We're very much just chatting about the idea at the moment. It may not come to anything. . . .
Ah, but then again...:)
Stuff that made people run screaming from the gaming table mostly. Although whether it was from joy or despair I do not know. I can't remember them all but they included:"Mightier than the Sword"
"Clarssh's Sepulchure"
"In the Court of the Dwarven King"
"Asflag's Unintentional Emporium"
"Huddle Farm"
"The White Boar of Kilfay"
"Iasc"
"Pakkillirr" (don't ask me if that's spelled right!)
"Telar in Norbia"
"Encounter in the Wildwood"
and a few others.
A few others, Willie, you were the Nicholas Logue of your day! I was surprised when one of your adventures didn't appear in Dungeon. I particularly loved "Huddle Farm," "Whitelake Mine," "The Cauldron of Plenty," "Nine-Tenths of the Law," "Mightier than the Sword," "Telar in Norbia," "The White Boar of Kilfay," and "Back to the Beach."
I just knew Logue would get in on the act somehow...
I'd like to see adventures that use Fiendish Codex 1 or Fiendish Codex 2 or both (i.e. Demon Lords and Arch Devils).
Good vs. Evil (with lots of role playing opportunities for Paladins).
And also maybe a conquest adventure for a barbarian that wants to topple a tyrant and bed a princess.
...And also maybe a conquest adventure for a barbarian that wants to topple a tyrant and bed a princess.
Nothing wrong with a good Conan-style adventure ;-)
Creative Director
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Dungeon used to have a d20 Modern section in it; Polyhedron. I thought it was a pretty spiffy section of the magazine, with a lot of cool stuff in it. So did a few readers. But the vast majority of our readers wanted D&D in their D&D magazine, which I can completely understand. And so Polyhedron went away, and almost overnight Dungeon became a stronger and healthier magazine. So alas, I think the chances of us doing a d20 Modern adventure (and by extension, adventure path) are approximately 0.
I think incorporating d20 Modern or d20 Future elements into a D&D Dungeon could work, maybe something like WoTC new free adventure "Return to the Temple of the Frog," but I doubt that most readers would want to see this in every issue.
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Dungeon used to have a d20 Modern section in it; Polyhedron. I thought it was a pretty spiffy section of the magazine, with a lot of cool stuff in it. So did a few readers. But the vast majority of our readers wanted D&D in their D&D magazine, which I can completely understand. And so Polyhedron went away, and almost overnight Dungeon became a stronger and healthier magazine. So alas, I think the chances of us doing a d20 Modern adventure (and by extension, adventure path) are approximately 0.
Dang! That's kinda sad. Why is it that people just don't seem to give Modern a chance? For those who turn their nose because it's not "Fantasy"...go check out the Urban Arcana setting. I run an Urban Arcana group from time to time that is basically a Modernized Urban FR setting. I deffinately play up the whole Magic vs. Tech thing but Magic has not been diminished AT ALL. nothing like a MW +1 Desert Eagle or a +1 Keen Chainsaw.
Anyways...come on people!! Give Modern a chance!!
sorry...I'll step off the soap box now.
Anybody got "Clarssh's Sepulchure"? I lost my copy in a move away from an evil exgirlfriend.
Here ya go, I will subscribe to Dungeon and Dragon if Walsh and Pett cowrite an adventure, (or better yet a campaign arc!!) either month to month or three years each.
So there powers that be I'm putting my money where my (all too large) mouth is.
I think incorporating d20 Modern or d20 Future elements into a D&D Dungeon could work, maybe something like WoTC new free adventure "Return to the Temple of the Frog," but I doubt that most readers would want to see this in every issue.
You could include an adventure for free and up the page count so as to not intrude on any other D&D material and 60% of the readership would be demanding James head.
They used to have a magazine called Challange that did something like this. That said I believe the last one went to press in 1994. I'm not sure of the real reason the magazine went under but I can say what my problem with it was. It was chalk full of interesting adventures set in interesting settings like Twilight 2000, Travaler, Starwars or Dark Future etc. The problem is once you get out of a fantasy setting it gets a lot harder to convert modules. I mean I read many issues of this magazine but it would just never come up that I could use their adventures.
There is something about the fanatsy setting that means that we can grab an adventure and simply slot it into a location in our worlds - a bit of spackle and the players will never notice. This seems to just not work outside of this genre.
