Scourge of the Demon Wolf

[robertsconley]

May 8, 2017 18:36:05 GMT -5 robkuntz said:

I have been thinking of writing the following and would appreciate some opinions on the matter. The work would be far-ranging example in a format akin to an adventure but that illustrates through shifts in design thought and direction the actual scope of Arneson's open form create/design-as-you nature.  
Opinions welcome and desired.

(Thumbs up) Showing how it done your way is always a plus in my book.

I would have it in two sections, one a "clean" text of the adventure that is ready to run. The second section the commentary and notes. 

With Scourge of the Demon Wolf I divided it into an adventure front half and a supplement back half. The locales of the adventure only had the relevant detail needed to use them as part of the adventure. The supplement half fully fleshed out the locales and detailed every inhabitant and building. The point of this to make the physical product useful beyond the adventure without having the referee feeling he needed to read through a village worth of detail to run it.

The same with your idea. The first half should be clean and ready to run and focus only what needed to run the adventure/situation/scenario.  The second half should be as detailed as you need to illustrate your points. 

[robertsconley]

If anybody here wants a copy of Scourge PM me and I will comp or send a PDF copy. I am making this offer not to generate sales but rather Scourge illustrate how I approach campaigns and adventures. People know that I talk about sandbox campaigns and Scourge was one of the few adventure I created that was self contained enough to turn it into a standalone work. It shows how the stuff I talked about in my MW Supplements and blog works in actual play. And demonstrate that whatever the state of the hobby there are still those, like myself, that are firmly in the camp of wide open campaigns.

[mormonyoyoman]

I'm pretty sure I bought Scourge when it first appeared, but don't think I read it. I'll search through GDrive, Dropbox, and 2 hard drives until I find it. When/if I do, I fully intend to remember why I was looking for it, and can maybe make informed comments here.

[robertsconley]

May 9, 2017 16:55:53 GMT -5 mormonyoyoman said:

I'm pretty sure I bought Scourge when it first appeared, but don't think I read it. I'll search through GDrive, Dropbox, and 2 hard drives until I find it. When/if I do, I fully intend to remember why I was looking for it, and can maybe make informed comments here.

Check your lulu or Drivethrurpg account

[mormonyoyoman]

Shall do. Duh. Obviously I must have bought it from one of those two. Where DID I leave my brain?

[robertsconley]

May 9, 2017 19:36:32 GMT -5 mormonyoyoman said:

Shall do. Duh. Obviously I must have bought it from one of those two. Where DID I leave my brain?

That OK. Luckily they are the only two places where I distributed the PDF

[Admin Pete]

Ok, I got it downloaded this evening and I will take a look. I have more to post on RobK's book and on CCC's book. Already committed but you are next.

[robertsconley]

I am writing some posts but here is a recent podcast where I was interviewed and talk about my campaign and how I design things with Brendan Dave of Bedrock Games. Warning it is about 2 hours long. 
bedrockgames.podbean.com/e/robert-conley-interview/

Here is a brief timeline
30:00 to 45:00 Scourge of Demon Wolf
46:30 talking about my next adventure.
51:00 talking about design philosophy from here until the end of the podcast.

[robertsconley]

Some background on why I do what I do.

I run campaigns where the overall direction is set by the players. At the start of the campaign I setup the initial circumstances based on what the players want to focus on. Circa 1980 when I first started using Judges Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy, I pretty much threw things out there and hoped for the best. Later I learned to talk to them beforehand about their goals. Note that is not a elaborate or formal process just something I know to ask as part of the back and forth banter that goes on before the start of any RPG campaign.

What set my campaign apart initially was the fact that I had no problem with the players trashing the setting I created. Kill the King, Sheriff, High Priest or local merchant? Sure no problem. But player better think it through and come up with a decent plan because it will be a challenge and there will be consequences.

In addition another thing that set me apart that the result of the previous campaign became part of the background of the setting for next campaign. At first it was just a novelty because the Wilderlands were a big place. But as time went on, more and more of the Wilderlands were affected by something the PCs were doing. And many places were affected by multiple parties especially the City-State of the Invincible Overlord.

