The Watch House

6: FLAVOUR

Every game brings its own tone, feel or flavour, as does every GM and player.

System and lore have an effect, even if you work around them. New editions run the risk of being like when an old favourite gets New & Improved, taking out something you loved, although improvements are also possible! How a new edition or conversion feels different is what matters.

Bonus round:

Chase - Espionage games often have the best chase system (and as Dave notes the TSR Indiana Jones RPG had a great one too) which zoom in on them. They might include a bit of extra crunch with specific moves, as well as things like a success target to track for both the pursuer and pursued.

Explore - As with Map I don’t do a lot of exploring in games.

Path - I try not to railroad but I like to give the PCs something to respond to.

John Carpenter remixes Good Girls. CHVRCHES remix Turning The Bones.

Runeslinger on Chase

Designers & Dragons

CHVRCHES / John Carpenter

I would absolutely try to get the JC GG remix on the end credits of an ironic Final Girl slasher.

I’ve seen Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES and John Carpenter perform at the Usher Hall on separate occasions. That was their sole connection for me.

UNTIL NOW.

The Bad Batch 1.15: Finale Part I

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

1.15: Finale Part I

“The Bad Batch find themselves in unexpected territory in this thrilling finale. Part 1 of 2.”

23 minutes plus credits.

This is listed as Finale Part I on the menu. With season two confirmed yesterday, you can have a finale called Finale without viewers worrying that it’s the series finale.

But, the episode title card actually says...

#RPGaDAY2021 Vampire 5V: Throne

5V: THRONE

My main post asks who’s in charge in a setting and how that relates to the PCs. In the Darkness family of games starting with Vampire: The Masquerade, the smallish supernatural communities often have feudal structures with a single leader, and their relationship to the PCs will do a lot to set the tone of a chronicle.

Part of the appeal of playing Anarchs is that you can stick it to the Man and the Man will actually notice.

Camarilla Princes are the classic example, with Sabbat Archbishops and Anarch Barons not being as different as they might want. A bit of the feudal divine right but also the Machiavellian scheming as vampire rarely inherit their positions naturally, as well as the conspiratorial option for puppet leaders with ancients pulling their strings. After Revised in particular set the Camarilla against the Sabbat and put the Anarchs in third place, V5 nudges it to be more exclusive and elitist as it puts Anarchs back as a default group to play.

Anarchs in a Camerilla city pretty much need an unreasonable establishment to rail against, a proper bastard as LARP wrier Jason Andrew notes, and probably on more than one level.

Lodin in Chicago By Night first edition is a piece of work himself, his childer are mostly horrible with some put-upon exceptions there to make the city Camarilla plausibly work and offer some compromise options, and the setting also provides an ideal corrupt awful authority figure in Sheriff. (His derisive nickname became the standard title for the role, though none of the examples in following settings are as bad as he is.) Lodin and his gang set the standard, so much that the broken burned out Prince Modius and self-serving Anarch leader Juggler in the rulebook now feels like a deconstruction.

The asshole questgiver Prince is the Vampire plot hook equivalent of the old man in the tavern - an NPC who will give the PCs a mission often for no reward except “for the good of the Masquerade” and be a dick about it as they do. And this works, but best not to do it often. LaCroix in Bloodlines is a prime example, and on screen often enough that his personality shows through. The Prince of Prague appears in one scene in Redemption and is exactly this and we don’t even get to kill him later.

Cults Of The Blood Gods writer Jacob Burgess sums up player feelings about LaCroix.

Players can also be the Prince or equivalent, either in tabletop where it might be the planned playstyle or more often in games with large player bases like LARP or chats - and doubly more often there because their immortal reigns tend to last a couple of months. This By Night Studios article about advice for LARP Princes has four sections and one of them is about surviving assassination attempts.

See Julian Luna, the Prince as protagonist in Kindred: The Embraced. See also series two of Being Human UK for why not to be Prince if you have a decent Humanity score.

I tend to make Princes fairly distant, to be approached through intermediaries unless the PCs are particularly powerful, so when they do show up it can be quite alarming. I make sure the titled NPCs aren’t always available right away, to give the sense that there’s more going on in the city than the PCs’ plots. I often have the Keeper of Elysium as the “reasonable” authority figure because they work to keep things peaceful, and the Sheriff is usually scary in some way.

So who sits on the throne in Last Dance?

