Running published RPG adventures. Or not.

I've been thinking about RPGs and I've noticed that I mostly run my own adventures. And when I say mostly, I mean almost exclusively. And certainly, since I came back to roleplaying from the wilderness, they have all been my own adventures.

An aside: I'm fairly late to the awesomeness that is John Harper’s Lady Blackbird. But the second thing I thought was "How can I do something similar?" Not "I want to run this," but instead how can I make my own copy... (My first thought was "I want to play this.") Thinking about it now, that seems a bit odd. But it's clear that my desire to run my own stuff is clearly deeply ingrained.

So which published adventures have I run?

I've had a good think about this, and the only published adventures I can ever remember running are:

• Annic Nova
• Murder on Arcturus Station
• Chamax Plague

And I think that's it - three Traveller adventures. I can't remember running any published Call of Cthulhu scenarios. I played in a couple, but all I can remember of my own scenarios is stuff that I created myself. (I may have run The Haunting - I can't remember. I have memories of that as a game, but I can't remember if I was a player or the Keeper.)

Making it my own

While Annic Nova didn't require any Referee input, I still added a rival band of adventurers to add some conflict. (Otherwise it's just wandering around some empty rooms.)

The other two adventures are interesting in that they both require some Referee input.

• Murder on Arcturus Station is a murder mystery - but it gives you the suspects with motives, and lets you decide who the culprit was.
• The Chamax Plague is an Alien/Aliens scenario - a crashed ship with a strange alien beasty to hunt. But the adventure gives you the deckplans and explains the creature's biology and lets you decide where the creature is hiding.

Early DIY Traveller scenarios

That's a common theme among many of the early Traveller scenarios - the idea that the Referee will do some of the work to turn it into a full adventure for the players (see Kinunir, Twilight's Peak or Leviathan). Similarly, one of the most popular features of the GDW in-house magazine (Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society) were the Amber Zones - short adventure seeds that required a fair bit of work (or improvisation) before hitting the table.

Over time Traveller's scenarios became more precise and structured. But I have fonder memories for the early scenarios that required me to put some effort in. (The sunk-cost fallacy may be at work here, making me value those scenarios more precisely because I put the effort in.)

The effort I put into those early Traveller scenarios did mean that I owned them, and probably led me to creating my own scenarios (as it turns out to be really easy).

Another aside: Thinking about, most of the games I've played have been created by the GM. I don't remember playing through many published scenarios. My sample size is very small though and I've no idea which is more common though - creating your own or using published adventures.

So why buy adventures?

I am aware of the hypocrisy in writing RPG adventures (and having some published) but only ever running my own, however. But of all gaming material, I prefer to read adventures - partly for ideas, but also because they give a clear demonstration of how a game is meant to be played. (One of the challenges I find with PbTA games like Urban Shadows is that I can't visualise how they are meant to be played.)

But yes - why buy adventures if you're never going to run them? Because they're chock full of ideas to steal and often they're a pleasure to read.

(That approach was one of the drives that led to Tales of Terror, as I explain here.) 

A new goal for 2020

So now that I've identified this blind spot, I'm going to try and run a couple of published scenarios before the year is out.