A Twilight 2000 adventure set in southern Texas only seems really good in Texas. If the adventure is done well it should evoke a feeling like your in Texas and hence one can't grab it and drop it in Post Apocalyptic Bangkok. I think that the setting itself is more important in genres outside of the fantasy genre. Half the time the players could hardly care or even discern the difference between adventuring in a town in Nyrond or in Sembia. One Fantasy town is pretty much like the next and any of them can be the location of a haunted tower. Modern or futuristic RPGs are just not like that. They draw their excitement to a great extent from the setting itself. Adventures are rarely in some town in the midwest but are based around a cult in Los Angeles or Post Apocalptioc Moscow, on a Star Destroyer or one the moons orbiting Saturn. Exciting stuff but very specific.
BABA YAGA'S DANCING HUT
There is something about the fanatsy setting that means that we can grab an adventure and simply slot it into a location in our worlds - a bit of spackle and the players will never notice. This seems to just not work outside of this genre.
A Twilight 2000 adventure set in southern Texas only seems really good in Texas. If the adventure is done well it should evoke a feeling like your in Texas and hence one can't grab it and drop it in Post Apocalyptic Bangkok. I think that the setting itself is more important in genres outside of the fantasy genre. Half the time the players could hardly care or even discern the difference between adventuring in a town in Nyrond or in Sembia. One Fantasy town is pretty much like the next and any of them can be the location of a haunted tower. Modern or futuristic RPGs are just not like that. They draw their excitement to a great extent from the setting itself. Adventures are rarely in some town in the midwest but are based around a cult in Los Angeles or Post Apocalptioc Moscow, on a Star Destroyer or one the moons orbiting Saturn. Exciting stuff but very specific.
I'm going to argue that point. The towns of Sharn, Freeport, the Styes, Haven-Fara, Redhand, Muffin's Honor, Hardby, Minas Tirith, and Talantier each have a flavor all their own. Sure there are a ton of Here-is-Town-X, but the same is true in "modern" adventures (Call of Cthulhu does it all the time setting things inplaces like Samson CA as a stand in for a West Coast town). I think the real difficulty lies evenly divided between a general lack of interest in game settings (even other d20 settings) outside of D&D's "fantasy" one, as well as the precieved difficulty in transitioning the adventure to suit the new setting/tech-level. It's fantasy for God's sake. If I as a DM want an adventure to happen on a moon of Saturn it can happen. Heck, I set "Prince of Redhand" on a moon a few months ago with flying galleons and mooncalves no less, the entire city was made of crystal grown into artistic shapes and Zeech was a descendant of the Goddess of Night. The real death of role-playing will not come from computer games it will come from within, when people stop being able (through lack of time and/or general indolance) to imagine things outside of their own personal fantasy world.
As for setting a Western flavored adventure in the Far East, I say why not? Akira Kurosawa was so inspired by John Ford's Westerns that he made "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo," which later inspired Sergio Leone to make "A Fistful of Dollars" and John Sturges to create "The Magnificent Seven."
Thought experiment of the day: Take an old Shadow Run, Twilight 2000, Rifts, Doctor Who, DC Heroes, or whatever module off your game shelf and mentally re-imagine it made for D&D.
GGG
I would vote for a quarterly d20 Modern/Future magazine, and buy it too. :)
May be a PC party of all Druids in the Yuiwood in the Unapproachable East, with the Blight Lords destroying the forest. Might be intresting I dont know what you think
...Thought experiment of the day: Take an old Shadow Run, Twilight 2000, Rifts, Doctor Who, DC Heroes, or whatever module off your game shelf and mentally re-imagine it made for D&D.
I've had some pretty good success with converting Shadowrun & comic-related adventures. Sharn is a pretty good substitute for Metropolis/Gotham/Seattle (or your SR metroplex of choice), and the Dragonmark Houses are almost ready made to replace the Megacorps of Shadowrun.
With all the interest on a d20 modern cross over, What about an adventure like Barrier peaks or temple of the frog where D&d characters go through some sort of time vortex ans end up in the future or modern characters are flung into the past!
With all the interest on a d20 modern cross over, What about an adventure like Barrier peaks or temple of the frog where D&d characters go through some sort of time vortex ans end up in the future or modern characters are flung into the past!
Ooh- I take it you saw the "Return to the Temple of the Frog" pdf that was just posted up on Wizards? Maybe a sequel off of that...
As for setting a Western flavored adventure in the Far East, I say why not? Akira Kurosawa was so inspired by John Ford's Westerns that he made "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo," which later inspired Sergio Leone to make "A Fistful of Dollars" and John Sturges to create "The Magnificent Seven."
Thought experiment of the day: Take an old Shadow Run, Twilight 2000, Rifts, Doctor Who, DC Heroes, or whatever module off your game shelf and mentally re-imagine it made for D&D.