1.05: Where’s Your Gavel, Your Jury?

Elizabeth Drake, politely callous Prince of the city, comes to Nocturne on a busy promotional Saturday night, with the overseer of the Rack and a couple of ghouls. She sits and observes, saying nothing. She leaves a card directing Paris to come to Elysium the following night. What does she want? Does she just want to talk and felt like making it threatening? Is she trying to draw the Nocturne coterie into the Camarilla, or make them look suspicious to their Anarch allies? Or is something else going on? Do you dare to go, or dare not to?

#RPGaDAY2021 5: THRONE

5: THRONE

Who sits on the throne in your setting? A Dark Lord? A wise leader? A young untested heir? A questgiver? A squabbling parliament full of corruption and, oh, sorry, got a bit off topic there.

And how much does this matter on the PCs’ level? Would they ever get to barge into the throne room to tell them Gondor calls for aid?

If the rulers are too distant, who is in charge locally that they would get scenes with? A petty tyrant representing a distant overlord can be a more personal enemy, especially when they hide behind their employers’ authority. Sauron is too distant so Tolkien gives us the still grand Saruman and other witting and unwitting obstacles like Wormtongue, Denethor and especially Gollum.

There are games where the answer might be one or more of the PCs. The balance of power becomes an issue if you have one PC on the throne, or in the captain’s chair of a starship or whatever, but it’s possible to have a main character and even one who can order the others around as long as the players get and feel they get a good share of the spotlight.

Bonus round:

Gamble - Depending on the stakes, swinginess of the system and the like, a lot of actions can be a gamble, though often with no big stakes on losing. It’s fun to have an occasional I Win button. I really felt like a superhero playing the brick in a Marvel SAGA game where I didn’t need to make a damage check for anything smaller than a bazooka and would only check to get in the way of gunfire.

Include - The discussion of inclusion and tools like safety mechanics has done a lot of good for the hobby.

Community - I’ve had great times with gaming, made lifelong friends, travelled, been part of doing a lot for charity and more.

Runeslinger on Ganble

Designers & Dragons on warfare and rulership

Wednesday, 4 August 2021

Buffy staying on UK TV

The 4Music late night Buffy double bills rolling straight from Chosen one night to Welcome To The Hellmouth the next.

Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser

The Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser two-day hotel stay and kinda-LARP experience is a bit pricy. Like $6000 for four is the bargain price, or a hundred years of Disney+ at current prices, or take as many people to Convention Of Thorns six times. So I guess no for the time being.

(The advert featuring actor Luis Carazo, Nines from L.A. By Night, makes the game-y connection a bit stronger, in a weird two degrees of separation way.)

#RPGaDAY2021 Vampire 4V: Weapon

4V: WEAPON

As noted in my main post the Highlander combination of katanas and trenchcoats became a cliché in Vampire: The Masquerade partially because of the concealment rules in the weapons table following Shadowrun’s example in the original Players Guide. So much so that a game called Katanas & Trenchcoats exists and some of the guest writer names may be familiar.

The modern armour in Redemption is a trenchcoat although the best magic weapon is a two-handed scimitar. Likewise the armour for most clans in Bloodlines, and the katana is the best melee weapon and there’s a magic one as well. It’s the best melee weapon in the gun-focused Bloodhunt as well, getting in the trailer and title sequence, because it has an alternate mode that lets you deflect bullets with it!

See also the first opportunity to buy gear in Vampire: The Masquerade - Night Road.

Vampire also leans into this by making bullets pretty ineffective against vampires, as in the moment in Near Dark where Jesse coughs one back up. But that also has him and Severen playing gunslinger, and one of the original Tim Bradstreet chapter frontispieces references Severen’s six-shooter with the cross on the handle.

Stakes paralyse Kindred, so mostly get used to deactivate them for capturing.

It all nudges things to encourage close combat, an RPG standard which makes for more dramatic fighting than sniping at a distance. Other Darkness games lean into this even more - the Werewolf games have assorted magical mostly melee weapons as well the characters’ innate strength and Changeling: The Dreaming has a big focus on knightly combat.

Shotguns are pretty good though, especially at close range. Incendiary rounds optional.

So where does this go with a Vampire game about characters who want to stay on the down-low?

Redemption and Bloodlines both have weapon sales under the counter, as does Night Road, and Bloodhunt has an atmospheric touch where most of the big guns you can find date back to WWII or the Cold War. If you want something new, you have to take on the high-tech hunters who will be happy to demonstrate it for you before handing it over.