The original Wilderlands of High Fantasy were pretty light on the details of the world. It had local detail in abundance but not much on at the level of Kings, and Emperors. Over multiple campaigns set in the same setting, I started developing a consistent background of my own. Eventually around 1988, with my originals wearing out, I used what I learned in cartography as part of my geography minor to hand draw an brand new set of maps for my own use. I expanded the scale slightly from 5 miles per hex to 12.5 hexes. Adopted some ideas on cartography from Harn and from then on the Majestic Wilderlands started to come together.

 

CSIO Larger Image
Wilderlands Larger Image

By 1988 I switched to GURPS. Rather then going off on a completely different tangent with the Majestic Wilderlands, I adapted the stuff I was doing with AD&D to GURPS. Sure there were differences as combat was deadlier, and more detailed. Character capabilities were more detailed and more flexible due to the point based system that GURPS used. But by and large players still explored dungeons to find wealth and magic items, and still were trying to knock off kings, emperors, and merchants.

Because of the flexibility of GURPS occasionally a focused campaign was run where everybody was a mage, or where everybody was a member of thieves guild.

One of my favorites was one where everybody was a member of the city guard and characters started out with half the normal number of character creation points. The tactics and gear the players developed as a result of that campaign I still use today. If you have my Majestic Wilderlands Supplement the Knight Killer Crossbow was a result of that campaign.

Another favorite was another low point character creation campaign where everybody was part of s small neighborhood in City-State. The highlight was the PCs successfully coming up with a plan to take out a vampire with blankets, pots, pans, and rope. And they succeeded.

Finally in the 2000s I started using OD&D for my regular campaigns. I already had some experience with the system from the various hexcrawl formatted settings that I wrote like Points of Light and Blackmarsh.

After reading Matt Finch's Old School Primer a bunch of things came together in my head that didn't happen when I first used AD&D. I saw how I could do with OD&D everything I was doing with other RPGs like GURPS but without the overhead of the more detailed mechanics. I still enjoy playing those RPGs but OD&D worked out as the better choice for the time I had. I started using it and eventually wrote up what I did in the initial sessions as the Majestic Wilderlands Supplement.

This is why I run the campaigns I do when it comes tabletop roleplaying. Next I will talked more about the nuts and bolts of what I do namely how I setup and use sandbox adventures.

[Mighty Darci]

May 9, 2017 19:36:32 GMT -5 mormonyoyoman said:

Shall do. Duh. Obviously I must have bought it from one of those two. Where DID I leave my brain?

Out behind the woodpile!

[bestialwarlust]

May 10, 2017 22:13:49 GMT -5 Mighty Darci said:

May 9, 2017 19:36:32 GMT -5 mormonyoyoman said:

Shall do. Duh. Obviously I must have bought it from one of those two. Where DID I leave my brain?

Out behind the woodpile!

Problem is he left it there too long and it's mutated and moved on!

[Mighty Darci]

May 11, 2017 8:27:32 GMT -5 bestialwarlust said:

May 10, 2017 22:13:49 GMT -5 Mighty Darci said:

Out behind the woodpile!

Problem is he left it there too long and it's mutated and moved on!

I love that image and it gives me an idea that I need to let percolate about crossing that with a beholder.

[robertsconley]

Sandbox Adventures - The Scourge of the Demon Wolf

In the last post I talked about my background in refereeing. As result of my experiences I found that I had to lot to write about sandbox campaigns. Stuff that people could get and use in their own campaigns like Points of Light and Blackmarsh. On my blog I worked on a series of posts about How to make a Fantasy Sandbox. One thing I didn't write about as much is what happens session to session, like the adventures I ran during a sandbox campaign.




Scourge of the Demon Wolf is an adventure that represent what players typically deal with in my campaigns. One that allowed me to publish Scourge was that it was self-contained enough to written up so it was useful for other campaigns. Most of my sandbox adventures are highly situational based on the circumstances of the PCs involved. But occasionally something like Scourge happens and I can set aside my notes for further development.

