Goodman Games

I'm kicking around an idea in my noggin about using procedural tables for a repeat-use funnel module. Rather than have the PCs hear tales of some dungeon nearby to go investigate for treasure and glory, I think I'll use the "bring it to them" idea someone else posted about, and have Ye Olde Village Attack scenario. So, what I envision is, Judge makes a few rolls on some tables and writes down results for:

1. Village NPCs, occupations, population, wealth, alignments
2. Who's attacking, their motivation, alignments
3. Randomized village layouts (this idea probably needs the most work; need to randomly but intelligently fix points where supplies/gear/wealth would be, etc)


Basically, the end goal is a small module that can be reused by the same gaming group later on (and potentially hundreds of times) to go back through a funnel again relatively quickly, or as a quick introduction to the game. Everybody pretty much groks survival scenarios (Red Dawn, The Walking Dead, Independence Day/War of the Worlds, etc) so I think this could work pretty well. Anybody interested in co-authoring? And any of the 3PP interested in publishing?

I love the survival scenario...much more than the "you're at the front door of the dungeon" funnel scenarios, but I wonder if your players would get sick of going through essentially the same scenario over and over when they have to bring in new characters.

Why not do a funnel scenario book that, like you suggest, has a randomized set of tables, but that covers more ground -- with the overall intention of "bringing it to them?"

Off the top of my head with a few formless ideas...

• One or more of the characters have something important stolen from them (or kidnapped from them) -- run a "town" adventure where they have to track X thief back to Y hideout, but all is not what it seems because Z boss is the one really controlling the situation.
• "Has there been a MURDER!?" -- Someone close to the character/party has been murdered. Who, what, why, when, how... with demons or something.
• You're in the army now -- the characters are bonded into service/slavery. Escape is the obvious adventure, but there could be others -- if they're press-ganged onto a ship, the ship could crash somewhere interesting, the captain could end up being less than evil and a valuable patron (not THAT kind...OR THAT kind) with an important mission, some sub-plot on the ship could funnel the party, etc. -=OR=- Variation on invasion/survival, the characters are pressed into the local lord's (or local bandit's) military service and sent to destroy a nearby village.
• Other stuff that I can't think of...

I think if you cast your net a little bit wider, this could be a very useful tool.

Nice thread, beermotor...

I guess my question is whether it would be best to:
(1) Have a single special module with all of the replay options such as you suggested, or
(2) Create a booklet of replay options which might work for any number of modules.

Both are cool ideas.

I guess I was thinking for #2 that it would be cool to have a book sort of like Dungeon Alphabet called Adventure Replay or something like that. It could have some tables and ideas on how to adapt or adjust modules for re-use. Sort of like the random dungeon generator type stuff.

I don't really have this worked out in my brain yet, and it might not be possible since modules vary so much in style and topic, but it seemed like a cool concept.

I'm proceeding with 1. I'm not sure how 2 would work, exactly, but it also sounds interesting. I think I'll have an easier time getting 1 finished though. I thought about trying to make it a system-neutral funnel, but that got tough fast, so I doubled back to DCC-specific.

Cool! Are you done yet?

Uh, no.

How about now?

Sounds cool, beermotor. I look forward to it!

Now looking for playtest groups. PM me if interested. If you're going to be running at a con, this may be a nice easy way to run a funnel for intro purposes. I'm shooting for sort of a board gamey vibe, kinda like Dungeon or DCC-meets-Settlers of Catan.