Vampires with a lot of resources can get the state of the art, but like most criminals most Kindred have to make do with what they can get on the sly...

1.04: Beats

The Sheriff stalks into Nocturne and asks the coterie if they know anything about a militant Anarch gang from out of town looking to smuggle weapons into the city. Led by one of Shane’s brood.

#RPGaDAY2021 4: WEAPON

4: WEAPON

RPGs with a lot of combat often have characters gain signature weapons, and in something with a fantasy element they’re often magical and often swords. Excalibur, Durendal, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi. Luke’s father’s lightsaber. Connor MacLeod’s katana and trenchcoat combo in modern New York, which thanks to concealment rules became a popular choice in Shadowrun and Vampire.

The bigger the universe, the more a variety of options are encouraged. Look at the signature weapons of Marvel heroes and what each says about them. Spider-Man uses restraining webbing. Captain America’s shield has as much symbolic weight in who wields it as Thor’s hammer. Hawkeye is an expert sniper, Black Widow is too but prefers to fight at close quarters. Wolverine can put his blades away but can never put them down.

Buffy’s signature weapons are a stake and a boot to the face, and she likes a crossbow as well, but her most dramatic fight is with swords.

Guns can have the same kind of symbolism in Westerns and Western-inspired fantasy like Supernatural and Wynonna Earp, and the paladin Gunslingers of The Dark Tower, but bring their own symbolic weight as well.

And they don’t let you get as close, as I discussed last year.

I absolutely lean in to this at times myself. I’ve written a YA novel about a girl finding the Sword in the Stone in the present. The Watch House had a season about a magic sword and borrowing from that my longest running tabletop Buffy character was the wielder of a legendary example too. My Relics playtest character forged the first sword and was at one point Hephaestus.

Bonus round:

Search - I make players roll notice checks a lot. Not for things they need to find for the plot to advance, though.

Reward - Experience Points, in-character rewards, and what else... sweets?

Figure - Figures mostly mean miniatures, but what would an action figure of your character come with? I use miniatures even more rarely than maps, though I made a set for the final episode of TWH, having previously made custom action figures for birthdays and Christmas.

Rumeslinger

Designers & Dragons

From A House On Willow Street (2016)

From A House On Willow Street (spoilery trailer) is kind of a played straight version of From Dusk Till Dawn as a group of low-level criminals stumble into a different genre.

Before that part pops up it already presents an interesting twist that could have been played as a straight crime story. What do you do when you kidnap somebody and nobody answers your call?

Before and after the twist could make an interesting one-shot.

It also has a grungy aesthetic with lots of leather jackets and grotty interiors that has me saving pictures for the Brujah folder in my Vampire: The Masquerade collection.

Tuesday, 3 August 2021

#RPGaDAY2021 Vampire 3V: Tactic

3V: TACTIC

As I say in my main post I’m not a good tactical combat GM, which is sort of okay in the Darkness family of games because they actively encourage the PCs to go for ambushes and have lots of ways for NPC antagonists to cheat.

So instead I’m going to talk about the short-lived 1990s DC horror-comedy comic Scare Tactics.

I bought every issue.

A bunch of young supernatural monsters on the run from a secret lab and monster hunters decide that Refuge In Audacity is their best move and become a shock-rock band so they’re in the public eye and people think they’re in costume. (Despite this being in the DC Universe where snake people and blob monsters are regular features in Gotham’s Most Wanted.)

Writer Len Kaminski went so far as to get a song recorded before DC told him not to bootleg it. (Content warning: lyrics that could not be printed in the comic!)

Vampire rock stars are almost as frequent as vampire nightclub owners, with Lestat being the most obvious example, the early Chill adventure Death On Tour starring one, and bands in Masquerade and Requiem canon. Multi-supernatural bands are trickier, but not impossible, especially in the more crossover-friendly Chronicles. (And also in the likes of Buffy, where I’ve been doing this on and off for years.)

So it’s part of the chronicle setup that a vampire-run club might play host to a monster-fronted band...

1.03: For One Night Only

The Kindred lead singer of a local band comes in to discuss playing a show, leaving out the salient detail that someone is hunting the band. Perhaps the Sheriff wants to arrest them for breaching the Masquerade at a previous gig, or a rival coterie wants revenge for poaching, or someone recorded one of their shows and it caught the attention of Hunters.

