Thursday, July 30, 2015

[IF/OSR] Narrative Dungeoncrawling

So I've been reading up on hexcrawling and pointcrawling and dungeon and adventure design in anticipation of running an Iron Falcon game. I've looked at random generation, including online generators, of which there are many very nice ones. I've looked up the various bloggers out there who are mapping, and even looked at some tutorials about doing my own maps. Sadly I have very little artistic talent, and I can't even begin to compare myself to some of the talent out there. To sum up, I felt defeated.

But then I realized I need to just do what I do best, and write. I don't need a map, and in fact I prefer not to play with miniatures or maps. I don't need a random generator, as I ran most of my games from the seat of my pants up until recently when I started looking at crawls and frameworks and the like. So I'm just going to go with it, and use what I know.

Some folks won't like this, as they are more visual, and that's cool. Some folks won't enjoy it because it might feel like railroading and too predetermined. That's also cool. I'm doing this for me. I hope you enjoy it, and that it sparks some ideas as all the wealth of information out there has for me.

Narrative Dungeoncrawling

The idea is simple. Make up a bunch of cards that are little more than narrative seeds. Some can be specific, some can be general and reusable. When it is time to get out there and adventure, pick a card, randomly or not, and get there. Here is a sample card:


With a stack full of chamber, connection, and encounter cards I would be able to quickly run a game with very little prep, which is my ultimate goal. Of course it will take time to make the cards, but once that is done I can run many games with very little further work.

I'm sure I'm reinventing the wheel here, but I'm going to go ahead with this anyway.

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