Hello to all Dungeon Staff,
Before working on a project that I have in mind, I wanted to understand if there was still interest in the "Cities of Adventure" type submission, and/or Adventures for Small Parties.
For the latter I have noticed quite frequently on the posting boards that there are many players who want to try and get either their spouse or their Kids playing DnD. Generally these folks are like me, usually not a lot of time to prepare adventures between the demands of work, kids, family, etc.
Where do they turn to? Dungeon. But almost all dungeon adventures are geared towards the 4 player party. Time and time again on the message boards, I have seen people play an adventure designed for 4 with 1 or 2 with negative results (i.e., the dreaded TPK). Which usually is not very fun for first time players.
Now, in my situtation, I am working on designing a city of adventure for my wife to play in. I went for the following ideas:
(1) A venice type city. I think most if not everyone loves Venice. Its easy to imagine the adventurers that a few people could have there.
(2) A venice type city has some of the great elements for a "different" kind of city. Imagine the fights and ruckus on a narrow bridge over one of the canals, or the fights that PC's might have on a gondalla [imagining a sidebar discussing some of the rule specifics of illness for falling a canal, fighting on bridges, tactics, etc.].
(3) Use a location based adventure, i.e. keyed adventure, vs. event type adventure mixed with a good description of some NPCs and ongoing subplots to put some backdrop to all of this.
(4) I could see a sidebar for talking about how to scale the adventure for different groups of small parties - like if there is no wizard in the group, or no fighter.
Anyway, I will do the project anyway to introduce gaming to my wife, but I wanted to know if there was any interest in this idea so that I would understand if it would be worthwhile to write up the adventure and city in Dungeon Format.
Also the secondary nature of the post was to query people's thoughts on small adventures for small parties, is that something you would find useful, or not?
Cheers for now,