In any case, this could turn from the vampire band episode to one of the other obvious adventure hooks for this setup, a barroom brawl. This will also let the PCs test their tactics for an attack on the premises.

#RPGaDAY2021 3: TACTIC

3: TACTIC

Tactics in RPGs mostly imply combat... and I’m not particularly good at or interested in tactical combat. I’ve taken to telling prospective players this after some disappointed expectations. As with MAP I will go for the dramatic action over the practical one.

And for this reason I often have fights with all the PCs up against one opponent because a lone antagonist is easy to characterise and I then have to load them with powers, or a bunch of faceless goons who go down with three solid hits or one smart action each. A tactically interesting fight tends to happen about once a year.

But there are other tactics to use as well. Social approaches, investigation methods, and so on.

Bonus round:

Risk - There isn’t actually much risk in my games. Sometimes random death is off the table altogether. (And when it is, players will sometimes go for it for drama!)

Support - Unless the PCs are totally cut off from any support I will have NPCs who could be on their side appear. As well as fellow action characters, I also include sounding board NPCs. They won’t always be 100% agreeable or reliable, of course. Buffy features Watchers who vary from Giles to Wesley to Travers, and all three and more showed up in The Watch House.

Image - I often use visuals in my games, as discussed when Vision was a prompt last year.

Runeslinger on Image

Designers & Dragons

In Every Generation

Blurb, cover reveal and release date (4th of January) for In Every Generation, first in a trilogy of YA Buffy sequel novels featuring Willow’s daughter:

Frankie Rosenberg is passionate about the environment, a sophomore at New Sunnydale High School, and the daughter of the most powerful witch in Sunnydale history. Her mom, Willow, is slowly teaching her magic on the condition that she use it to better the world. But Frankie’s happily quiet life is upended when new girl Hailey shows up with news that the annual Slayer convention has been the target of an attack, and all the Slayers—including Buffy, Faith, and Hailey’s older sister Vi—might be dead. That means it’s time for this generation’s Slayer to be born. But being the first ever Slayer-Witch means learning how to wield a stake while trying to control her budding powers. With the help of Hailey, a werewolf named Jake, and a hot but nerdy sage demon, Frankie must become the Slayer, prevent the Hellmouth from opening again, and find out what happened to her Aunt Buffy, before she’s next. Get ready for a whole new story within the world of Buffy!

I am working on the assumption that the book will not actually have killed off Buffy, Faith or even Vi...

The new Scoobs sound potentially fun, although as a Director I’d have reservations about letting someone play a slayer who’s also a witch...

Monday, 2 August 2021

#RPGaDAY2021 Vampire 2V: Map

2V: MAP

As noted in my main post I use maps rarely, particularly in modern games, unless I’m GMing online and can therefore get to them with ease, in which case I’ll use maps for the city, the subway system, clubs and houses and so on. This is still more for atmosphere than tactics, though.

My Vampire games often use fictionalised if not completely fictional cities, providing backdrops like the Elysium, the nightclub and the cemetery.

My main use of mapping of a sort in Vampire has come from having NPC cards printed out so I can lay them down and show who’s where in a location like Elysium. It provides a clear visual guide for keeping track of multiple characters, and also lets me move them as the night goes on, and put somebody down for a dramatic entrance.

This is a fairly quiet night.

I would look for a suitable map for a regular location like Nocturne if I were running Last Dance.

In-character maps are rarer than in some genres, but the setting has ancient ruins containing secrets, modern Inquisitors using surveillance, and plenty of clandestine meetings in secluded locations.

1.02: New Maps Of Hell

A Nosferatu spy approaches the group with the location of a building being used by the agents hunting Alice, and a building blueprint with a note that it may be out of date. She tells them that they’re holding a local vampire inside and due to their mutual interest she’s asking for their help retrieving the hostage...

#RPGaDAY2021 2: MAP

The only fantasy world map you'll ever need

2: MAP

I use maps very rarely.

I’m mostly a Theatre Of The MIIIIIND GM whose combat tends towards stunts, and also fairly low on prep.

I used maps twice in five and a half years of The Watch House, once for the final battle (with miniatures I made as souvenirs) and before that at player request for a fight against vampires inside a country house with heavy shutters on the windows keeping the daylight out - who was where and in and out of the sun made for an interesting battle.

