Aetrimonde

A while back, I opened up a poll with the intent of writing a crowd-guided starter adventure for Aetrimonde. I still want to do that–unfortunately, I haven’t gotten as much engagement as I’d been hoping for. So I’m putting that on pause (although the poll remains open and you should go vote in it…) and I’m going to just jump into writing an adventure on my own.

Today’s post will cover the basics: I’ll largely be following the advice, excerpted from the GMH, in various posts on the topic.

Conflict

For a starter adventure, I want the conflict to be relatively low-stakes. The PCs aren’t going to have to save the world or change the course of history…which puts lower pressure on new players who may not be super familiar with how TTRPGs work, and also makes it easy to start off with some very easy encounters and scenes to ease them into it.

This adventure’s conflict will deal with fellow people doing something harmful and dangerous, but not world-ending.

Antagonist

The antagonist for an adventure with that kind of conflict will naturally be a kingpin of some sort: a person at the head of an organization that’s putting their devious scheme into action. I don’t intend for this antagonist to become a recurring villain who outlasts the adventure: assuming the PCs succeed, it ends with the antagonist arrested or otherwise dealt with.

At the same time, I want this adventure to hook the players and give them an easy avenue to keep playing past the end of the adventure. So, I’m going to give the antagonist ties to a larger organization or scheme that can be used as the jumping-off point for another adventure. Maybe I’ll write it…or maybe a GM will use it as the basis for their own adventures.

Setting

I’m going to set this adventure in rural Waystone: the city of Waystone is Aetrimonde’s largest, bustlingest, and most cosmopolitan city (an equivalent to Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms, Sharn in Eberron, or Absalom in Pathfinder), but the kingdom of Waystone is large enough that the provinces are insulated from the hubbub of the city, and a bit of a backwater.

Being set near, but not in, the big city gives an excuse as to how a bunch of characters as diverse as the typical adventuring party might all show up in one place at the same time. And, at the conclusion of the adventure, the buzzing markets of Waystone offer a tempting place to spend some hard-earned loot…

Structure

A starter adventure needs to be easy for a novice GM to run, as much as for new players to play through. So this is going to be a fairly linear adventure, with perhaps a couple of small branches, but only one real ending planned for.

Length

I’m not going to commit to a super-long adventure right now: I’m aiming to make this a very brief introduction to Aetrimonde’s system and world, which means 10 or so scenes: just enough to get the PCs from level 0 to level 1, and something that could be played through in a couple of 2-4 hour sessions depending on how quickly everyone takes to the rules.

Title

As for what I’m going to call this…my working title, based on my initial ideas, is The Mysteries of Owgotaat. And what exactly that means will become apparent shortly…stay tuned!