Thanks for the thought experiment- that's a great brainstorming exercise. Another one is the "rip-up"- take your favorite magazine (with lots of ads) and quickly flip through it, ripping out every page that catches your eye. Scribble a single word (adjective, noun, adverb, whatever,) that the image evokes. When you're done with the magazine, go back to your rip-ups and look at what words and images you've got. Then use that to build a story. Great fun and very much in the "destroy-to-create" vein...
I know GGG was giving examples of cross-genre application with the westerns and samurai flicks, but just out of curiousity, does anybody actually play D&D Oriental Adventures any more? I've always had a soft spot for it, but it never seems to get beyond samurais and ninjas, and people lose interest. Would DUNGEON print an OA adventure? Or better yet, an Forgotten Realms OA adventure that actually makes reference to Kara-Tur's location in Abeir-Toril? I've got a couple of ideas that would make a nice proposal, but if nobody else plays OA any longer, there's not much point.
*gasp* Rip my favorite magazine? Are you crazy? :P
*gasp* Rip my favorite magazine? Are you crazy? :P
Yeah, no. I'd pick any magazine BUT Dungeon or Dragon because any adventure ideas that came out of it would be horribly derivative, if not plagiarized. Try Vogue, or raid your dentist's office. I hear "Highlights for Children" has some seriously twisted stuff in it.
Thought experiment of the day: Take an old Shadow Run, Twilight 2000, Rifts, Doctor Who, DC Heroes, or whatever module off your game shelf and mentally re-imagine it made for D&D.
I think mentally re-imagining something for D&D or taking a D&D adventure and re-imagining it for some other modern or futuristic setting somewhat side steps the issue. For a product like a modern/futuristic adventure magazine to work it has to be possible to take an adventure from one modern futuristic setting and re-imagine it for another modern futuristic setting. Now I'll concede that I can take an adventure about hijacking a Star Destroyer and re-imagine it as a Call of Cuthulu adventure. but it sure ain't a simple task. Your calling on the DM to do a lot of work to make this function. Each game not only usually uses somewhat different rules but the entire look and feel tends to change from one genre to another. Ultimately its usually just easier for the DM to start from scratch and create the adventure themselves then try and make the look and feel of Star Wars into the look and feel of Call of Cuthulu.
Now admittedly if I'm running D20 Post Apocalypse and I read a cool adventure about hijacking a Star Destroyer I might get some cool idea's. Maybe its not a Star Destroyer but a normal destroyer, How about a plot line about Mutants that have gotten the Arliegh Burke to work - and their extorting California coastal towns (why are all post apocalyptic games set in California?). That's cool and the PCs could have to sneak aboard and steal it long enough to run it aground at full speed - some where where friendly militia from the towns will help to overcome the mutants.
OK that's not a bad little scenario and it probably has a look and feel pretty close to the Star Wars adventure. The problem is that I can't really use much of the Star Destroyer adventure. I need maps of the Arliegh Burke - or failing that something that is like a Destroyer. Once I start delving into where my mutants got the Destroyer from, who they are and why and how they are doing what they are doing I'll quickly find that the NPCs etc. from the Star Wars adventure don't work as well as using cool NPCs that are being imagined to fill rolls in this mutant band of post modern pirates. Soon enough the plot lines begin to diverge as well. That Destroyer is a fuel hog and fuel is going to be a rare resource in post apocalyptic California, hows that going to effect the adventure? It certainly could in this case where as fuel is not a big issue on our Star Destroyer and it won't feature as a significant part of the plot..
At the end of the day the magazine just does not help that much. If you got the time to re-imagine an adventure in one setting for an adventure in another then there probably is no real need for you to steal plot lines from a modern/futuristic adventure magazine - you can steal the plot lines from James Clavell's Shōgun or last weeks episode of Battle Star Galactica or from bits and pieces of plot lines and idea's floating around in your head after a life time of playing, reading and watching sci fi and fantasy media. Its here that I think the project falls down. Its not so much that no one will buy the magazine after the first issue goes to print - its that subscribers will tend to not get around to renewing after they have 16 issues. At that point it will start to seem like a lot of money for a magazine full of adventures that they never really seem to use. I can't really see how to grow such a product or make it more relevant over time to its users.
One answer might be if it was done in some kind of computer format where I could easily cut and past bits from one issue or another into other programs. I mean if I have a modern bank in one adventure I could probably use the basics for the ruins of a bank in my post apocalyptic campaign – but I'd sure like to be able to drop this thing into Photo Shop for the map and I'll drop the text into a word processor and redo the descriptions as if this was what the place looked like when it was abandoned 60 years ago. I'd think this might b a better business model to try then attempting to walk the same path as GDW did with Challenge. That road has already been shown to lead to failure so something slightly different might have a better shot being a viable product.