My most recent example of not mapping things out came in Vampire: The Masquerade: Nobody’s Home where thanks to a player using Google Maps we discovered that the dramatic race against time in one session was between two locations that are actually a block apart.

Despite this, I did consider a series of World Of Darkness location books with focuses on their history and modern uses as well as details like all the obscure ways to get in and out... but would have had to make maps.

One place I might bring up a map for is the PCs’ base if they have one, as it’s the most likely place to need some spatial awareness. So if I can find something suitable online I’ll grab it.

GMing online has upped my use of maps a bit as suitable images are often a quick Google search away if something comes up. Still more for atmosphere than tactics, though.

The other main use of maps in RPGs is in character. Treasure maps might not reliable, but city guides should be and modern surveillance photos can cover a lot. These are basically handouts, and fall under high prep, so not something I do often either. It may come up when a game really needs it, like that final battle, or a planned raid, or a Base Under Siege situation.

Settings not based on Earth may have world maps as well. Laying them out leads to expectations of visiting many of the noted places, trying to avoid some of the ones that sound bad, and going off the map into the Here Be Dragons bit at some point.

With something like this, logic need not apply. But consider real-world naming like Greenland being icier than Iceland, the Cape of Good Hope being dishonest marketing, and how many places Alexander The Great named Alexandria.

Bonus round:

Senses - I rarely invoke senses other than sight and sound, particularly in media-based game. What does a lightsaber smell like? I have no idea. It can come up occasionally, like the supernatural senses vampires and werewolves have, but if I bring it up it’s a big factor.

Plan - I like the flashback method of avoiding OOC planning in heist games.

Voice - I don’t do accents for NPCs but I do changes of tone and cadence.

Dave Chapman vlog, also featuring Theatre Of The MIIIIIND

Runeslinger on Plan

Designers & Dragons on the history of RPG maps

Sunday, 1 August 2021

#RPGaDAY2021 Vampire 1V: Scenario

1V: SCENARIO

As noted in my overall SCENARIO post, World Of Darkness games don’t have many published adventures.

Vampire: The Masquerade had some for first edition forming an episodic chronicle around the Chicago and Gary settings, fewer for second and Revised before a run for the Time Of Judgment finale, and IIRC one for V20. V5 is seeing an uptick with a hardback adventure book, adventures in sourcebooks and adventure books spun off from them, bringing it a bit closer to the modern D&D model of a campaign book a year and more support online, good for GMs and Storytellers with less prep time.

In his Interactive Toolkit series of articles on GMing adventure design first published in White Wolf Inphobia magazine, Christopher Kubasik noted specifically in part two that adventures for Vampire are tricky because of how personal the stakes are.

Yes, you can have the Prince give the coterie a quest and an expectant look like any RPG with quests and missions, and that works once in a while (and could be the basis for a game about being agents of a power bloc) but it makes Backgrounds and Touchstones and Ambitions and the like far less significant. (The recent V5 adventures offer a lot of advice on tweaking the plot and setting and providing various ways in, while the big book Fall Of London has tight parameters for the PCs and their concerns.)

Scenario can also be an outline of the premise, so after session zero we start with a pilot episode. TV tends to have either a premise setup pilot or an example of a normal episode, but RPGs tend to do the setup as the PCs get to know each other, particularly with players who need to get to know each other as well.

Can you find me...?

Last Dance

1.01: Nocturne

With the lights out it’s less dangerous

Here we are now

Entertain us

Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit

With a new Prince on the throne, the young outcast vampires of the city are in turmoil, but the Kindred who claim domain around alternative club Nocturne have been able to keep together, at least so far.

The Toreador promoter and her contacts keep the club going, the Brujah and Caitiff members, ghouls and some few allies keep it safe.

But now someone claims sanctuary. A teenage runaway pursued by the agents of a rival Camarilla court. A dhampir. The human child of a Thin-Blood vampire. Something Kindred myth teaches is a mark of the end of all things...

#RPGaDAY2021 Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampire: The Masquerade

Following taking the RPGaDAY2020 prompts to inspire a Buffy series, the next game setting I can riff on that casually is Vampire: The Masquerade and the World Of Darkness in general, as well as Vampire: The Requiem and the Chronicles Of Darkness. Some discussion and adventure hooks to follow.

Looking at the list some lean towards more fantasy and action-y games, but hey.

