First game down, and I’m realizing the Adventure Fronts I made aren’t super useful. Because of the way I wrote them, the adventure basically takes place between the last and second-to-last Grim Portent. I have nothing to check off, because everything before has already happened, and everything after would only happen if the adventure is abandoned. Think I need to zoom in a bit more, think about what the starting state of this situation is, and how it would escalate in hours, not weeks or days.
First game down, and I’m realizing the Adventure Fronts I made aren’t super useful.
First game down, and I’m realizing the Adventure Fronts I made aren’t super useful.
Would you like to tell us more about the situation at hand?
Anyway, don’t worry, you can just zoom it in also now .
Ditto on knowing more info about the Grim Portents.
Rewrite them between sessions
Sounds like you wrote up the front at a “campaign” level of detail, but need some for “adventure” level detail.
When I find that I’ve done that, I try to take the next upcoming campaign-level Grim Portent and treat it like an Impending Doom. Then make 2-4 more local, zoomed in grim portents leading to that.
At a high level, i would wait to draft up fronts (adventure or campaign) until a couple sessions in. At this point you’ll have a good idea of the different stakeholders in your world and the dangers your players are most interested in exploring.
Jeremy Strandberg that sounds really interesting! It would totally fix my problem, I think.
I essentially have a group of cultists trying to break a series of seals to unleash a great evil. I wrote the GP as “Cultists find seals” and Cultists break seals” because writing out 9 separate GPs seemed to cluttered.
Maybe it’s not just the paperwork that’s clumsy, but the idea as well? Something happening nine times isn’t super interesting on its own. Maybe they need several different things to break this seal?
After seeing your idea Chris Woods, I think Jeremy Strandberg had the right of it. That’s a campaign front. Now you need some adventure fronts for the cultists finding some of those seals.
Sounds like a cool idea. What popped into my head: I would do 3 seals. That’s always a good number. Give each a theme (i.e. element, world state, etc.). Put each in a perilous location and the cultists always seem one step ahead. Hero’s are always having to deal with cultist related dangers as well as the normal denizens inhabiting the locations. Perhaps trick the hero’s in the last one that the cultists were using them to clear the way to get to the last seal. Sounds fun! Just some ideas that would need to be molded into legitimate adventure fronts.
In a campaign front the seals can definitely be a single portent – but each seal can be its own adventure! The cult need to located the seal, traverse whatever hinder their progress, find the way to break it – and in every turn, the party can thwart their actions. Sounds like a pulpy good time to me.
Also, I don’t know when you’re in this campaign yet, but have the party find an already broken seal, to foreshadow things to come.