Hi all,
I recently read my old Marco Volo modules , and I couldn't help to feel a bit of nostalgia , based on the long hours I spent with my group playing this fantastic campaign. It was full of over the top and remarkable characters , funny and swashbuckling situations , epic moments , and most of all , it was greatly heroic and refreshing with a "Three Musketeers" kind of atmosphere!Definitely the masterpiece of the AD&D times , along with Dragonlance.
I was wondering why we can't have , from Paizo or Dungeon , more of this style of adventures , which are for me far more interesting and roleplaying-friendly than any of the usual dungeons and "get the loot and kill the bad guys" modules published in the past few years.Personally I'm fed up with that , and , don't take it for yourself guys , the adventures I read in your columns only seldomly give me the will to master them to my players.
As a DM , I want my players to have epic duels , meet great characters , make long and dangerous trips , in a non-black and white style of universe where all is sumed by "he is LE so he's a bad guy". Somewhere where they're heroes and live heroic moments.
And my players , even if they like their powers and level-advancement gifts , want to feel like they're having great adventures in a fascinating world , full of spicy characters, and where their swords of course can solve problems , but also their social talents.
The Marco Volo trilogy had all of that , with a different touch , along with the greatest NPC in D&D history , and the greatest villain (ahhh , this stupid and megalomaniac Darklance...)at the same time. Because they were more real than a "evil temple of doom" and the likes.And when I talk to my players about our D&D moments , Marco Volo stands as our best memories with the game , same level with Warhammer's The enemy Within and Alternity and Pendragon campaigns we had.
So , please , could we have more adventures like it , something like it , free of these stupid and casual dungeons and villains who have 2 pages long of abilities but no personality ?
Sorry for the fans , but Kyuss is only a technical challenge to me , a PC-game big boss void of all the Something that makes him alive and great to confront (Lashonna on the other hand is a great character , and you should have stopped with her , making Kyuss more of an unworld menace , a bit like a Great Ancient).
I would be delighted to see an adventure or a campaign between the technical florilege of Age of Worms and the fantasy of Marco Volo.Something that has the seminal taste of our childhoold fantasy books and the feeling of our swashbuckling/adventurous teenage readings.Yeah that would definitely delight me.Thanks for reading me and let the good times roll. :)
And what do the other readers think ?
As a reader and a writer I have to agree. Interesting role-playing mixed with interesting, over-the-top, life-or-death situations are much more fun than door drills, buff spells, and wizard battlefield control tactics that use meta-game mechanics to their fullest extent any day of the week. At times the rigorous rules-laiden nature of the current D&D, while more balanced, is an absolute pain to write and GM for. Many times it is as much about the cool enounter as it is about the mound of technical writing it took you to get there. On the whole though, I think that most of the better-known Dungeon writers (past and present) manage to pull off at least one or two "set-piece" encounters within their scenarios to satisfy most everyone.
Were I you, I might post more specifics about what you want to see in the "Adventure Request" thread, as I am on the whole unfamiliar with the pseudo-Italian of whom you speak - other than his well-hatted mug appears on many Forgotten Realms products. That and I suspect that his name is meant to imply that he travels around a bit.
GGG
Marco Volo was a trilogy of adventures published back in the 90's for AD&D - Forgotten Realms. You can download them for free on Wizards website . And one thing : Marco Volo has nothing to do with the Volo that is mentioned on many FR regional books , at least not really....but download these adventures and you'll understand better what I mean. And you'll yourself get some of the best material for D&D on the same occasion !
In general I am a bigger fan of the interactions and interesting characters and places, but I also realize that these don't please everyone, or even the majority of people. Instead I think the current Adventure Path format does a phenominal job of striking a great middle and allowing people to run the game how they like with great success.
When I ran Life's Bazaar, first adventure in SCAP, it was over 6 sessions before they got to a dungeon environment. For this group they were bored quickly with the overall size of the dungeon and the lack of roleplaying (with a few exceptions) within. As a result I moved the goals around in the dungeon to keep people interested and make sure they found the encounters that I knew they would find the most interesting.
In reading other posts I see that Takasi is running or has ran a Eberron conversion of There is No Honor in which he is skipping past most of the background type info and considers the encounters in this adventure to be mostly the background for the campaign. Not my style of play, but he would be doing his group wrong if he did not provide them with a game of the style the collectively enjoy the most.
I guess the point is that the current format present the adventures in such a way that with some little work (and not excessive in my opinion) the adventures can be tailored to either general style of play (action only oriented vs. role-playing heavy). I would probably agree with you if you got your way as to which are better, but I think Dungeon might actually loose readers.
Oh, and since I am playing the fan-boy role here, I guess I will throw in the corporate line of saying that if you would like to see an adventure of a certain type that it is likely that you should start looking to submit adventures of that type. (not sure how just wanting something makes you qualified as a good author, but whatever).
Sean Mahoney
I think one of the issues here is that Dungeon (and Dragon) are produced with everyone in mind. Every article I query has no specific character in mind. I design it for the everyman, and I feel that is the road Dungeon has gone down for a long time now.
I don't see it as a bad thing; there is a definate need to try to appeal to as broad a spectrum of readers as possible. Unfortunately this often prevents dungeons or other articles being specifically tailored for a certain breed of players, such as over-the-top flashy (like the bucaneers), tremendously evil, stupid, or whatever other niche character styles I'm sure we've all come up with before.
For example, I once ran an adventure inspired by Stan Nichol's Orcs series, where all the players resided in an orcish tribe (they were full orcs, half orcs or goblins). It was a neat little campaign arc, and very original. Would it ever see the light of day in Dungeon? I think not.
I'm finding it tricky to sum up my thoughts on this succinctly.
Broadly, I think a wide variety of adventures is a good thing. I'm also quite glad that Dungeon seems to have been taking some steps in that direction lately (the various Eberron adventures, and in particular the recent adventure where the party had to infiltrate an interplanar prison without their gear, stand out as being quite 'different').
However, a large part of the problem is space. When you only have 10,000 words to play with, providing detailed breakdowns of personalities and factions, and all the other things required for 'proper' political intrigue, and 'proper' roleplaying encounters like you describe becomes very difficult. When you also need to provide stats, and area descriptions, and all the other 'meat' of the adventure, it's more difficult still...
The truth is, I can come up with my own personalities, and I can supply my own political intrigue, make characters live, and so on. I have less ability to generate good settings, and I find working with stats to be a major pain. Therefore, if I have to choose, I would prefer to be given the things I can't easily supply on my own. That's what makes Dungeon most useful for me.
So, while it would be nice to have both, and while I certainly applaud variety in adventure offerings, if I have to choose between good 'roleplaying' encounters and good area descriptions and NPC stats, I have to go for the latter.
I run my campaign almost solely using Dungeon adventures, but I keep a central theme running in the background that provides the characters with a goal greater than the next adventure and lots of RP opportunities.
NPCs and factions in Dungeon adventures have become permanent fixtures in my campaign, sometimes before I even run the adventure, as I read ahead and try to drop stuff into my campaign that I think would be cool to have, even if the PCs never actually go through the adventure.
For example, I put "The Styes" into my campaign before it even started.
I'm a long-time and very vocal advocate of the DM art of customizing published adventures for your campaign. The adventures in Dungeon are only frameworks to me--I speed them up, slow them down, add NPCs, take NPCs out, move them around, it's all good. If you want Volo style adventures, I think you could have a great amount of fun between your gaming sessions by "swashbucklerizing" the published adventures you like and by doing so, making them your own.
I look forward to making the STAP campaign a totally unique experience for my players. 75% of the work has been done, 25% of the work is MY reward.