Expect discussion and plot hooks. Going with this setup:

Last Dance

Zola Jesus, Halloween 2017 at Saint Luke's Glasgow, by me

Three cheers to the mirror now

The two of us

Can we have one last dance?

Thursday, Jet Black New Year

Anarchs in a modern Camarilla city. Based around a club at the edge of Rack so they have somewhere to meet and to defend.

Vampires and nightclubs go hand in hand, vampires having their own nightclubs has its own TV Tropes page, and Vampire has a history of it from the Succubus Club in the first playtest through the clubs in Bloodlines to the V5 Nordic LARP preview End Of The Line and one of the big interiors in Bloodhunt.

And like Rick’s in Casablanca or the Sheriff’s office in a Western, a known location also gives the Storyteller somewhere that adventure hooks can walk right into.

A club called Nocturne, because why not?

Imagine five PCs, who are all characters I might play if someone else were running this:

Paris, Toreador club promoter

Shane, Brujah student street teamer

Mercy, Caitiff waitress

Jonah, ghoul security

Alice, dhampir teen runaway

Bonus: find me in this picture from Enlightenment In Blood!

1: SCENARIO

2: MAP

3: TACTIC

4: WEAPON

5: THRONE

6: FLAVOUR

7: SMALL

8: STREAM

9: MEDIUM

10: TRUST

11: WILDERNESS

12: THINK

13: FLOOD

14: SAFETY

15: SUPPLEMENT

16: MOVE

17: TRAP

18: WRITE

19: THEME

20: FOUNDATION

21: SIMPLICITY

22: SUBSTITUTE

23: MEMORY

24: TRANSLATE

25: WELCOME

26: THEORY

27: FRACTION

28: SOLO

29: SYSTEM

30: MENTION

31: THANK

#RPGaDAY2021 1: SCENARIO

1: SCENARIO

a written outline of a film, novel, or stage work giving details of the plot and individual scenes.

a postulated sequence or development of events.

a setting, in particular for a work of art or literature.

Scenario is a term in RPGs somewhere between Module and Adventure to describe that kind of source material, a more-or-less ready to run session or more for a specific game. (Outside of RPGs “scenario” often follows “nightmare”.)

Adventures were a mainstay of the likes of (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons and Call Of Cthulhu publishing schedules back in the day, adventure booklets were industry standard, with games like Marvel Super Heroes having them and D6 Star Wars launching with a run of them alongside its sourcebooks.

White Dwarf in the 80s had a shorter adventure or two most issues, and other RPG magazines had more - Dungeon spun off from Dragon, and Challenge covered lots of science fiction games as well as publisher GDW’s own. (I got to run the Golden Heroes adventure from my first WD issue a few years on... and got to tell both the game’s creator and the adventure’s writer about this at a con a few years back.)

Vampire: The Masquerade had a few early on, but never very many - V5 has actually seen an uptick. Its mainstay short supplements were the likes of the Clanbooks, something players could read as well as Storytellers.

Nowadays D&D publishes one or two official hardback adventures per year that can take up an academic year and a lot of shorter adventures come through free or creator content sources, while Cthulhu keeps going with its model of the occasional big book of multiple adventures as well as its own online resources. (It also uses its classic rulebook adventure slash rite of passage The Haunting as its quickstart to this day, so it has been published continually for forty years.)

And if you want a big adventure book or set these days, consider calling in Gar Hanrahan.

As someone who started with gamebooks and then went straight to improvised adventures before starting to get scenarios, I use them pretty rarely, but pick them up for games I’m doing, to use, adapt or take ideas from.

The series I’ve run most of of was The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay first edition, as it was coming out, with a captive high school player audience. We got stuck at some point in Power Behind The Throne and never finished it. Which is a shame about Power, but the following adventures were... there’s a reason the fourth edition revision is going a different way.

The single adventure I’ve used most is Fated Voyage by Michael R. Mikesh, from Challenge issue 46. It was intended for MegaTraveller, a system which I’ve never even read. It has a throughline and various optional asides so could reasonably be called a scenario. It sends the PCs in a space opera kind of setting onto a ghost ship, with enough plot twists and spooky options that I’ve run it for Doctor Who and a Star Trek inspired setting. (I could probably run most of the adventures in that issue with Doctor Who, Doctor Who being like that...)

So what to take away? I like a mix of a plot and some optional extras. And a ghost ship.