What makes Scourge a sandbox adventures? First off it is a situation that has the potential for adventure. The situation is driven by the interactions between the various NPCs. For Scourge it starts when an ambitious apprentice foolishly summons a demon. To the apprentice the ritual appeared not to have worked. So the apprentice returned the conclave where she was studying. But shortly after a weakened wrath demon from the Abyss emerged. Without the proper completion of the ritual, the Wrath Demon floated around as a spirit and possessed a nearby wolf pup. Thus the Demon Wolf was born.


Larger Image

The area in which this occurs is a typical rural fantasy medieval setting. There is a village owned by a Baron and has a Bailiff and Reeve that work together to manage it. There is a crossroad hamlet nearby with a inn. More unusual is a conclave of mages living in a small compound just half day into the wilderness. There are also bandits that prey on caravans and a group of wandering beggars that occasionally travel through the area to smuggle stolen goods. Finally there is itinerant tinker that wander the area making a few pennies by selling small goods and doing repairs.

The Demon Wolf goes on a murderous rampage, people die, the Baron sends his huntsman who is outwitted, and finally in a second round of attacks the baliff of the village dies. The villagers refuse to bring in the harvest until the creature is killed. The Baron can't have this so sends the PCs to deal with the situation once and for all. There also a number of other hooks including the thieves guild sending somebody to find out why the bandits or beggars are not paying a cut of what they steal.

This is the setup.

How did this get written up? Most of the time author get an idea; write, refine, edit, and then finally get laid out as a book or PDF and published. This works for a lot of published adventures. But they suffer from the same problem as a movie or a novel, it hit or miss whether the hobby winds up liking it. Sure experience helps but still a roll of dice whether something catches on?

Is there a better way of doing this? Or rather there is something we can do more. What I didn't mention above is playtesting. Because writing for RPGs is about writing for games, playtesting is part of the process. However how do you playtest? You get your draft into a semi-finished form and try it out a couple of times. Then use the feedback to tweak it from there.

The problem I have with that process is the initial draft especially for adventures. Normally people lay out a rough draft from start to finish and use that as a starting point. A lot of the structure of the adventure is baked in. What if you took advantage of the fact that RPGs are a active form of entertainment and just started with a initial situation. You have NO idea how the adventure is going to conclude when you start the process. Would it be a more useful adventure for others to use in their campaign?

By the time I decided to publish Scourge I ran it two times already. Once for GURPS and once for D&D 3.0. So I had a some information of on the things that PCs were likely going to do. But now I was going to publish it, I resolved that the final product would be in part a record of what the players do and not do in the various playtest sessions. And see if this really made for a better adventure.

By the end of the process I have ran it over 8 times through my home region centered NW Pennsylvania and twice in other locations in the United States notably Morningstar Games in Savannah Georgia. By the sixth time I ran it I started writing, and was incorporating notes from the 8th and last time I ran the adventure.

What did I wind up writing about? I wrote about the region, the locale, and the NPCs. The playtest helped pare down what I needed to write about. Then I consolidated common events caused by the PCs and wrote them up. I included notes about where things diverged. I made sure I included a one page summary to get the referee up to speed.

The stuff I pared away I reformatted into a sourcebook. I laid the book out into two sections, the adventure and a small regional sourcebook that fully fleshed out each of the locales in the adventures. You can run the adventure with what in the first half. Then use the second half as part of your ongoing campaign.

So how did sell? OK didn't burn down the RPG hobby by any means even by OSR standards. But creatively it was very sastifying and currently repeating the process for a couple of other adventures.

Any downside? Yes time, it is very time intensive to do this. Not good if you need regular cash flow as a business. You couldget a pipeline going where you are playtesting all the time so when the first adventure is finished there always one more behind it almost done. Then you have to think of travel expenses for face to face. The rise of vritual tabletop software should make this easier. You could schedule periodic sessions and really rack up the playtest hours. But you are still going to need to do face to face as not all hobbyists can be found on-line.

For me using my hobby time to develop this, it took me three years to rack up the eight playtests. Although in the third year, I slacked off the writing a bit too much I have to admit.
Today I can probably do eight playtest in a year with two run face to face at a game store and/or convention and the others run on-line. 

Next time I will be talking about the creative process I used to develop the initial setup.

