not to worry though I embarrassed myself running out of time so you don’t have to.

The trouble with using any published adventure is that they’re usually written with an idea of what the beginning, middle, and end are going to be, and trying to find smaller story arcs within the plot can lead to a hollow story. Finding the right places to trim is a GM skill that doesn’t usually get enough practice, as, if you’re anything like me, the big worry at the table is “do I have enough content for the next four hours?” Siege of Starhaven has a set number of beats in its original outline that give the story pace and momentum. It has an “in media res” intro scene, an investigation that can go basically three directions, a first encounter with the villain that ends in defeat for the heroes, an escape, a rallying of resources, and then a triumphant final combat with the forces of the Stellar Imperium. It’s all very exciting and I intended for it to be the first two or three sessions of a brand new Starhaven campaign.

I used to be pretty good at estimating how much adventure fits into four hours of play, but I’ve been spoiled running an ongoing series for the last few years. I haven’t HAD to shorten things so I’ve let that part of my GM brain atrophy. I ran Siege of Starhaven at Origins this year, and admittedly I didn’t find the right place to make the end of the adventure feel like a satisfying payoff. I wasn’t prepared for how abruptly I was going to run out of time. The players all still had a great time and left with a smile on their face, but it didn’t feel like my best work to myself. I promised I would take the time to better condense the story before Gen Con.

I did not keep that promise.

Between work and my stream games, I didn’t do as much Gen Con prep as I would have liked, so I was worried that once again the adventure wouldn’t be as satisfying as I wanted it to be. As I was flipping through the sourcebook in the thirty minutes before the event was scheduled to run, I had an epiphany about the plot. I wrote down a few notes, which I’m going to share here. This is how I shortened the adventure to fit in one four hour slot:

I started by cutting the adventure down to four scenes. The new story outline was thus: introductory scene to establish stakes/teach people how the rules works, investigation with multiple paths

Prime Consul Tamira-Van of Starhaven

Prime Consul Tamira-Van

to reward player agency, big fight with the villain at the end.

Scene One: Instead of beginning in media res, I added a roleplaying scene to provide more context as to what the heroes were looking for in the warehouse and who they were working for. They met with Prime Consul Tamira-Van who explained that the Children of Chrysalis were stealing artifacts from the Draffsnarl and that she had a tip about where they would strike next. She explained that this was a tryout for Starhaven’s new defenders and if they prove themselves she would be willing to appoint them as the Guardians of Starhaven. From there the fight with Pupil and the Imperium troopers went as scripted in the adventure.

Scene 2: This works pretty much as written. The heroes search the warehouse and find leads that point them towards Tamira-Van and MamaKaiger. The person they choose to follow up with then determines next steps, either towards the missing Daedalus and the Robot Forge or the elusive hacker Bran Cardon. The only slight modification needed is to eliminate any mentions of Cardon’s interest in Daedalus/the Facetwild.

I had time for a ten minute intermission here.

Scene 3: Again pretty much as scripted, either the conflict in the Robot Forge or the skill challenge to break into Cardon’s warehouse. The only modification to Cardon’s warehouse is that the body is actually his body and not a decoy. The building still explodes and leads to…

Scene 4: The various challenges in the Fait Accompli scene. Helping the burning building, rescuing the pilots at the starport, etc. The only difference is that instead of providing the minor bonuses for other scenes in the adventure, any successes in these challenges reduces the amount of enemies in the final fight with Ko-Nan (similar to the resistance assets in the current adventure.) Pull a benefit from that table and assign it to the Fait Accompli challenges: rescuing the pilots removes one of the Hounds for example. The other small modification is that Ko-Nan doesn’t mention that she has control of the Propylaea so the heroes are able to confidently confront her.

Scene 5: Big fight with Ko-Nan and her crew!

There you have it, a beginning, middle, and end that offers a wide variety of scenes and a pretty well-paced story for four hours. And there’s even time for a bathroom break if you want it. I’ll be going over the topic of shortening adventures (and lengthening them if you’re long-winded like me) more generally in some of the material I’m working up for Astonishing Adventures Assembled but this is how I would modify Siege of Starhaven for a nice one and done. Thank you for taking the time to read today and happy gaming!

And if you’d like a print copy of the Guide to Starhaven, a Print On Demand option is now available at DrivethruRPG!

Last Chance Warehouse Sale

Last Chance Warehouse Sale: 75% off select print books, while supplies last!

 

After 22 years in business, the Green Ronin warehouse is looking a little crowded. With reprints and new products incoming, it’s time to make more space! These deals are for print products only. With limited stock and priced to clear some pallets, this is a screaming deal (75% off!) you don’t want to miss. With that, we offer you the LAST CHANCE WAREHOUSE SALE!

Please note the sale does not extend to shipping, and shipping fees are determined by the carrier.

75% off on select titles