Monday, January 4, 2016

Recycling

The new round of Chanbara play testing draws nearer! And I'm revising and expanding on the old adventures I ran with my Evansville Group years ago. Back in 2013, the play test didn't last long, and we never got to these adventures. So I'm dusting them off to use them again.

I've completed converting all the information from the original adventure from AD&D to Chanbara stats (wasn't hard) and doing a bit of revision in the notes. Now, I'm adding some extra contingency plans for things that could happen if the players take the adventure in an unexpected path (or fail at something). The hooks may make this seem like a simple "fetch quest" but of course it's not going to be that simple! And when things get complicated, things are less likely to go according to plan.

When I ran this back in the late 90's in Evansville, the party failed the "fetch quest" which then inspired them to try and rectify the situation and led them on to greater threats and to uncovering the enemies' plots (well, some of them... we stopped playing before they had even figured out who was behind all of this). It was possible then, and it's possible now that at the end of the adventure, the PCs will have the object of the quest, so I need to plan on both contingencies.

So, expansion and preparation for contingencies is the plan. It's also helping me flesh out some NPC faction motivations a bit more. Or maybe I had the motivations figured out 20 years ago, and have just forgotten them in the intervening years.

The up-side of this over-prepping and revamping is that I should be able to publish the module; possibly as a super-module with the whole darned campaign if the play test goes well and I can keep up the pace while working on my dissertation. Possibly as a series of linked modules. This series, along with the standalone Ghost Castle Hasegawa (which I'm planning to play test again via PbP if anyone's interested) will give Chanbara a nice little bit of support when released that Flying Swordsmen never got.

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