[Robert the Black]

Thank you for posting this robertsconley , this is fun and useful. I like to see how other peoples minds work and how they put things together. Even if it is completely different from what I do, it is very useful and inspiring.

[robertsconley]

May 12, 2017 11:31:51 GMT -5 Robert the Black said:

Thank you for posting this robertsconley , this is fun and useful. I like to see how other peoples minds work and how they put things together. Even if it is completely different from what I do, it is very useful and inspiring.

Appreciate the compliment. This is why I take the time to write this up. Everybody think differently about this this stuff. A result what works for me is not quite going to be the same as what work for me. For the past couple of years I felt the key to writing good supplemental material is to layout your thought process as well as provide content. It helps the referee make an informed decision about how they will incorporate the material.

[mormonyoyoman]

Couldn't find any indication at Lou-Lou or DrivethrurpgnowNowNOWDANGIT.com that I had bought this, despite my memories, so I bought it the other day. And though I'm really pleased with it, I once thought everyone created their adventures through a similar procedure of: create the locale and the problem, now see what the PCs do (ala CotIO) - until I experienced my first Railroad GM.

But just as I was getting ready to write about it, I see Robert is now supplying further background on its creation - which was my favorite part of the book(s) - so I'm gonna sit back and read his posts before I pretend to be a knowledgeable reviewer.

[Mighty Darci]

May 12, 2017 17:07:22 GMT -5 mormonyoyoman said:

Couldn't find any indication at Lou-Lou or DrivethrurpgnowNowNOWDANGIT.com that I had bought this, despite my memories, so I bought it the other day. And though I'm really pleased with it, I once thought everyone created their adventures through a similar procedure of: create the locale and the problem, now see what the PCs do (ala CotIO) - until I experienced my first Railroad GM.

But just as I was getting ready to write about it, I see Robert is now supplying further background on its creation - which was my favorite part of the book(s) - so I'm gonna sit back and read his posts before I pretend to be a knowledgeable reviewer.

But I thought you were The Great Pretender, the guy they wrote the song about? I didn't know he(you) was (were) a knowledgeable reviewer.

[mormonyoyoman]

Shhh. Don't tell anyone. Used to do it for a living.

[robertsconley]

In the previous post I talked about how I developed Scourge of the Demon Wolf. How does one get started with this type of adventure?

Scourge of the Demon Wolf was developed during the course of one of my GURPS campaigns around 2000. I knew the players were planning to travel along a specific road from the events of the last session. There was a small chance that something different would have occurred but given their goal the odds were high they were going to do. Remember that once a sandbox campaign gets going,it gets easier to predict the players are looking to do for the next session.


PC Route
What does it suggest to you?

Thinking of ideas I was inspired by a movie called the Brotherhood of the Wolf about the Beast of Gevaudan. Now I have a basic situation, a monster terrorizing the countryside. What the monster? A wolf of course, but abnormally powerful wolf. Where was the wolf doing this? That was easy for me as a lot of that region were medievalish manorial villages. So I picked one near the road the PCs were travelling on.

Why is the wolf on a ramage? Here I diverged from my source of inspiration and picked something more suited for my campaign. To make the wolf more powerful I elected to have the wolf possessed by a demon. How did get it possessed by a demon? By a botched summoning! Who botched the summoning? A mage's apprentice greedy for power. Where was the apprentice's master? He was one of several living in a mage's conclave in the wilderness.



Now I turned to who the demon wolf was terrorizing. I knew it was a fantasy medieval villages. So I came up wtih a reeve, a village priest, and added two characters for local color. A old guy who "minded" the local tavern and Yoluf a trapper that could act as a guide if the players hit it off with the Reeve.

To connect the village to the mage I had the apprentice be sloppy and left much of what she used for the botched summon out at a site in the wilderness to be found.



At this point I could have run it. But the situation would have been straight forward to resolve. If the PC elect to pursue the reports of wolf attack, they go to the village, do a bit of roleplaying, go out into the wilderness, maybe fight some wolves, find the summoning site, realize that mages are involved, find out about the local conclave and then head there. Another alternative they could just resolve it by main force and figure out a plan to kill every wolf in the area including the Demon Wolf.

So in the next post I will explain how I complicated it.

