So on DriveThru RPG I see a lot of playbooks for sale, but oddly enough very few ADVENTURES. Why do you guys thing this is the case? Seems like ADVENTURES would be something that lots of people would make and sell? Do you think its the system itself that encourages you to make your own ADVENTURES, or the players attracted to the game that just aren’t into pre-made ADVENTURES?
(post edited for clarity, I originally posted FRONTS but I meant Adventures, sorry for the confusion)
For me, playbooks are more valuable than Fronts because I most often only get to play DW as a one shot. This makes Fronts almost completely useless for me.
The same problem occurs with compendium classes.
Fronts are so dependent on individual GMs and parties that I can’t envision a product that would really be all that helpful. I suppose a general advice product that talks more about creating fronts and using them in play might be nice.
Fronts aren’t something you make for other people, they’re something that arises out of the answers your players give you in the first session.
How about adventures/one shots?
Funnily enough, I was talking about something like this recently on another forum.
I think there’s space for people making “public” adventures and such for DW (Johnstone Metzer is proof of that), but a Front isn’t the same as an adventure, because a Front on its own lacks any real context as to how it fits into the world.
Edited the post
I design my one-shots (mostly for convention games) as a limited Front, a handful of PC questions, and a brief location description. The Fronts are obviously much more narrow and focused but they work great and leave plenty of room to “play to see what happens”.
Fronts designed for a single session or two might be useful to a broad audience.
Based on the edit, yes I’d love to see more DW adventures out there, either short dungeon starter-style things or full-blown adventures.
Adventures for DW are a bit special in that the “normal” D&D mould of “here’s what is going to happen, here’s what’s happened so far, read the following paragraphs to the players” don’t work with DW’s ask questions/leave blanks/play to find out principles.
Which just means they need to follow a specific formula to work – instead of providing all the answers, provide a dungeon, the outline of a plot and a bunch of questions to ask the players to flesh it out some more. It’s worth checking out Johnstone Metzger’s DW1 Lair of the Unknown (on DTRPG) and Joe Banner’s Failspeake Gorge (http://joebanner.co.uk/failspeake-gorge/) for the kind of formula that does work with DW.
That aside, one of the reasons why there are quite a few playbooks and not that many adventures is that in general, playbooks sell a hell of a lot better than any content aimed at GMs.
I really liked DW-UK1 The Enchanted Garden From Brouhaha Games. It was short and had enough meat on it to make it a perfect con game. (which is how I ran it)
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/111690/DW-UK1-The-Enchanted-Garden
I wrote and published a one-shot adventure for DW and had planned to write more, but then I got better at improvising one-shots and didn’t need adventures anymore.
I like bits that I can throw into ongoing campaign: micro-fronts, modular adventure parts, that kind of thing.
There’s probably also room for a list of one-page campaign starters.
I don’t think you could sell fronts on their own very well, if at all. Like everyone has said fronts are very specific to someone elses campaign, a lot like CCs, though with fronts it is much more so. I think the way to market a front would be to package them with other products.
For example, I wouldn’t pick up a front just on its own. Though I am likely to pay a little extra for a playbook I really wank that comes with a few fronts that are likely to make this particular playbook shine. I am also likely to fronts and micro-fronts if a handful of dungeon starters were thrown in to give the fronts more context, meaning and direction.
Even releasing a batch of themed monsters and throwing in a front that specifically featured them as the big bad’s, that too would be cool. But all on on their lonesome fronts really don’t have much staying power. They are the condiments and other products the meal. Great for enhancing the value of other products, but unlikely to attract a paying customer as their stand alone value is hard to recognize.
Since the first short DW adventures on drivethru were born from old TSR modules (DW T1, B2, I3, U1, UK 1) I’ve started to look for my old booklets and for newer ones (like those of Goodman Games); with a bit of effort, they can be adapted and work very well for DW. Even more important: they are a good (and funny) exercise in understanding:
1) what are they talking about?
2) what are the factions ==> fronts?
3) what is important/colorful and what can become a “blank”?
4) Are they linear or do they allow for multidimensional exploration?
When I’m finished importing them in DW, I can look at classics as Isle of Dread with a new mind.
So, maybe since there are many old adventures, ready to be hacked, we don’t feel the need for many new ones; which is a shame, since I’d love a hundred of Blackscale Brakes and Evil Wizards in a Cave.
I love what can come out of the core improvisational approach of DW, but I also love old-school modules, and for the past few months I’ve been exploring the potential middle ground between those two things. As a trial run at the idea, I’ll be kickstarting a DW adventure some time in February, after a little more playtesting. We’ll see how it goes…
Adventures are harder and less fun to playtest than character classes. Also, the format of the game is relatively new, and a lot more work has been done on other aspects. For example, outside of Dungeon World I think there are only three examples of adventure design in the AW sphere (Hatchet City, Misty Harbour, and tremlus, IIRC).
Dangers and grim portents might also be more useful in the format of a monster manual than in an adventure or a dungeon module. I don’t know for sure, but we’ll find out at some point.
Also, it’s pretty easy to grab One Page Dungeon entry and just wing it.
A compendium of one page dungeons and game or adventure seeds might be quite good, but you’d probably want to include some layer facing content like CCs or base classes because so much of the game is player facing.
The GM is more fueled by prompts in the current fiction, so perhaps you could have examples of GM moves in certain environments like caves or a forest or a city, and things like descriptions to spark the GM’s imagination.
“You see:
Eyes like glowing embers
A nervous twitch betraying nervousness or a lie
A towering shadow in the gloom
The gleam of its teeth in the torchlight
I wonder if some sort of “Mad Libs” style approach would be viable. A format where specific questions are asked, the GM fills in the responses, and together with the published material a Front (or an entire adventure) is born.
I like the idea of a book/pdf of Dangers and Grim Portents(Johnstone Metzger) that also includes lists of descriptions like Adrian Thoen said.
That sounds very interesting John Lewis. It sounds like a format I would get a lot of enjoyment out of.