Press The Beast

Prepping & Running Super Adventures

Today I ran a Super Adventure! What's a Super Adventure? Invite your friends, invite as many as you can stand, to a bangin' all out adventure. The adventure is designed for a level range (in this case 3rd to 5th level) and players are encouraged to bring characters from ongoing or completed campaigns within that level range to the adventure. I've long thought that the flailsnails gaming is not only good for gaming culture but also a moral good. I've done some of this inter-campaign gaming but only in small little bits, and even in campaigns where bringing outside characters is opened up as an option players rarely bite because they always want to make a new dude. A Super Adventure foregrounds inter-campaign play—the point is to round up all the baddies and hit the dunge' with a vengeance.

The first Super Adventure, called Wild Wild Fortress Farandan, featured characters from OD&D, B/X, Wolves Upon the Coast, DCC, Delta Green, Meatheads, and probably more (idk idc); we got a total of 10 players, which was sick as hell. We even had a character come from the old G+ campaigns! I did very little conversion for these characters and did most of it on the fly. I use a d6 standard for HD and damage (as per OD&D) in my adventures, so the only thing I converted was damage values—a player could tell me what weapon they were using and I would let them know the damage. I posted basic guidelines for this damage conversion before the adventure. Otherwise, everyone processed their own Saves, Attack rolls, etc, based on the system that their character came from. That means the Delta Green agent rolled a d100 to shoot dragons with his SAW, the Meathead used Mighty Feats to rip the wings off a dragon, the DCC wizard used roll to cast and fired a Magic Missile that dealt over 20 damage.

The other order of business for a Super Adventure is to establish basic ground rules among the players in terms of communication, especially if you run online. Crosstalk can eat session time, and can be especially bad with so many players unused to playing together. So we established a few simple rules:

Because the players were on the ball my job was easy: pace, pace, pace, focus, focus, focus. This ties into session prep. It's very handy to have clear goals that keep the party moving in a clear direction, but it also requires good refereeing. There's a need to balance highlighting player character action and processing combat; in general, especially for this type of game, I think about the ways in which you establish and develop scenes in improv. The players are basically a shit ton of scene partners that you're working with to establish a shared understanding of the gameworld, so where the player has a suggestion it is almost always best to give a "yes, and"—the conversation keeps moving, and the session maintains momentum. This is, I think, a fairly common way of referring but it comes in particular use when running such a chaotic game. Paint with concepts, not details. Insisting on fidelity to a specific referee vision kills momentum with a need for clarifications; it's also selfish, it's not the referee's game but everyones. Speed means more can get done in the session—stories are built on context, faster processing speed means more context, which means more meaningful experiences for the player and ref: "In martial arts, speed decides the winner" and the same is true for table top RPGs. Love and death lives in a single roll of the dice.

While I discuss how to ensure fast resolution for combat at length in a blogpost focused on running fights, I don't talk there about running dungeon crawls. For this particular adventure I used very loose turn tracking during exploration; each turn was an iteration of the encounter roll/attrition loop rather than a measure of time. Being loose in terms of time made it easier to track and keep player action synchronized when the party was split into two different groups. OSR play cultures often emphasize the importance of time tracking, and that's cool and often very good, but 10 minutes isn't always 10 minutes. "The map is not the territory", though an oft repeated cliche, is immensely applicable to table top games—the referee should understand a dungeon turn, a combat round, an overworld watch, the passing of seasons, as representative, not literal. If I measured time literally, estimated distances and measured how far characters could move, etc, then we would have gotten about half as much done.

(In this case, four players also would've been fucked over: when the party got separated, the away group ran to meet up with the main contingent. The main group engaged in a major combat and we moved into 1 minute rounds. If I was to insist on using "literal time" then the away group would have arrived long after combat had ended. Instead, I made a call of a number of a rounds that, I thought, would make them show up too late to be critically useful but not so late that they wouldn't be able to participate. This was a better call for the pace of the session, and the enjoyment of the players. In another circumstance, such as in a small combat that would likely end in a round or two, I could have made the call differently.)

For the adventure itself, the party was tasked by King Ollie to take on a gigantic walking fortress which had gone berserk and was marching toward his city-state. The party was granted 5 Gliders, which could house 2 people each, were given an outline of the anti-air defences of Farandan, but had scant few details about the conditions on the fortress itself. They were also given a list of objectives, nearly impossible to fulfill to completion with the given timeline, and were sent on their way.

I prepared the adventure in about 1 hour—I spent about 20 minutes or so ideating, then wrote out sufficient details to run the adventure. Farandan was broken into 4 areas—his belly and inner guts was laid out as a depth crawl (This is closest to how I run this sort of thing but the way I do it is better and cooler than the way in this link, whatever); on his back was a garden, handled by a simple pointcrawl, a city handled by text description, and a palace with a little 2 level dungeon each with about 8 or so rooms. Woah! Lots of space for games and antics—the party basically just stormed the palace and ignored the rest; still, the work done on the rest of Farandan meant I had enough high level context to properly imagine the space.

In the 3 hour session the party killed 3 mutant dragons, 3 giant worms, about 30 or so soldiers, a wizard, a genie, and blew up a gigantic lightning shooting tower; they also murdered a totally innocent monkey, and took a nap in a beautiful garden. The Delta Green agent summoned the Yellow King, went insane alongside half the party, and managed to conquer Farandan as its new mad king. I was very happy with the speed of processing, the performance of the players, and the general good vibes at the table. I think if a lil rat wanted to play our group would've been accommodating enough to help her through it.

In regards to running all these systems at once, here's the low-down. RPG people always xeet on X about if system matters or not. Yo: RPG play is the game that you do at the table, players and referee can say and do whatever the fuck they want, and the system is helpless to stop them. "System matters" is the cop in your head, it is self imposed shackles. You don't need that shit; it is okay when the Delta Green agent shoots the dragon using a d100 roll and the balance is all fucked up because the dragon doesn't get a chance to dodge. Trust your players, trust yourself, and prioritize developing a loving, playful culture at the table—that's what will make your game rock, not choosing correctly between a bunch of systems that are all the same shit, or making the perfectly tweaked B/X.

Super Adventures! I'll run another one on March 1st!