[Mighty Darci]

Very interesting robertsconley, I can't wait for your next installment, Oh! I do have to wait don't I!

[bestialwarlust]

Yes agreed. Thanks Rob it's fun to read how others work out their creation process.

[robertsconley]

Complicating Sandbox Adventures
Last post I mentioned how I decided to complicate the Scourge of the Demon Wolf adventure. To do this, I decided to introduce a red herring, some bandits who were faking wolf attacks. To tie them into the situation, I added the body of a local tinker that they robbed and killed. Then the bandits made it to look like a wolf attack.



Then I asked myself would there be anybody else involved with the bandits? Having one of the Beggars clans in the area fencing the bandit's goods would be a good addition. To further tie this group in I decided that the Beggar Clan chief's son was killed by the Demon Wolf. Plus they have more information about the the mage's conclave than what the villagers know. From stuff I established in previous campaigns I also noted that the villagers would not be on friendly terms with the Beggar Clan adding another complication to the situation. That where I stopped, I learned that once you get up to four or five distinct aspects to a situation the players get confused.

Now I was ready to plant rumors about wolf attacks. The day of the game arrived and sure enough the players went down the road. They stopped at a crossroads inn and heard about the attacks and decided to investigate. It wasn't the only rumor they heard but it was the one closest in geography.

When faced with multiple interesting choices players are more apt to pick something that closer than further away. It not an absolute however. They could and will opt to pursue something further away if think that would be better for their immediate goal.

I don't remember much about that first adventure other than the fact they encountered every group involved. That they went from the summoning site to the conclave, talked to the mage at which point the final series of events started happening.

The thing to remember I did not write this in any amount of detail. I had two pages of note which you can download from here. And some paper character sheets with the NPCs and the Demon Wolf written up.

What filled in the details was my conception of what life in a medieval village was like, life in a bandit camp, etc, etc. This is part of what I call my bag of stuff. Nothing in there is as detailed as you find in a published work but I internalized it so I can pull stuff out of my memory and combine it with other stuff to create interesting situations for my players. Finally it has the virtue of being able to be done on the fly.

[Deleted]

This is hot stuff. BTW who did the drawing, very good, excellent even.

[robertsconley]

Jun 26, 2017 11:29:54 GMT -5 The Bloody Nine said:

This is hot stuff. BTW who did the drawing, very good, excellent even.

Jason Sholtis and John Larrey

[Deleted]

Jun 26, 2017 11:41:06 GMT -5 robertsconley said:

Jun 26, 2017 11:29:54 GMT -5 The Bloody Nine said:

This is hot stuff. BTW who did the drawing, very good, excellent even.

Jason Sholtis and John Larrey

How did I not know about these guys?

[robertsconley]

Jun 26, 2017 11:43:45 GMT -5 The Bloody Nine said:

Jun 26, 2017 11:41:06 GMT -5 robertsconley said:

Jason Sholtis and John Larrey

How did I not know about these guys?

Don't feel bad even I can't follow what everybody doing in the OSR these days. It just incredible the diversity and numbers of people promoting, playing, and publishing for the classic editions. Jason and his friends are the culprits behind Operation Unfathomable. 

[Deleted]

Jun 26, 2017 11:58:19 GMT -5 robertsconley said:

Jun 26, 2017 11:43:45 GMT -5 The Bloody Nine said:

How did I not know about these guys?

Don't feel bad even I can't follow what everybody doing in the OSR these days. It just incredible the diversity and numbers of people promoting, playing, and publishing for the classic editions. Jason and his friends are the culprits behind Operation Unfathomable. 

OPERATION UNFATHOMABLE is an internally-consistent, gonzo funhouse that runs like a subterranean wilderness trek instead of a “down the 10 foot hall and kick in a door” affair. There are random elements aplenty to keep GMs guessing as well as players. No balanced encounters to be found here, but the clever setup allows low level characters to drop into the dungeon “deep end” and still have a chance of making it out alive—if they’re smart and wary.

Sounds like fun. There is so much going on it would take a paid team to keep up with everything.

[Robert the Black]

My compliments robertsconley! I have an Exalt here someplace with your name on it, just a moment, yep found it, here you go.